A review of The Case For Trump by Victor Davis Hanson. Basic Books, Hard Cover (March 2019).

“I too grew up, and still live, outside a small town in California’s Central Valley,” Victor Davis Hanson writes, in his new book The Case For Trump. “For a century (1880–1980) it was a prosperous multiethnic and multiracial community of working- and middle-class families. By 2010, high unemployment was chronic, drug addiction was endemic, crime commonplace. In 1970, we did not have keys for our outside doors; in 2018, I have six guard dogs.”

Hanson remains one of the rare prominent writers and theorists to throw his intellectual weight behind the new conservatism that is taking shape across the Anglosphere and broader West since the twin victories of Brexit and Trump in 2016. While there have been recent attempts from both conservative (Legutko, Hazony, Mearsheimer) and liberal(ish) perspectives (Deneen, Goodwin and Eatwell, Walt) to explain what went wrong, Hanson’s latest refers more specifically to the social conditions in the United States. It is also very different from the works of scholarship he is known for. Hanson is one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars of classics and military strategy, and his last book, The Second World Wars (2018), which I reviewed for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, remains peerless in its thematic analysis of history’s most devastating conflict to date. But his new book addresses a distinctly modern phenomenon, namely the rise of Donald Trump. Its misleading name notwithstanding, the majority of the book focusses on the social forces behind Trump’s first success rather than making the case for his re-election.

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Hanson suggests that these social forces are nothing new. “Middle-class populism—less government, doubt over overseas military commitments, fears of redistribution and globalization, and distrust of cultural elites—was as old as the Athenian landed revolutionaries of 411 BC,” he writes. But what changed is the spread of this populism to the working class, something the Left, with its urban bubbles and intersectional dogmas, failed to foresee. “In the 1990s, an array of issues such as the post-industrial and global economy, illegal immigration, and the Democratic monopolies of big-city mayorships split the country apart along new regional lines,” Hanson writes, indicating that it all started during Bill Clinton’s presidency. “[The Democrats] were content to let the labor market, not existing law, adjudicate border crossings. Prior and rather pathetic Republican efforts to go soft on immigration were predicated on outdated stereotypes about ‘family values.’ Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico and Latin America, if amnestied, supposedly would vote as if they were third-generation middle-class Cuban Republicans, even as open borders allowed hundreds of thousands of new arrivals to enter the United States illegally from Mexico and Central America.”

Immigration is the key theme in Hanson’s book—the word itself appears well over a hundred times. Hanson points out that immigration was not always a right-wing concern. In fact, it has traditionally been a section of the capitalist Right which has espoused labor mobility and the Left was usually opposed to it. “Even Barack Obama, an old laborite community activist, as late as 2008 had campaigned on enforcing immigration law,” he writes. “During his first four years as president, Obama had reiterated (twenty-two times, to be exact) to mostly Latino pressure groups why he could not provide them with blanket amnesties and open borders: ‘I am president, I am not king. I can’t do these things just by myself.’” Indeed, Obama’s own words on immigration—“Do not send your children to the borders. If they do make it, they’ll get sent back”—were indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton’s: “We have to send a clear message, just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay.” Bernie Sanders was castigated by the liberal left for saying that open borders are a Koch brothers’ plan (nonsense, obviously), which places him at odds with some of the other Democratic Presidential hopefuls who say they want to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and tear down existing borders. The Right, by contrast, has turned Laschian. The phrase “illegal alien” has become “illegal immigrant” and “undocumented immigrant” has become “undocumented migrant.”

However, Obama failed to end illegal immigration. “I will secure the borders first, and I will have the border states’ governors certify that those borders are secured,” he promised during his 2008 campaign. That didn’t happen, and neither did many of the other “tough” measures he proposed. The backlash to those broken promises forms the core of this book. Hanson sums up:

[The Democrats’] free-market dogmas offered answers to far wider social and cultural questions, from immigration and the role of government to education and defense. Summed up brutally, it meant that for the market to enrich society, champion the individual, and protect liberty, there would have to be short term winners and losers—players who were constantly engaged in a cauldron of modification, rejection, and adaptation of their very lives. Nothing was static; nothing sacred.