Victor Davis Hanson on Today's America

The March 14, 2005 edition of the Weekly Standard includes an article entitled "The Sage of Fresno: Victor Davis Hanson, down on the farm."

Here is an excerpt:

Hanson places much of the blame for this decay on America's elites, who he says have fostered a cult of post-modernism, identity politics, and affirmative action - or, as he puts it, "diversity without standards." As a classicist, he sees this as nothing less than a renunciation of the intellectual tradition bequeathed by the Greeks.

"Multiculturism, in preference to a multiracial embrace of Western culture, has become what pulp was in the 1950's," he tells me..."Plato told us this was inevitable: The more you embrace a state-mandated egalitarianism for its own sake and radical democracy,...the more you will be driven to the common denominator of a therapeutic, happy-go-lucky culture, simple stories, low-brow entertainment, minimal expectations - rather than the hard work of using education to uplift the majority."