Victor Davis Hanson: From Monroe to Clinton, How The American Presidency Changed

[00:00:00]Your presidents today are as you've been speaking of Bill Clinton and then also the Monroe who followed on Madison's work and is probably most famous for the Monroe Doctrine. So >> yes, James Monroe was our fifth president.

[00:00:16]Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe. And he was, just think of it, he was after Washington and Jefferson and Madison. He was the fourth president from Virginia.

[00:00:29]And that was at that time called the Virginia Dynasty. I think there would be four more. I don't remember them all, but there was Tyler and Benjamin Harrison and Woodwell Wilson. I'm sure Woodro Wilson was for Virginia. He's a Southerner. Abject racist, by the way.

[00:00:50]Not that that's always to be equated with Southerners. It's not. But, um, he's known now uh for a couple of things. Liberia, the capital is Monrovia. Remember that? He was a big uh advocate of reverse colonization as a solution to the slavery problem and dur during his administr it didn't work out too well because slaves African slaves had been there for 200 years. So they were now more African than white people were you know what I mean? So it didn't work out too well. But um he also had seen this during the Mon uh Madison and his presidency. They had closer ties with after the war of 1812. they kind of shifted and they normalized their relationship with Britain number one and they had seen what the French Revolution had done and Napoleon that followed uh had done to Europe. So um and they were very skeptical of the Spanish Empire. So there was a a new idea that the United States would follow, Washington, would not get involved with foreign powers, but they were they had established much better relationship with Britain. They were going back to being pro- British again. And the result of that was uh they were very skeptical of the Spanish. And so under Monroe, they they annex Florida. Um and he was really he and Madison were really instrumental in carrying out the not the spirit of the Louisiana purchase but the actual uh implementation of it. So this was a period of they doubled the size of the United States and he was but one of the things he did not want were imperial European powers intervening in u the western hemisphere that was largely Spain because um the Spanish Empire had a very different attitude about colonization. It was not open to Europeans. It was not open to Protestants. It was you had to be get permission of the Spanish crown and you had to get the permission of the Spanish crown in its Catholic manifestation.

[00:03:18]And he was worried that uh Spain was playing too great a role and would get too powerful with right on our border with Mexico. And >> I think that was the period the 1820s when the Spanish Empire was falling all over Latin America like there were revolutions. It was it was starting but he he then said the impetus was that he felt that the imperial all the founders have thought that the imperial tradition of the French in in Canada, the Spanish and the and uh the British in Canada, the British in America, the Spanish south of the border was nefarious, toxic. So it was it was a duty of the United States to get them out and get them out in the sense to get the French out and buy their land off and get the Spanish out of the United States and buy, you know, Florida or or settle it. And by extension, they did not want Spain to then start dictating to these national liberationist fronts. They really they really did believe that Bolivar and San Marti, all these people were going to create United States. They weren't. They they weren't going to last is what I'm saying. They had a very different origin and maturity than we did. The Spanish crown was very different than the British crown. They weren't the same.

[00:04:46]There was no Spanish enlightenment like there had been a British and Scottish enlightenment. But that was he's known now for the Monroe Doctrine, which in 2013 Kerry said that he had renounced.

[00:05:00]It was no good. But now it's sort of been re reinvigorated.

[00:05:05]I think most people consider him a very good president, better than average, but he's um he's also kind of the end of a president either selecting his former opponent as secretary of state or vice president or there's not a big difference in the party between the wigs federal federal and the federalists party was dying at this time and the Republican party the people for the republic I should say it's different than the later Republic.

[00:05:37]They were gaining ground, but I think they call it the the era of good feelings or the era of good relations.

[00:05:44]It was ending. So, you're going to get a modern antithetical two-party system of really angry and it's going to be characterized by we want strong federal government and we want internal improvements and we want taxation and tariffs versus a Jeffersonian. we want to be left alone and have states rights etc. And I think so. Anyway, the idea of an aristocracy is only got one more president left, John Quincy Adam, and then that's over with. The idea that you're going to come from New England or Tidewater, Virginia, it's going to be populism, you know, Zachary Taylor and James Pope and um Andrew Jackson.

[00:06:33]As far as Bill Clinton goes, elected in 92, he never got over 50% of the vote. I don't think he ever did. I think he got 41 or 42% in ' 92 and he got 49.6 or something in uh 96. That was largely because of Ross Perau. Ross Perau, for what all the Democrats want to say, he took more votes away from George Bush than he did from Bill Clinton.

[00:07:03]and he was responsible and he knew that.

[00:07:06]He said that he wanted to help the Democrats. He said they've become normal again under Clinton.

[00:07:13]Uh he was a leftist and the Republicans when they ran against him tried to say that when he was a student at Oxford, you remember that he I like that new word. He was adjacent to the communist at other students and they said that he was smoking. That was when smoking marijuana was disqualifying. And he said he did smoke, but he never inhaled.

[00:07:37]And that was the beginning of I never had sex with that woman because the type of sex he had with a woman, he didn't say qualifies with traditional notions of sex.

[00:07:50]>> What was that thing where they kept saying he said, "Well, that depends upon what is is."

[00:07:56]>> Is is Yes. It was being by the special prosecutor and he said it depends on the definition of is meaning are you basically are you having sex? Did you have sex? And it was sort of like now well no I'm not. You know what I mean? It's >> was the special prosecutor Fitzpatrick was that the >> No, he was uh he was the one that went after Scooter Liby as I remember. That's right.

[00:08:27]>> It was Kenneth um >> Ken >> Star Ken Kenneth Star. I met him and I knew him a little bit. He was a very fine person. He was dean of the Pepperdine Law School >> and and he got a really bad uh you can chalk that up to James Carville. He got on TV and he just character assassinated him. And there that special prosecutor, he's a cigarette lawyer. He's a cigarette lawyer. That's what he is. He just descended cigarettes, cigarettes, cigarettes.

[00:08:56]That's what he did. I I met James Carville once when I was speaking on a Hillsdale cruise. He was incidentally on the same boat. He came up to me and he tried to tell me that the T34 was the best tank in the World War II. I see you're talking on World War II, the Sherman.

[00:09:14]And I said, "That's just so stereotypical, James. Do you have any idea of maintenance and hours of maintenance to make it, you know, the T34 had no radios in it? Um, it stored its shells very um dangerously at the front of the compartment and they could blow up. It was a very good tank, but it was basically based on a Christy American chassis. And the Sherman for all of its defects, it was a medium tank. It was not intended. always explain on his ass is no good. He's no good. Very dogmatic guy. Not to mention that he didn't he he did get um he and Doug Shoen and Mark Pin made sure that Clinton and Dick Morris got the white working class. And he had that they all staged that sister soldier moment where they went to Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition and they deliberately said to her and she said, "Well, if why do why do we black people kill each other? Why don't we just go for change and kill white people in their neighborhoods?" And he said, "You should be ashamed. You should be ashamed of yourself." And that was a really that took a lot of independence.

[00:10:33]They said, "Wow, he's not that leftwing after all." He's known really uh for a couple of things. Whatever you can say about him. Um 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, he had a balanced budget. He had a surplus. He was playing down the debt. Now, conservatives will tell you it was because Nuke Genrich forced him to cut cut.

[00:11:00]He did, but he also gave into a increase in the income tax. That's what that was the big grand deal and it worked and they had a balanced budget and we were we were had we continued on that uh plan we would be have no national debt now we would have paid it off we wouldn't be 31 trillion in debt so you got to give him credit for that and I went back not too long ago I wrote about the dying citizen but if you look at the charter of the 92 Democratic convention and the 96 Democratic And I think that was written by Mark Pin that maybe people listening will correct me and Doug Shoen with input from some other people. Uh it it it's a Republican I mean it says we want closed borders. We want legal only immigration.

[00:11:54]We want juvenile murders and violent criminals charged as adults.

[00:11:59]Uh we want everybody to pay their fair share. We want to make sure people are not cheating on their income taxes and we are for a strong defense and to you know he bombed and I don't it was kind of a misadventure but he bombed melovich and got the Serbs out of Kosovo 77 days without congressional authority of course uh where he was faulted he had numerous opportunities to stop um alqaa Ala and Bin Laden and he passed up on them.