S8 Ep586: 1. Author: Victor Davis Hanson. Title: *The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America*. Hanson explores the classical importance of the middle class as the bedrock of a stable republic, drawing
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2026
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
1. Author: Victor Davis Hanson. Title: *The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America*. Hanson explores the classical importance of the middle class as the bedrock of a stable republic, drawing from Aristotle's view of self-reliant citizens. He argues that the historical strength of the American middle class—rooted in property ownership and autonomy—is being undermined by a "hollowing out" into two classes: the fabulously wealthy and a dependent "peasant" class. Hanson cites the Obama administration's figures "Pajama Boy" and "Julia" as symbols of a new state dependency that replaces Jeffersonian independence. This shift is particularly visible in California, where high taxes and regulations drive out the middle class. (1)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Batchelor. |
| 0:09.5 | The Dying Citizen, a book by Victor Davis Hansen of the Hoover Institution, |
| 0:14.9 | How Progressive elites, Tribalism, and Globalization, Destoring the Idea of America. |
| 0:21.0 | We begin with the middle class. |
| 0:23.2 | We begin, in fact, with Aristotle acknowledging the power of the middle class. |
| 0:27.7 | Victor does me the favor of translating from the Greek. |
| 0:30.3 | He's a classical scholar. |
| 0:32.4 | Great then is the good fortune of a state in which the citizens have a moderate and sufficient property. |
| 0:39.3 | Victor, congratulations. Good evening. We have a great deal of territory to cover, |
| 0:44.3 | but we begin with the praise of the middle class in classical Greece, in classical Rome, |
| 0:50.3 | and through the empires ever since. Why? Why is the middle class important? Good |
| 0:55.0 | evening to you, Victor. Good evening, John. For a couple of reasons. One, of course, is that before |
| 1:01.9 | the industrial revolution, anywhere from 80 to 90 percent of the population was agrarian and made |
| 1:08.9 | their living by producing food. And in the ancient idea, there was something about being autonomous, self-reliant, owning |
| 1:16.2 | your own property, and more importantly, combining muscles with mind. |
| 1:21.9 | And so that you would not be what they call verified as an intellectual or as a sophist and yet you wouldn't be a physical |
| 1:31.8 | brute so that was a perfect combination but then the second argument for the chauvinism in the |
| 1:37.7 | middle class and why government should be based on the middle class as the largest of the three |
| 1:44.0 | classes was in comparison to the other two. |
| 1:48.0 | And the classical complaint against the poor was that they don't have the means for whatever reason. |
| 1:54.0 | And the classics, in classics people were very empirical. |
| 1:58.0 | They were not romantic, but they were not stereotypical either. |
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