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Posted on 09/05/2026 6:22:51 AM PDT by texas booster
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
The more you look around us today, I think a good description of 2026, culturally, economically, socially, politically, is that we are in a modern medieval world.
Maybe we’re progressive regressives, and I don’t mean that just in the sense that progressives are regressive, and they are, but that one part of our society is advancing at lightning speed to the future and progressing. But the other part is regressing, and regressing at a phenomenal pace back to what I would call the medieval period.
Remember, the medieval period was roughly that area in time after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, roughly AD 500 to around AD 1300 to 1400, the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. In medievalism, we often talk about primitivism after the destruction of the classical world during the Dark Ages, the early medieval period, and it’s characterized by epidemics, bubonic plague, typhus, typhoid, smallpox, terrible sanitation in urban centers. They had forgotten the Roman use of sewage and aqueducts.
There were open borders. National states popped up that couldn’t defend themselves, so you saw castles and walls pop up all over the European countryside in a way you had not during the Roman period. In cities, they were walled, towns even, and the gates closed at dusk to prevent gratuitous crime.
But at the same time that this was happening, you had some of the greatest works of literature in the Western world. You had Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” Dante’s “Inferno,” St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologica.” And if you look at the architectural expertise and scientific knowledge of architecture, it was progressing at a geometric rate when you look at the huge cathedrals at Seville or Cologne.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailysignal.com ...
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Now let’s switch to the modern period. All of us now can call anywhere in the world in seconds on our iPhones. Anything you want to know, past, present, future, you can just get on a cheap computer and ask an artificial intelligence program from the many free platforms. You can watch movies, you can watch entertainment on satellites. Anything you want is at your fingertips.
The nation itself is exploring space. We’re getting close to conquering cancer. I can attest to that. Computers allow you to write without even speaking. You can, unfortunately, compose a whole term paper or a book with AI. You can make a movie with AI.
Yet at the same time that’s happening, look at what’s going on in Berkeley here in California or Los Angeles. We’re seeing outbreaks of medieval diseases that we thought had been conquered years ago, given our sophisticated knowledge of sewage and water treatment. We had a typhus breakout in Los Angeles. We had leptospirosis, a rat disease, in Berkeley.
You look at the homeless camps all over our major cities. People are just out in the open fornicating, urinating, defecating, injecting drugs. There’s tons of feces that has to be removed, and it’s so strange in this modern medievalism.
We have sophisticated researchers who go into a hospital in Chicago or go to a cancer center in San Francisco and have to check the bottoms of their shoes to make sure they don’t have feces as they go into their space-age laboratories.
It’s really funny. In the medieval period, public hangings and beheadings were sort of public events that people flocked out to see. Is that any different than our glorification of murderers?
And there is a difference. Luigi Mangione, they named an opera after him in California. The killer of Charlie Kirk brought people jubilation. I won’t even get into Lindsay Clancy, who strangled her three children and became every woman to the feminist left.
At least in the medieval period, they knew that the murderer had done something wrong and was being punished. In the post-medieval period, we are glorifying that murderer, and that’s really striking.
And so, what I’m getting at is we are the most regulated, the most advanced, the most modern, the most scientific society in history, even as we can’t solve problems that were solvable, and the medieval period would have died to know the solutions that we have in our hands to make sure we have clean water, to make sure there is no crime, to make sure there is no disease, to make sure that people don’t defecate on the street. But we don’t do it. We willingly don’t do it.
Now, the question to finish is why?
We have an elite that has embraced a very toxic ideology throughout history, and that is mandated, government-sanctioned equality of result. And they have divided, therefore, to further that ideology, the world into victims and victimizers, an arbitrary classification, sometimes based on class, but increasingly on race.
And once they identify someone as a victim who’s not responsible for his plight, then it’s the duty of the society to allow him to express himself. If you have a lot of teenagers who want to loot a jewelry store, then you say they were hungry and they needed food.
If you see homeless people living on the street, then it was because of something the majority culture did to them.
And the result of that is when people engage in very dangerous antisocial behavior, an elite will tell the rest of us that they’re not subject to law enforcement or they’re not subject to the laws that apply to the rest of us.
But there are two really pernicious addenda here.
No. 1, the people who do this on the left, who believe in this mandated equality and a binary of victim and victimizer, are never subject to the consequences of their own ideology. Nancy Pelosi‘s home is not surrounded by homeless people. Jane Fonda doesn’t have to trip over people injecting drugs when she walks outside her door. The Hollywood stars in Malibu who champion the homeless have very clear security. You can’t get near their homes.
In other words, we, the lab rats, are those upon whom they experiment.
And there’s another reason as well. It’s not just that they experiment on us. and this ideology is not applicable to itself, but more importantly, they believe that they are morally superior because most of them are agnostics or atheists. They have lost their God, but they have found it in a post-Enlightenment caring, abstract though it may be, for victims.
And when you put this religious element to it, because it makes no sense to allow medieval diseases and medievalism to dominate your cities in crime, filth and homelessness, but they do it. They feel morally superior, and it gives them meaning in their life in a way that we, the majority, find not morally superior, but morally repugnant.
And there’s another reason as well. It’s not just that they experiment on us. and this ideology is not applicable to itself, but more importantly, they believe that they are morally superior because most of them are agnostics or atheists. They have lost their God, but they have found it in a post-Enlightenment caring, abstract though it may be, for victims.
A full transcript of the Daily Signal YT from Sept 3. Excellent!
FR Index of his articles: Victor Davis Hanson on FR
Town Hall: Victor Davis Hanson on Town Hall
American Greatness: Victor Davis Hanson on American Greatness
His website: Victor Davis Hanson The Sword of Perseus
One of his sponsors' website: The Daily Signal
Please let me know if you want on or off this new VDH ping list.
As a reminder, Professor Hanson has asked that we do not post the full article of his writings. Thank you for following the link to finish his article.
Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience.
“Progressives” are progressive only because Marx said so.
According to Marx’s long refuted theories, dictature of proletariat, socialism and communism are the future of human society.
In reality, communism is leading us back to stone age!
Medieval disease in California is not bad
For America to be America, California must be disrupted to the core
He’s 100% correct!
The 64k question is, what do we do about it?
It’s not just “the left”. It’s the global elite. As far as I can tell, the global elite are a group of people who were raised without any form of moral compass. The guiding light for these people is money and power. A stupid, compliant population is what they want, and they’ve done a great job making that happen. It turns out leftists are the globalists useful idiots.
Where this all will get messy is the introduction of muslims everywhere. I can’t see that working out well.
VDH is a national treasure. He is incredibly bright, incredibly measured, and never projects ego. Pray for his health.
OK. VDH has eloquently laid out for us the primary cause of this civilizational rot that we are all witnessing. We know the cause — progressivism — but what is the solution? How do we defeat it? Civil war?
Apparently, they forgot Roman sewage and aqueducts, but not how to populate the cities.
It’s going to come down to militias using their god given rights.
Our Lord didn't come down on Earth just to show us how to have eternal life. His advice holds for life ON EARTH while mortal.
Imagine the political, scientific, economical, political, etc., advancement that WOULD HAVE happened had people immediately said, upon hearing the rules of our Lord, "yeah, that makes sense, we'll do this." The progress of the world would have been at the speed of light.
And it says as much in the NT:
"... on Earth as it is in Heaven..."
People totally gloss over this phrase in The Lord's Prayer.
But what it says is that if we collectively decide, most or all of us, to start following the rules, then Earth will approach Heaven in terms of perfection.
People need to stop and meditate on what our Lord said. It takes a whole lifetime to think about these things.
I think the old Left/Right is no longer useful terminology.
I think the big divide is “I want to control my own life” and “I want to control other people”. I think that’s the spectrum.
The communists and the muslims clearly want to control other people. It has long been a foundational belief in America that we want to control our own lives. Unfortunately, this seems to be fading as so many people now expect the Big Government to take care of them. The AWFLs, the Karens, and the Managerial Society, as well as the anarcho-tyranny is all about controlling other people (often, as compensation for the fear that you have lost control of your own life). It becomes a vicious circle.
I need a militia with a good vision and dental plan please.
The solution was put into the Constitution and has yet to be used: Article V , the Convention Of States. If one were convened for a simple Balanced Budget Amendment that would be a great start . It would show Article V is not monster to be feared but the way to a real solution.
You wrote: “ As a reminder, Professor Hanson has asked that we do not post the full article of his writings. Thank you for following the link to finish his article.”
But you posted the whole article!
Good article.
“ I think the big divide is “I want to control my own life” and “I want to control other people”. I think that’s the spectrum.”
Yes, I agree. That is far more meaningful than left and right, conservative and liberal.
I think the big divide is between, “I want to provide for myself and those I care about” and, “I want someone to take care of me.”
“Victor Davis Hanson: The Left Is Dragging America Back to the Dark Ages”
What’s the problem with going back to Dark Ages? I’d rather have that happen than to re-elect my local RINO because he doesn’t always vote with the Conservatives and thus HE DESERVES TO LOSE!...and that’s all that matters to me.
(sound about right, Purists?)
Traditionally, people seem to want to view our political landscape in this fashion, which for some political science purpose may be useful, but in reality, it is fallacious. It shows Communism and Fascism at opposite ends of the spectrum. (This is no doubt useful for Communists who want the proles to think they the polar opposites of Fascists, and for Fascists, perhaps vice versa:
When you said: "...I think the big divide is “I want to control my own life” and “I want to control other people”..." that indicates to me you see the truth of the real political spectrum, which resembles this one:
Communism and Fascism are adjacent to each other, and truth be known, both Communists and Fascists (at least in WWII) understood that the "other side" populated by their mortal enemies was perhaps the most fertile recruiting territory for them, because in the end...they weren't that different.
People like you and I know this truth intuitively.
I believe ClearCase_guy has it fundamentally correct when he opined that it was the difference between controlling your own life or controlling others.
Your variant would be a subset of the overarching characterization made by ClearCase_guy. You aren't wrong, but his example covers it all, while yours is more...specific.
Not wrong, mind you. Just narrower and more focused, in my opinion.
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