This is a

is CBS I on the world. Here's John Bachelor

The Dying Citizen, a book by Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution,

how progressive elites, tribalism, and globalization

destroying the idea of America,

we begin with the middle class. We begin in fact with Aristotle

acknowledging the power of the middle class. Victor does me the favor of

translating from the Greek. He's a classical scholar. Great then is the good fortune of a state in which the citizens

have a moderate and sufficient property. Victor, congratulations, good evening, we have a great deal of

territory to cover but we begin with

the praise of the middle class in classical Greece in classical Rome and through the

empires ever since.

Why is the middle class important?

Good evening to you Victor.

Good evening, John.

For a couple of reasons, one of course is that before the Industrial Revolution anywhere from 80 to 90 percent of the population was agrarian and made their living by producing food and in the ancient idea there was something about being autonomous self-reliant

owning your own property and more importantly combining muscles with mind and so

that you would not be what they call verified as an

intellectual or as a softist and yet you wouldn't be a physical group so that was a perfect combination but then the second argument for the

shavanism in the middle class and why government should be based on the middle class as the largest of the three classes was in comparison to the other two.

And the classical complaint against the poor was that they don't have the means for whatever reason and the classics in

classics people were very empirical they were not romantic but they were not

...