504: Victor Davis Hanson—The Counter Revolution

The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe

Mike Rowe interviews historian and raisin farmer Victor Davis Hanson about his new book, The Counter-Revolution. The conversation explores t

Key takeaways

Victor Davis Hanson bridges the worlds of high academia at the Hoover Institution and manual labor as a raisin farmer.
Hanson argues that modern higher education is suffering from significant grade inflation and a loss of practical utility.

Main topics

The Counter-Revolution book
Skilled trades and manual labor

Notable quotes

There was no correlation necessarily between wisdom and degrees.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a profound meditation on the value of practical

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:03) Hello, friends. Mike Rowe here with another episode of The Way I Heard It. Happy to see my old buddy Chuck all lit up here on my computer screen. How are you, pal? Speaker 1 (0:12) I'm living the dream, Mike. Living the dream. Speaker 3 (0:15) You know, it's weird. I think I've done seven of these without you over the last couple of months for various reasons, and it's just not the same. Aw, I'm happy to hear that. I didn't say it was better or worse. Oh, I see, Speaker 1 (0:27) I see. It's just not the same. Speaker 3 (0:30) Oh, yeah. But you've been traveling, you've been vacationing, you've been relaxing, I hope. Speaker 1 (0:36) A little bit. All three of those, yes. Excellent. Speaker 3 (0:39) Well, welcome back. I'm glad you didn't miss this one because I think you are probably as big a fan of Victor Davis Hanson as I am. And I hope you enjoyed the conversation you just produced. Speaker 1 (0:51) Yeah, this guy is, he's a brainiac. He's smart. He's level-headed. And he's really calm, you know? He's not a guy who gets worked up. He's a guy who can argue convincingly. And it's not really arguing. It's just he makes such a persuasive case that you have to pay attention to it. Speaker 3 (1:10) Well, he's very experienced. I would never suggest he's old, but like all of us, he's older than he's ever been. I don't know how exactly or when. I think I know how, but I don't know when precisely he came to occupy such a huge piece of real estate in the zeitgeist. Speaker 1 (1:29) But Speaker 3 (1:30) maybe it's a confirmation bias. Maybe, you know, the brain finds what it looks for. And I started looking for Victor Davis Hanson seven, eight years ago because every time I heard him speak, I heard what you just described. It was a mix of experience, common sense, but also a balance. I was really delighted to spend the first 30 minutes with him talking about the importance of the generalist and our infatuation with the specialist. And he would never describe himself as a Renaissance man, but when I talked to him, I can never quite decide if he's a bigger fan of history, of the present day, of the skilled trades, of the true pursuit of knowledge, his time at Stanford, his hundreds of articles, his dozens of books. Speaker 2 (2:27) They Speaker 3 (2:28) all just really speak of a curious mind. And a very brave guy, because he has taken it in the neck. I mean, from both sides for the last 10 years, and he just doesn't seem to care. Speaker 1 (2:43) No, he doesn't. And partly it's because he bridges two worlds. He's a man of two separate places. He's an intellectual and an academic. You know, he's, I think, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, right, at Stanford. And yet he's also a raisin farmer. And you know what I mean? It's like he's a guy who could, kind of like Reagan, who could be mending a fence one day and negotiating a contract the next. I Speaker 3 (3:10) don't think he would disagree. I just don't think he would put him in that order. I honestly think he sees himself as a raisin farmer first. Speaker 1 (3:17) And Speaker 3 (3:18) the son, the grandson, the great-great-grandson of farmers. This guy has made his home. in the Central Valley here in California. He has not just passionate views about what's happening to California, but informed, logical. You just don't want to argue with this guy. And honestly, the reason I wanted to have him on, I so enjoyed talking to him a couple years ago when we did this. And he's written a book. It's called The Counter-Revolution. It's going to do what his last three or four books have done. which is inflame and inspire and confuse and challenge people on both sides of the aisle. And sell. It's going to sell a lot. I'm sure it's already. It was Speaker 1 (4:04) number one on Amazon, yeah. Speaker 3 (4:06) Yeah, so it's a thick book. I'm about halfway through it. The way a B-list celebrity gets through a book when he's attempting to impersonate the impression of preparedness for an interview like this. I will finish it. cover to cover before too long. But I didn't want to wait. I wanted to talk to him immediately. I do want to see his book sell out. I'm sure it will. But I also want people to arm themselves with it. It doesn't matter how you vote. If you can understand what's happened in the country vis-a-vis Trump over the last couple of, well, over the last decade, then you can probably start to understand what's happened to your own relationship with your friends. and with your family. I don't want to speak for you, Chuck, but I've got members of my family who have very strong opinions on the other side of the aisle. I think you do as well. And I say that not even knowing what side of the aisle I'm really on. I haven't even talked to you about my interview with Joe Manchin. Wait till you hear that. Oh, man. Speaker 1 (5:07) Yeah. Speaker 3 (5:07) You're just going to love it. But what you're about to hear are the well-articulated thoughts of a man who has mastered Greek studies. and classic literature, and at the same time, grows his raisins, and writes his papers, and earns the respect of anybody who genuinely gives a damn about our country, and who is intellectually curious. I think he's sui generis, man. I think he's unexampled in these times. Speaker 1 (5:38) Agreed. And, you know, before we got on to do this preamble, you asked me what my favorite part is, and now I remember it. When you brought up California, there is a part in here where he makes a list, and he just pulls this off at the top of his head. And this is not a very young guy, but he brings out a list with statistics and facts and numbers about the state of California today in what dire straits. It is. Speaker 3 (6:09) He's in complete demand of the facts. And to your point, he's older than he's ever been, and he's coming off a terrible fight with cancer, which he, at the moment, appears to be winning. And I'm so happy to report that as well. Speaker 2 (6:22) Amen. Speaker 3 (6:22) He's, I think, the most popular guest we've ever had historically. When you listen to this episode, I think you'll understand why. We're calling this The Counter-Revolution because that's the name of the book, his latest book. And it's worth your time. Right after this. Speaker 3 (6:43) You ever wonder how meat got so expensive? I do. And I just asked the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, to explain it to me like I was a small child. She did. And I'll have that whole conversation for you in a week or two. It's an eye-opener. In the meantime, you should know that our government, in an effort to reduce the price of ground beef, has just allowed 300,000 metric tons of foreign ground beef into the U.S. market. Here's a problem. In the grocery store, you'll have no way of knowing where the ground beef you're buying actually came from. And that makes it really difficult to support American ranchers, which I encourage all meat eaters to do. Good Ranchers is the number one company delivering 100 % American meat straight to your door. They partner with over 100 local farmers and ranchers to deliver pasture-raised meat. with no antibiotics and no added hormones. They've got 25,000 five-star reviews on Trustpilot, including my own. And this month, when you visit goodranchers.com slash ro, you'll get a free Angus ground beef bundle with your first order. Again, that's goodranchers.com slash ro for four bonus pounds of ground beef raised right here in these United States. Good Ranchers, American meat. Delivered. Speaker 2 (8:07) If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't Speaker 3 (8:12) take a chance on a foreign ranch. Get good ranchers now. Speaker 1 (8:16) Yeehaw! Speaker 3 (8:22) Well, before we dive in to the book, can you endure two quick compliments? Yeah. Are you still in the stage where that makes you awkward and uncomfortable? Speaker 2 (8:31) In the book business, nothing makes the author uncomfortable. If it's positive, only negative things make the author uncomfortable. Speaker 3 (8:39) We just finished our 500th episode, and I was looking back at them and the spontaneous conversation that you and I had a couple of years ago. has generated and continues to generate more questions, more interest, over 5 million views. I don't know how many downloads and shares, but I only point that out because I would hate for you up there on your great-great-grandmother's farm to lose sight of the fact that you are adored and valued in ways that I want to ask you to explain in a moment. The second compliment, earlier this year, I was invited to speak at the Independent Women's Forum. And they were honoring you in part, but you were recovering from your illness. And you zoomed in, you know, long distance, probably from where you're sitting now. I Speaker 2 (9:36) was, yeah, right here. And Speaker 3 (9:38) you spoke for about a half hour. And I know how disconnected it feels to do things like that this way. And I was sitting there in the audience, and I just have to tell you, when the signal was gone, the emcee walked out, and it took about 20 seconds for people to stop talking in response to what you had said. The entire crowd was hanging on to your every word in a way that, I don't mean it as cheap flattery, I just mean to say that you're out there today with a message and a voice. and a resume, and some gravitas. And what you're speaking is resonating, like some sort of tuning fork. And I just wanted to get that out of the way before we start. Speaker 2 (10:25) Well, I appreciate that, because I had no idea, because you were exactly right. When you give a talk like that on Zoom, and then it says, you're done, so you just get done. So I remember saying to my wife, I have no idea how that went over. And she said, well, that's because... you didn't stay on. They may have really liked it. I said, well, they didn't clap. I was kidding her. But yeah, and today, I really like your show, Mike, and what you've been doing the last 30 years because here I am in a 150-year-old home that my great-great-grandmother, and almost every day something goes wrong, and I've tried to redo the, when my grandfather died, he said, someday this place is going to fall apart. I was 20, and he said, could you, he just appointed me the custodian. He said, I want you to redo everything. So I have not touched the architecture. It's an old Victorian two-story farmhouse, but I've had it rewired and replumbed, and today we're doing foundation work. And for 30 years I crawled under there until a guy called me. One of the listeners, I mentioned it, and he said, you know, These companies will come in, and I'm sure you know about them. I didn't know about them. They'll clean your crawl space, and then they'll put a waterproof mat and then plastic over it. And they did the whole thing. And then I asked a friend of mine who's a good electrician, could you put 12 lights in there? And I went under there, and I didn't want to leave. It was like a complete different experience. I thought, wow, this is like a house under here. Because it's, you know, it's, and I hadn't, I didn't know that people were doing that. Well, Speaker 3 (12:08) it's probably the perfect metaphor from which to leap into the country. And, you know, the things that occur out of sight and out of mind, and the muscular trades that you've referred to so eloquently over the years, really are embodied in the business of crawlspace encapsulation. waterproofing, foundation raising. These things, they're so primal and they're so fundamental and they're so easy to overlook. And it's interesting. It's the same sort of disconnect we were just talking about. We've become technologically advanced at the same time our ignorance multiplies and we just seem to be profoundly disconnected as a country. from these primal things and maybe that's a place to start Speaker 2 (13:00) I wrote an article, too, about those of us who had grandparents that were born in the 19th century. And that was a really great thing for me. Their whole accent, their expressions, you know, don't catch cold, don't go out yonder, I'll give you the Dickens, taint funny McGee, all that stuff I grew up with. And they were before cell phones, they were before phones. They grew up without toilets. and electricity. And it's funny because when I work on the house, every once in a while, I bump into them. You know, I'll take out a wall and I'll see the first iteration was newspaper for insulation, 1898. Or I'll be out doing yard work and I'll see horseshoes. And this place I'm having right here was a manger. This was, it has a sloped roof when I grew up. This was where the horses came in, even though they weren't used to plow anymore. We had some. And they ate. They stuck their heads right where I am right here. And we put straw here, hay, and then they would eat. And I gutted it about four years. I kept the outside exactly the same, but I made it into a studio. But it was like archaeology going through the roofs and everything about it and seeing things. Speaker 3 (14:21) As a classicist. when you, and a political observer, I'm guessing it's important on a personal level to have that kind of connection to your own past. Do you worry today that as a country, we're just missing something? It's hard to articulate, but it feels like a generation ago, we were better connected to the kinds of things you're talking about on a grander level. I just don't know how we became untethered. I Speaker 2 (14:54) think part of it was that generation that came out of World War II had largely, their parents had not gone to college. And they were offered the GI Bill. Twelve and a half million people were in the military. And that was the entree to the new type of economy. If you were certified or you had a BA or a Master's of Public Policy, whatever it was. And they did get... good salaries. But the difference was the college experience that they had, though the professors were liberal, they were disinterested. My professors in college were disinterested. I mean, they would make fun about Nixon once in a while, but they didn't hate him. There were no conservatives that I knew of, but I didn't even care whether there were. But now that's not the case. And it's a sin of commission and omission when you invest that much time in trying to indoctrinate people, whether it's DEI or woke or green or all of these isms and ologies, you miss out. So for the first time in my life, I can tell you that I don't see a big difference between. people with a bachelor's degree as far as their knowledge, and people like two people here today are working with a water pressure, Mexican-American guys. And I see students a lot, and I don't see any difference in their vocabulary, their way of, but I do see a big difference. If I were to ask these two guys out the door right now, oh, by the way. Could you seal the tile balcony? Or by the way, the electricians forgot to do the junction box. Or by the way, my own pressure washer has a seal. They could do all of that. But the people with college educations can't. And then they would say, well, we can always hire somebody. Well, I'm not sure that's true. But more importantly, the ability and the experience of acquiring that knowledge. It's kind of like anthropology. You meet so many different people in the process of mastering these physical, muscular trades. It's very important, I think, for the elite class, the people with all the letters after their name, to be not removed from the middle class and that they feel comfortable. The problem today is a lot of the people who are very elite, they adopt these very radical ideologies. psychologically to square the circle that they do not feel comfortable with a working class. They either feel that the working class doesn't trust them or doesn't like them or is suspicious or they have contempt for the world. But out of that distance, they talk about, you know, we're going to do this for you and we're going to give you this program. And it's an artificiality. It really grounds, when I went to Stanford as a graduate student, The first year we lost the whole raisin crop and my grandfather was 85 and he would call me in my dorm and he would say, now Victor, there's some music there. I'm not saying there's something going wrong there, but every time I call you in the hall, you said it's on your hall. I hear people saying language that I cannot believe. I said, well, I can't either, but I'm here. And he said, now would you just... If you could just drive down on Friday night and take us to Eastern Star and the Masonic Temple, and then I've got all the tarps out for the raisins, and you and I can cover all the bins. And I said, well, I have my French PhD exam. And he said, is it that important? I said, actually, it is. But you know what? I will be there in three and a half hours if the truck doesn't break down. So I drove, and I would do that almost every other, and then it was schizophrenic because I never moved in that area. Even today, I've been at the Hoover Institution at Stanford for 21 years, but I live here, so I have a 400-mile-a-round trip. Speaker 3 (18:58) What I find so interesting, given the complexity of your curriculum vitae, is how often the intelligentsia will introduce you as a... You know, as a teacher up at Fresno State and a raisin farmer. And it's like, dude, the guy wrote 22 books. Speaker 2 (19:18) I know. I don't know if you ever remember that he was kind of an, I knew him, but it was, Tarkanian was our basketball player, coach, and he was very controversial. And Fresno State for a brief period enjoyed two things about him. They won a lot of. basketball games but they were always under censure by the NCAA for recruitment violations and I you know raisin I don't know why it was but they couldn't say that we had tree fruit you know they never said he's a grower of tree fruit but every time I went to a university campus it was here's Victor Hans and never said Cal State Fresno I thought I could get a little shred of dignity if they said Cal State but they always wanted to put the location of the particular branch in Fresno. And I remember being at Princeton giving a talk. And so this is Victor Hansen. These were by classicists. Victor Hansen, he's a raisin farmer from Fresno State. And I don't know much about it, but I remember Jerry Cartanian is there. And then even a guy at the Hoover would introduce me. One of my close friends was the director. We said, you know, we don't have affirmative action at Hoover, but we don't. hire people from Fresno very often. In fact, we've never done it. Cal State Fresno. So Victor is an affirmative. He was making a joke, but I've heard that my entire life, you know. Speaker 3 (20:44) Before I ask you to support ACE Scholarships with a generous donation, I want to make sure you understand that your donation won't cost you a penny. Thanks to the Education Freedom Tax Credit, you can now donate up to $1,700 to the best K-12 scholarship program in the country and take every dollar off your tax bill. This is not a deduction off your gross income. This is a 100 % dollar-for-dollar reduction. of whatever you owe the federal government at the end of the year. Now, why ACE scholarships? Because ACE scholarships were designed to rescue young kids from failing school systems all over the country by empowering parents with real school choice. So far, over 121,000 scholarships have been awarded over the last 26 years. I know these guys personally. I support them directly. And I've spoken at several of their annual fundraisers. Most recently, earlier this year in Denver, it was extraordinary. The event gave me a chance to meet a few of the kids who have benefited, some of whom have gone on to apply for a scholarship from my foundation and then entered the skilled trades. ACE operates with total transparency. absolute integrity, and a fierce dedication to reinvigorate the American workforce. And now you can help them reach a lot more kids, and it won't cost you a penny, thanks to the Education Freedom Tax Credit. Learn more at educationfreedom.org. That's educationfreedom.org. Speaker 2 (22:21) The funniest story, and I'll end with this, I was a professor in 2002. Speaker 2 (22:28) John Racin was a wonderful guy, called me up and said, we'd like you to come to the Hoover Institution. So I went up there, and one of the assistant directors, who was actually from Ohio State, he tells me about the Hoover. And he has no idea that I was a graduate student at Stanford for four years. He has no idea that my mother got a B.A. and a J.D. at Stanford in 1944. She was one of the first women in the law school. She had no idea that my aunt, my cousins, all went to Stanford and didn't really make a big thing about it. So he says, you know, you're in the big leagues now, Victor. I had written 15 books, and it's going to be a very different environment from you. And I said, well, where did you go to school? It doesn't matter, but you're in the big leagues, and you're going to have to get reacquainted. It's going to be very stressful. And I said, you're the one that's stressed. I'm not stressed at all.