Sunday in the Park with Victor: How to Pick a Candidate

Okay, it wasn’t a Sunday. It was a Wednesday. And it wasn’t a park. It was a farm, Victor’s farm near Fresno, California. But I somehow thought Victor Davis Hanson merited a title on a par with George Seurat (from the musical Sunday in the Park with George), because Victor is — and I know the humble Hanson would reject this — one of the great artists in his field: punditry.

Well, not exactly punditry, something more like historo-punditry, because VDH, more than anyone I can think of, has the background and intellect to interpret the events of our time against the wider perspective of history, classical and otherwise. That’s when punditry becomes, well, if not art, something close to it.

So this post is to mark the release of some short videos we did with VDH a few weeks back. They are excerpts from a considerably longer, slightly over thirty minutes, interview I did with Victor, which will be available to members only shortly.

You can subscribe here and get the longer Hanson interview along with Scott Ott’s terrific series on the Constitution. You’ll also be helping support our battle against the mainstream media.

But before I put up YouTubes of the new excerpts, I’d like to make an observation regarding the first video we released, during which Victor discussed the coming election. From the comments, I gathered some viewers may have misinterpreted what Hanson meant when he said conservatives might have to swallow “castor oil” and vote for Mitt Romney. This was not a ringing endorsement of Romney. Far from it. It was an acknowledgement that our country had come to such a pass historically that any of the Republican candidates would be vastly better than Obama. Indeed, it was our duty to vote for whoever emerges. (Well, perhaps not for Ron Paul, who, unfortunately, makes Neville Chamberlain seem like Douglas MacArthur.) And remember, this was recorded before the current rise of Newt Gingrich.

Whatever the case, that first video was deliberately more immediately “topical” than the others. The subject matter of the longer “members only” interview, and therefore the excerpts, was intended to be more evergreen or historical in nature. The first excerpt we chose concerns the subject of immigration, which, readers of VDH’s superb Mexifornia know, is one of his great areas of interest. It’s an issue that, as a Central California farmer, he has lived.

Another topic I discussed with Victor was Europe. As a classicist, he has spent much time there, especially in the highly-precarious Greece. Not surprisingly, he predicts the decline of Europe. But surprisingly, he has good things to say about what this means for the US.

Okay, that’s it for now, but there’s a lot more on the full-length video. If you haven’t, please subscribe and see it. And if you’re already a member, please let us know what you think, especially if there are other areas you would like us to cover with Victor Davis Hanson.