Victor Davis Hanson has written 16 books, mostly on classical and modern warfare. His opinions are worth noting.

But that essay wasn't about classical and modern warfare, was it? Forgive me for laughing, but it's funny to see you attempt argument-by-authority after you've sworn up and down that you're not an authoritarian conservative.

Pointing out your willingness to embrace propaganda and call it "scholarship" is far from superficial; it's ground zero of the sort of things I'm talking about. Denying the subjectivity of politics creates a fertile ground for demagogues to disseminate propaganda and plant seeds of opinion disguised as "facts". It encourages the gullible to treat politics as another form of religion, with a panoply of myth put forth as objective truth. Belief in objective political reality belongs in the same category as Creationism.

I've read lots of Victor Davis Hanson. The Merc regularly gives him a half page in the editorial section...right next to the letters from RightWingers denouncing the bland and inoffensive, downright jellyfish-spined, Mercury-News for its "Liberal bias". He writes propaganda. Period. I've never read anything by VDH that didn't have a pronounced and painfully obvious spin to the Right.

The only way to find whatever objective truth is to be found in politics is to learn to distinguish propaganda and to factor it out of the equation. It's equally important to remember that everybody in politics has an agenda, and the agenda is often not to be found in the superficial words.

Which means that I'm hardly being superficial to dig beneath the surface to uncover what propagandists like VDH really intend to accomplish if they succeed in persuading people to their way of thinking. What would Victor Davis Hanson's Conservative utopia look like? It's rather important to understand the kind of world we'd get if we buy into a particular belief system. How else can I responsibly discharge my duty as a citizen of a democracy?

That's the bottom line: To be blinded by partisanship is to fail to discharge one's duty as a citizen to make the best judgments possible. The Founders called upon us to be the nation's think tank, it's brain trust; and we fail in our duty when we merely sing in the choir and parrot the words and thoughts of others.