Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson

Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and an expert on the history of war. A regular contributor to National Review Online and many other national and international publications, he has written or edited sixteen books, including the New York Times best seller Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. He has received a National Humanities Medal and a Bradley Prize for Outstanding Achievement.

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    • Dependent No More

    | April 07, 2012 | 5:49 pm

    There is a revolution going on in America, but it is not driven by the tea party or the Occupy Wall Street protests.

    Instead, massive new reserves of gas, oil, and coal are being discovered almost everywhere in the United States, thanks to revolutionary methods of exploration and exploitation such as hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and horizontal drilling. Recent prices above $100 a barrel make even difficult efforts at recovery enormously profitable.

    There were always known to be additional, untapped reserves of oil and gas in the petroleum-rich Gulf of Mexico, off America’s shores, and in the American West and Alaska. But even the top energy experts never imagined just how vast was the energy there—or beneath far more unlikely places such as South Dakota, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. Some studies suggest that the United States has now expanded its known potential gas and oil reserves tenfold.

    The strategic and economic repercussions of these new finds are staggering, and remind us how a once energy-independent and thereby confident American economy soared to world dominance in the early twentieth century.

    America will soon again be able to supply all of its own domestic natural gas needs—and do so perhaps for the next ninety years, at present rates of consumption. We have recently become a net exporter of refined gas and diesel fuel, and already have cut imported oil from OPEC countries by one million barrels per day.

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    Walking Back the Trayvon Martin Hysteria

    | April 06, 2012 | 8:16 am

    1) If one suggests that there may not be, at least as yet, enough evidence to overturn the initial police decision of not charging Mr. Zimmerman with a crime, then one is a de facto racist.

    In other words, the liberal position of letting all the evidence be reexamined in a dispassionate fashion is now illiberal. And the illiberal one of charging someone with a felony without established probable cause is liberal. But just arresting and charging a suspect to let a judge or jury post facto decide whether there was ever probable cause for such an arrest is neither liberal nor consistent with American jurisprudence.

    2) It is clear now that the African-American civil-rights hierarchy is concerned largely with maintaining power and influence by promulgating the theme of unending white racism — and the need for its exclusive agency to find redress and reparations from that eternal fact. That is a serious charge, but one easy to substantiate — whether we compare the commensurate outrage accorded the Duke case, the Skip Gates mess, the Tawana Brawley hoax, or the present Trayvon Martin tragedy, with the veritable neglect about the carnage of young African-American males in our cities, or the deliberate distortion that white-on-black crime is an epidemic when, in fact, black-on-black crime is — in addition to the fact of vastly higher incidences of black-on-white crime.

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    The New Anti-Semitism

    | March 28, 2012 | 2:39 pm

    Not long ago, the Economist ran an unsigned editorial called the “Auschwitz Complex.” The unnamed author blamed serial Middle East tensions on both Israel’s unwarranted sense of victimhood, accrued from the Holocaust, and its unwillingness to  “to give up its empire.” As far as Israel’s paranoid obsessions with the specter of a nuclear Iran, the author dismissed any real threat by announcing that “Iran makes an appealing enemy for Israelis,” and that “Israelis have psychologically displaced the source of their anxiety onto a more distant target: Iran.”

    It is hard to fathom how a democracy of seven million people by any stretch of the imagination is an “empire.” Israel, after all, fought three existential wars over its 1947 borders, when the issue at hand was not manifest destiny, but the efforts of its many enemies to exterminate or deport its population. I would not otherwise know how to characterize the Arab promise of more than a half-century of “pushing the Jews into Mediterranean.”

    While it is true that Israeli forces stayed put on neighboring lands after the 1967 war, subsequent governments eventually withdrew from the Sinai, southern Lebanon, and Gaza—areas from which attacks were and are still staged against it. The Economist’s choice of “appealing” is an odd modifying adjective of the noun “enemy,” particularly for Iran, which has both promised to wipe out Israel and is desperately attempting to find the nuclear means to reify that boast.

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    Will Afghanistan End Like Iraq or Vietnam?

    | March 16, 2012 | 10:34 am

    There are lots of legitimate differences over U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Arguments continue over what happened to the “good” or “real” war that after the first five years of relative quiet (from 2001 through 2006 there were never more than 100 Americans lost per year) began heating up in 2007–8 (even as Iraq quieted), and by 2009 (317 lost) and 2010 (499 lost) had become a mess, even as we began to pour reinforcements and more money into the country. (No one to this date has explained adequately why violence increased even as we put more troops and material into the country and disengaged our efforts and attention from Iraq. There are all sorts of possible explanations, but none really have been offered.)

    Forget the background, context, and all the various exegeses, and simply note that we have reached a point where the secretary of defense is met with a probable assassination attempt upon landing at a coalition, supposedly secure, airport, and the American soldiers he addresses, for the first time in recent U.S. military protocol, have to be disarmed, given fears of some sort of repeat of last week’s appalling shooting.

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    (photo credit: The U.S. Army)

    The Middle East Mess

    | March 15, 2012 | 11:55 am

    Most polls show a decided unease to preempt in Iran, at least for now. The nearly inexplicable failure to encourage the 2009 Iranian protests seems more regrettable each month. Trying to lecture and embarrass Israel the last three years led nowhere. The Syrian dissidents are now infighting. Assad, once well-spoken-of by the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, is receiving Russian arms, and seems to be silently warning to fight to the last bunker, atop supposedly massive amounts of WMD.

    Libya — no U.S. congressional authorization, exceeding the much-referenced U.N. authorizations, and chaos in the postbellum era — is a blueprint for nothing. The verdict is out on the Arab Spring; but confidence mostly hinges on believing the supposedly reformed Muslim Brotherhood and affiliates either do not have broad support or are not as radical as they sound.

    The once-”good war” in Afghanistan is being dissected every which way in terms of getting out without avoiding a 1975 Vietnam-like scramble. Certainly the old mantra that we took our eye off the ball in Iraq needs revisiting — given that when we put it back on Afghanistan and poured manpower and capital into the country, things either did not improve or got worse. In any case, four ground commanders in three years, diplomatic musical chairs, surges cum withdrawal deadlines, and a disengaged commander in chief did not send the message of a new administration finally bent, as promised in summer 2008, on winning the “real” or “good” war.

    The Middle East Mess…

    Back to the Byzantine Blues and Greens?

    | March 14, 2012 | 10:27 am

    Ethnic politics have always been a facet of American politics. But recently the frightened Obama reelection campaign seems to be going to unusual lengths to appeal overtly to voters by virtue of Obama’s race — a sort of retrograde tribalism that Obama in 2004 promised that we would transcend.

    What are we to make of the coach of the Chicago Bears, Lovie Smith, announcing on acampaign video, “I have the president’s back and it’s left up to us, as African Americans, to show that we have his back. Also join African Americans for PresidentObama today.” Does Coach Smith mean that “as African Americans” one has a duty to support the president by virtue of his race rather than his politics alone, or his politics as they relate to the welfare of African Americans? Are those African Americans who oppose Obama, then, doing so “not as African Americans”? Are whites and Hispanics who support Obama doing so because he is also half-white or as “not African Americans”?

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    Bad or Worse in Afghanistan?

    | March 13, 2012 | 2:26 pm

    The latest mass killing by an American soldier follows a three-year downward spiral: the burned desecrated Korans, the murdering of Americans by Afghan “allies,” the surge followed immediately by loudly announced withdrawal dates, four different senior commanders in three years, a musical-chairs rotation likewise on the diplomatic side, and a president clearly uncomfortable that his prior promises as a candidate to fight unflinchingly in Afghanistan were strait-jacketing his presidential impatience at leaving.

    After ten years, we have forgotten why we went into Afghanistan in the first place: a) to deny Islamic radicals similar bases from which to attack the U.S. in 9/11 style, who had been hosted by the terrorist-friendly Taliban “government”; b) to stay on and establish a consensual government to avoid resurgence of the Taliban-friendly radicals, in a de facto admission that our aid to Afghan Islamic radicals in the 1980s to defeat the Russians had been followed by a thought-to-be unwise departure after the Soviet defeat, ceding, in blowback style, the country to the Taliban; and c) at some point after our defeat of the Taliban and the establishment of the Karzai government, a third rationale emerged that we were now supporting “democracy” to ensure an end to the humanitarian abuses under the Taliban.

    By 2005 the war and its aftermath were felt to be a general success in that two of our three goals were largely met; indeed, in those days, in contrast to the present, observers looked at the escalating violence in Iraq and wondered “where was the Iraqi Karzai?,” who was feted as a near-hero as American casualties were remarkably low and the Taliban stayed in disarray. There was never a real anti-war movement against Afghanistan.

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    Sick and Tired of the Middle East

    | March 09, 2012 | 6:41 am

    Americans — left, right, Democrats and Republicans — are all sick of thankless nation-building in the Middle East. Yet democratization was not our first choice, but rather a last resort after prior failures.

    The United States had long ago supplied Afghan insurgents, who expelled the Soviets after a decade of fighting. Then we left. The country descended into even worse medievalism under the Taliban. So after removing the Taliban, who had hosted the perpetrators of 9/11, we promised in 2001 to stay on.

    We won the first Gulf War in 1991. Then most of our forces left the region. The result was the mass murder of the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites, 12 years of no-fly zones, and a failed oil-for-food embargo of Saddam’s Iraq. So after removing Saddam in 2003, we tried to leave behind something better.

    In the last 10 years the United States has spent more than $1 trillion and has lost thousands of American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both places seem far better off than when ruled by the Taliban and Saddam Hussein — at least for a while longer.

    Yet the Iraqis now bear Americans little good will. They seem friendlier to Iranand Syria than to their liberators. In Afghanistan, riots continue over mistaken burning of some defaced Korans, despite serial American apologies.

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    In California, Whom Will They Blame?

    | March 07, 2012 | 2:01 pm

    Here in California, students just marched on Sacramento in outrage that state-subsidized tuition at the UC and CSU campuses keeps climbing. It is true that per-unit tuition costs are rising, despite even greater exploitation of poorly paid part-time teachers and graduate-student TAs. But the protests are sort of surreal. The California legislature is overwhelmingly Democratic. The governor is a Democrat. The faculties and administrative classes are largely Democratic. Who then, in the students’ minds, have established these supposedly unfair budget priorities?

    Sales, income, and gas taxes are still among the highest in the nation (and are proposed to rise even higher) — prompting one of the largest out-of-state exoduses of upper-income brackets in the nation. The state budget is pretty much entirely committed to K–12 education (whose state-by-state comparative test scores in math and science hover between 45th and 49th in the nation), prisons, social services, and public-employee salaries and pensions. Whom, then, can the students be angry at?

    Are students angry at public-union salaries and pensions that are among the highest in the nation? Do they think the many highly compensated retired Highway patrol officers have shorted students at UC Davis? Are they mad at the 50,000 illegal aliens in the California prison system that might have siphoned off scholarship funds from CSU Monterey Bay? Or is the rub the influx of hundreds of thousands of children of illegal aliens who require all sorts of language remediation and extra instruction in the public schools, and so might in theory divert library funds from UC Santa Cruz?

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    Syrian Ironies

    | March 06, 2012 | 1:32 pm

    The more Bashar Assad butchers Syrian dissidents, the more the world community expresses outrage — while it does little to stop the bloodletting. Why?

    Ironies on top of ironies

    1. The politics of intervention. Republicans might seem the most likely to push for an American bombing campaign against Bashar Assad. Some conservatives, in fact, are doing so. But most are silent — and for understandable reasons. Between 2005 and 2009, most liberals made the case that American intervention against an Arab dictator in the Middle East was intrinsically unwise. This liberal chorus included the likes of Hillary Clinton, who as senator had voted to authorize the use of force against Saddam Hussein. Barack Obama in 2007 started his presidential bid to the left of Senator Clinton, outlining a plan for near-immediate withdrawal from Iraq, while continuing his concerted attack on almost all the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols.

    Republicans were relieved that Obama, once president, suddenly dropped almost all the demagogic criticism that had fueled his successful campaign and embraced the Bush-Cheney policies against terrorists. But they were not relieved enough to overlook the hypocrisy — and the prior damage done by Obama and others, whose rhetoric was revealed as more partisan than reflective of any principled positions against Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventive detention, and troops in Iraq.

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    So Are High Gas Prices Good or Bad?

    | February 24, 2012 | 1:07 pm

    As the global economy gets better, as we freeze federal leases, and as the Middle East heats up, will $5-a-gallon summer gas be good or bad? Suddenly the administration seems to think that high energy prices are bad and, in fact, that it has done a lot to lower them.

    The Obama team’s various explanations for addressing skyrocketing gas prices so far seem threefold: It claims that by getting out of Iraq it is settling down the Mideast; it is reducing demand; and it is increasing production. All of these are either half-truths, or developments that are irrelevant to the presidency. And the fact that gas prices have doubled since January 2009 suggests that whatever the current Obama policy is, it has not worked — at least if lower gas prices were the aim.

    Our departure from Iraq has had nothing to do with calming oil prices. When Obama entered office, Iraq was already quiet; the month we left, no U.S. soldiers were lost. As for Middle East oil, in 2002, the last year before the Iraq invasion, Iraq produced slightly over 2 million barrels per day; oil production exceeded that prewar figure already by 2007 after the success of the Petraeus surge. In 2011 (with thousands of troops still in Iraq), it hit a 3 million barrels average, with projections for even more this year. The Iranian mess, no doubt, has fostered speculation, but I will leave it to others to judge whether Obama’s policies toward Iran have created calm and reassurance in the Gulf region.

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    (photo credit: Paulo Ordoveza)

    Greek Tragedies

    | February 16, 2012 | 4:41 pm

    There are a lot of new twists to the old story of massive demonstrations in Greece. This is the first time in my life (I first went to Greece in 1973) that I can remember Greek rioting and demonstrations that were not anti-American. Oh, there have been a few contorted efforts to blame the Wall Street “Jews” for the 2008 meltdown that in turn supposedly called in Greek credit, but it is a half-hearted attempt, and for the most part the Greeks seem bewildered that they cannot properly fault the U.S. for much of anything in their present disaster — so unlike the old days of the 1967 coup, the colonels, the Cold War, the American support for Israel, the oil boycotts of 1973, the 1974 Cyprus disaster, the bombing of a kindred Orthodox Milosevic, etc. But it has been a generation since the Greeks have had much to do with the U.S. The Greek lobby is long retired from the Congress. The Obama administration is enthralled with Turkey. Former prime minister and U.S. citizen Andreas Papandreou long ago cut any remaining close ties with the U.S. in a flurry of anti-American and pro-Soviet rhetoric designed to appeal to popular anti-Americanism. The Greek diaspora in the U.S. is mostly third-generation, intermarried, and assimilated, and the net result is that we are now spectators, not players, in the present tragedy.

    The end of utopianism is certainly causing far more furor than had the utopian dream never materialized, so the anger against Germany in the popular press (“Gautleiters,” “The Fourth Reich”, “Dachau!”, etc) is far greater now than had the Germans and their friends never loaned the Greeks nearly $400 billion in the first place. What is strange to watch is the nature of the Greek furor: that the Germans are probably eventually willing to forgive hundreds of billions almost seems to enrage Greeks all the more — for their debtors’ unwillingness to go all the way by forgiving the entire huge sum. The thinking is almost, “Well, if they have that much money to forgive, why not forgive it all?”

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    Why NATO Still Matters

    | February 15, 2012 | 11:54 pm

    The first Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the sober and judicious British Lord Ismay, famously remarked that the purpose of the controversial new postwar alliance would be “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

    Over the next sixty-six years of NATO’s existence, most in the Atlantic Alliance assumed that the first commandment was obvious, the second one was taken for granted, and the third would soon be irrelevant. No longer.

    With the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, few worry anymore about an invasion from a shrinking Russia. America’s recent loud announcements of a shift in strategic focus to Asia, coupled with continual cutbacks in troop levels within Europe, reflect, in trans-Atlantic terms, a new American desire to “lead from behind.” We saw that shift in the recent Libyan war, when the Obama administration outsourced America’s historic leading role in NATO to a militarily weak Great Britain and France, while predicating the legitimacy of the alliance’s intervention on United Nations directives (which were almost immediately exceeded when found bothersome to operations).

    The alliance has recently not fared too well elsewhere. The effort in Afghanistan was to be the Obama administration’s “good war” (compared to Iraq) that would showcase NATO solidarity. Instead, we saw bickering European nations seeking to either evade or end their participation in the war. Note that Germany did not participate in Libya, and at home is facing fierce opposition to the continued presence of its shrinking contingent in Afghanistan.

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    The Libyan Non-Model

    | February 15, 2012 | 10:35 am

    It is a good thing that Moammar Qaddafi is gone, even if by barbaric means. So what did we learn from the 2011 misadventure, given that some are advocating much the same sort of action against Syria and Iran? Answer: Not much.

    1. Small is easy. The bombing of Libya was billed as an idealistic effort to free an oppressed people from a tyrant. But the decision to take action was largely predicated on realist assumptions: that Libya was small and weak, and Qaddafi easily targeted — unlike Iraq and Saddam or Syria and Assad. We will not repeat the Libyan paradigm in Syria, not because Assad is not a tyrant or his people are not treated brutally, but because military intervention in a much larger and more volatile Syria would not be so easy. There need be no apologies about picking and choosing easy targets; but we suffer the wages of hypocrisy when we claim that the Libyan action was reflective of our overriding idealism about promoting systematic democratic liberation from tyrants. When one looks back at the operations in Iraq versus those in Libya, the difference was not morality, but the relative ease of the latter in simply removing a dictator, and the difficulty in the former of staying on to foster democracy.

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    Europe in the Rearview Mirror

    | February 13, 2012 | 2:14 pm

    The European Union was always a paradox. Its existence was predicated entirely on the notion of German guilt, translating into massive cash transfers east and south. Just as Versailles was supposed to have restrained Germany, then a divided, postwar Germany, then NATO integration and the common Soviet enemy, and then the EU — and now what next?

    There was quite a EU veneer placed over the politically incorrect “German Problem.” Most of us listened in disbelief as we were lectured that veritable disarmament, subsidized windmills, reach outs to a Syria or Libya, easy anti-Americanism, and sermons about cradle-to-grave socialism were the way of the new Europe. And always came the grating condescension, that a self-appointed bureaucratic class in Brussels might lecture Neanderthals what was good for them, without worry over democratic checks and balances.

    In understandable fear of cannibalizing Europe yet a third time within a century’s span, European academics and elite functionaries had taken a perfectly understandable notion of a European common market and transmogrified it into an anti-democratic, utopian, and utterly unworkable European Union. Was the euro supposed to trump the laws of Economics 1A, simply because it was constructed as something moral?

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    Which Way Greece?

    | February 10, 2012 | 12:50 pm

    One question that rarely arises about Greece is “where did all those hundreds of billions of Euros really go?” I think most visitors could easily answer that they were not all squandered on pensions and inflated government staffs and salaries. The Greece of 1975 was changed into a simulacrum of northern Europe by all sorts of vast public-works projects — new bridges, port facilities, freeways, museums, light rail, the Athens subway and airport, new agricultural projects, as well as hundreds of luxury hotels well outside Athens and thousands of upscale vacation homes dotting the Greek coastline for 1,000 miles. Suddenly, by around 2002, a Mercedes seemed far more common in Athens than in most cities in California, and yachts in the harbors looked about like those in Newport Beach.

    Whether due to Hellenic accounting fraud that masked an enormous rip-off, or a cynical German mercantilism that wanted to sell its cars, trucks, and machines to the indigent whose borrowing was to be backed up by EU guarantees — or to both — a tiny country not particularly known for labor productivity, tax compliance, transparency, or a robust private sector for a moment obtained a glimpse of life as it is lived in Northern Europe.

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    A Post-American World?

    | February 08, 2012 | 3:58 pm

    In a scathing denunciation of Mitt Romney last week, Fareed Zakaria praised Barack Obama for his nuanced understanding of what Zakaria has called the “Post-American World”:

    This is a new world, very different from the America-centric one we got used to over the last generation. Obama has succeeded in preserving and even enhancing U.S. influence in this world precisely because he has recognized these new forces at work. He has traveled to the emerging nations and spoken admiringly of their rise. He replaced the old Western club and made the Group of 20 the central decision-making forum for global economic affairs. By emphasizing multilateral organizations, alliance structures and international legitimacy, he got results. It was Chinese and Russian cooperation that produced tougher sanctions against Iran. It was the Arab League’s formal request last year that made Western intervention in Libya uncontroversial.

    By and large, you have ridiculed this approach to foreign policy, arguing that you would instead expand the military, act unilaterally, and talk unapologetically. That might appeal to Republican primary voters, but chest-thumping triumphalism won’t help you secure America’s interests or ideals in a world populated by powerful new players.

    Where to start with Mr. Zakaria’s indictment? George Bush traveled frequently to “emerging nations,” as did Bill Clinton. The former’s multibillion-dollar initiatives to help battle AIDS in Africa have saved millions of lives. Long before Obama, the G-something meetings were already more than “the old Western club.” Unlike Obama in Libya or Clinton in Serbia, Bush did not intervene in Afghanistan or Iraq without first obtaining congressional support. Bush obtained United Nations approval for our intervention in Afghanistan and tried to for Iraq. In contrast, Clinton did not go to the U.N. before bombing Serbia, and Obama obtained U.N. resolutions to enforce a no-fly-zone in Libya and offer humanitarian aid, and he then summarily far exceeded both by bombing ground troops.

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    (photo credit: World Economic Forum)

    ‘Breaking Free From the Constraints of the Founding Fathers’

    | February 08, 2012 | 3:56 pm

    In the last week in the popular press and academic journals there have been several pre-election essays and op-eds about the cumbersome nature of the U.S. Constitution (as we were reminded by the president) and its unsuitability for emulation by other countries (per Justice Ginsburg), given contemporary supposedly superior models. In addition, we are told that food stamps are a great win-win situation for everyone, and that breaking immigration laws are infractions not really violations.

    What we have here is an assault on traditional American notions of self-reliance, respect for the law, and a sense of American exceptionalism as embodied by the Constitution. It is weird, to say the least, to even hint of superior constitutional systems elsewhere, given the current chaos in South Africa, and the coming implosion of the European Union — not to mention the mess in the Middle East and Russia.

    What’s behind the sudden defiant push-back against traditional advocacy of the old self-reliant, arms-bearing citizen as championed by the Constitution? Give credit to Barack Obama and his supporters. They are seizing the moment in a fashion undreamed of by Bill Clinton in 1996 and framing his reelection as a referendum on the entire American system itself. We see this with Obamacare’s attack on the Catholic Church, with the Obama administration joining with Mexico to sue a state, and with these remarks from our highest officials about the problems with our Constitution.

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    Gingrich’s Speech–How to Make a Bad Night Worse

    | February 06, 2012 | 3:20 pm

    Newt Gingrich’s post–Nevada caucus speech included about three minutes of inspired moments about issues and ideas in his usual imaginative and intellectually robust style. So why does he not just stay with that — given that he often seems more dynamic and glib than Romney in his attacks on Obama, and not long ago gained ground despite the attacks against him? Instead, he now turns ad nauseam to the tired reasons why he loses — yes, including lots of Mormons in Nevada — and ends up as Richard Nixon not going to get kicked around any more.

    But whether he knows it or not, Gingrich is becoming a caricature of petulance: no concession in Nevada, no call to Romney, no awareness that his inability to raise money at levels of a political rival or to match a competing campaign organization is not necessarily unfair. That’s politics, and Gingrich knows it. I don’t understand why he thinks now losing to Romney in 2012 is solely due to Romney’s innate deviousness in a way McCain beating Romney in 2008 was not — given that Romney was about the same in both 2008 and 2012. Gingrich seems oblivious to the fact that McCain’s style and history gave him advantages over Romney’s money and hardball in ways Gingrich’s own proven liabilities apparently do not.

    Gingrich should carefully play a tape of his post–Nevada caucus performance, and then he would quickly grasp that it was little more than a litany of excuses, whining, and accusations — characterized by stream-of-conscious confessionals and rambling repetitions. And, I think, will hurt him more than anything yet in the campaign.

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    A Populist Campaign of One Percenters

    | January 31, 2012 | 5:07 pm

    The problem with President Obama’s us-vs.-them fairness campaign is that the Democratic technocracy that runs the redistributionist state is so deeply embedded within the One Percent that it is impossible to hide the hypocrisies. Today’s BigMoney is not the staid GM and IBM of the ’60s, but the hipper Wall Street and Silicon Valley where millionaires can still wear the same sort of clothes, listen to the same sort of music, and adopt the same sort of platitudes as the left-wing counterculture of Occupy Wall Street. Without that veneer of coolness, someone who milked Freddie, Fannie, or Citigroup would be reduced to an Enron- or Halliburton-style caricature.

    This week we heard that consumer populist and Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren is, by both net worth and salary, part of the One Percent herself — as well as a past consultant to insurance companies seeking to avoid litigant claims. All three of Barack Obama’s chiefs of staff were Wall Streeters; all three made their Wall Street millions in very little time; two had some sort of association with Freddie and Fannie. Peter Orszag of both OMB and Citigroup is emblematic of the technocratic class’s revolving door between “public service” and ever more enhanced billets back on Wall Street. And, fairly or not, even good handlers cannot keep Michelle Obama’s taste for the aristocratic life of high fashion out of the press.

    The media that resonates Obama’s “fairness” attacks are One Percenters to the core, from Soros-subsidized blogs and think tanks to mega-salaried corporate news anchors. The epitome of all this is the business model of Arianna Huffington — low or no pay for writers, trendy liberal celebrity spotlight appearances, and tabloid photographic gossip — which turns a “progressive” blog into a corporate-bought-out bonanza that will earn AOL very little and Ms. Huffington quite a lot.

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