VDH: The Left Seems Desperate

I listened to an interview today of historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson by Telegraph journalist Steve Edgington. It started off with this exchange:

Edgington: Victor Davis Hansen is the American Republic under threat?

VDH: It’s said to be under threat mostly by the Left but it’s a pretty resilient form of government. It’s the only one of its type. It’s the oldest democracy or constitutional republic in the (world), whether the Civil War, the Great Depression, the 60s cultural revolution. The problem we’re having right now is that it is not working for the Left, and so when it doesn’t work for the Left they say the Republic is in danger and they want to change the institutions. So they want to get rid of the 180-year filibuster or the 150 year nine Justice Supreme Court, the 233rd year of the Electoral College the 60 years of the 50 state union because they feel that the electorate is drifting away from them, and their agendas – which they’ve implemented the last year and a half especially – do not warrant on any poll 50 percent support. And their president is at a historic low at 29 (%) for first-term president so yeah that’s what we’re told. But when you actually look our elections being held, or that agreed on winners taking power, is legislation being passed, yes yes it is. I think the lockdown, the quarantines, set the Western World in general a little crazy, but I think we’re recovering from that.

Edgington: How how seriously should we take them when they say they’re going to pack the courts, or add DC as a 51st state and change the sort of as you say these historic kind of elements of the American Republican Constitution? Because they’ve been saying these things I guess for a while now, the last few years at least but they haven’t done them yet.

VDH: We should take them very seriously, because if you look at the Supreme Court which was their darling for the last half century because it was a legislative, executive and judicial grand all-in-one, and when an occasional Republican president wished to nominate Justices that would bring a little balance, they flipped. So Earl Warren flipped and all the way to David Suter and John Paul Stevens and Potter (Stewart) they all flipped, and now they don’t, and so all of a sudden they want to pack the court. And to pack the court they just need to eliminate the filibuster and get every Democrat on board. I don’t know if they will or not. And then they can flip it, and then they can vote to restore the filibuster which they said they would do because they’re going to be a minority party and they’ll need it in the fall.

I don’t want times to get any more “interesting” than they already are. But it appears it isn’t up to us.

4 thoughts on “VDH: The Left Seems Desperate

  1. The Roman Republic was pretty resilient until it wasn’t. The Roman Empire was pretty resilient until it wasn’t.

  2. Two points, Kevin:

    1) Of course it “isn’t up to us”, the enemy always gets a vote in any contest.

    2) On the “pack the court” issue, I’m skeptical this can be done at all as a politically practical activity. To the degree I can claim to understand our Judicial Branch (not a given), the Supreme Court is comprised of 9 individual justices responsible for the 9 distinct federal court circuits (leave the DC circuit out of this for now) (which we ought to do for good anyway). To add more Supremes, don’t you necessarily have to add more court circuits? Along with all of the infrastructure and personnel required for each? If those politically opposed to attempting such a thing can’t bog down that process to a stand still over those fiscal issues alone, we might as well move to Canada (or Mexico, if your palate prefers) now and get it over with.

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