Episode Details

Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University and New York Times bestselling author joins America's Roundtable co-hosts Natasha Srdoc and Joel Anand Samy in a timely conversation on one of the greatest challenges impacting America. Professor Hanson explains the decline and fall of the once cherished idea of American citizenship.

Human history is full of the stories of peasants, subjects, and tribes. Yet the concept of the “citizen” is historically rare—and was among America’s most valued ideals for over two centuries. But without shock treatment, warns historian Victor Davis Hanson, American citizenship as we have known it may soon vanish.

In The Dying Citizen — How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America, Hanson outlines the historical forces that led to this crisis. The evisceration of the middle class over the last fifty years has made many Americans dependent on the federal government. Open borders have undermined the idea of allegiance to a particular place. Identity politics have eradicated our collective civic sense of self. And a top-heavy administrative state has endangered personal liberty, along with formal efforts to weaken the Constitution.

As in the revolutionary years of 1848, 1917, and 1968, 2020 ripped away our complacency about the future. But in the aftermath, we as Americans can rebuild and recover what we have lost. The choice is ours.

Bio: Victor Davis Hanson, PhD | https://victorhanson.com/

Hanson, who was the fifth successive generation to live in the same house on his family’s farm, was a full-time orchard and vineyard grower from 1980-1984, before joining the nearby CSU Fresno campus in 1984 to initiate a classical languages program. In 1991, he was awarded an American Philological Association Excellence in Teaching Award, which is given yearly to the country’s top undergraduate teachers of Greek and Latin.

Hanson has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Post, National Review, The Washington Times, Commentary, The Washington Post, Claremont Review of Books, American Heritage, New Criterion, Policy Review, Wilson Quarterly, Weekly Standard, Daily Telegraph, and has been interviewed on National Public Radio, PBS Newshour, Fox News, CNN, and C-Span’s Book TV and In-Depth.

Hanson is the author of hundreds of articles, book reviews, scholarly papers, and newspaper editorials on matters ranging from ancient Greek, agrarian and military history to foreign affairs, domestic politics, and contemporary culture. He has written or edited 24 books. His latest books, The Case for Trump (released on March 5, 2019) and The Second World Wars (October 2017), a history of World War II, were both published by Basic Books.

Hanson was educated at the University of California, Santa Cruz (BA, Classics, 1975, ‘highest honors’ Classics, ‘college honors’, Cowell College), the College Year in Athens (Athens, Raphael Demos Fellow, 1973-4), the American School of Classical Studies, Athens (regular member, 1978-79) and received his Ph.D. in Classics from Stanford University in 1980, with special emphases in the classical authors Thucydides and Aristophanes.

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