Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. Sami Winc: So Victor, I guess the first question maybe we could discuss is how have we made it in 250 years, this republic, a rare thing historically that a republic could go for so long?   Victor Davis Hanson: Well, the secondary reasons are—we had not the primary, but I’ll get over very quickly review the secondary. We had a huge North American continent.  It was richly endowed with natural resources, farmland, etc. We didn’t fragment into European warring states, but we were the size of Europe, but we were one complete nation thanks to people like James K. Polk and [Thomas] Jefferson and other people who saw that we needed to have the whole continent or end up like Europe.  Number two, we had two oceans, so we were protected from what was going on in Asia and Europe. But that is secondary to the Constitution. So we took the Spartan, Cretan and then Roman idea of mixed constitution—a legislative, executive and judicial branch. But unlike some of the mixed constitutions, we put a number of checks and balances in.  So the whole point of it was to slow down radical changes through the president’s power to veto legislation, the Congress’s power to impeach him, the president’s power to pick judicial appointments, the Congress not to approve them, and the judiciary to strike down laws as unconstitutional. And they can impeach—the legislative body can impeach judges. The president cannot appoint people he thinks would be bad judges. There’s—it’s all intricate checks and balances.  Number two is we were the only country to really have a Bill of Rights, so there were certain issues in other countries that have never been up for—I mean, they’re nuances, and everybody reinterprets them, but they’re not up for discussion as far as eliminating them.   The Bill of Rights—the ability not to have your house searched and seized, the right to bear arms, the right not to have to testify against yourself, the right of habeas corpus—that’s all documented.  And then with the amendment system, we have further rights. The other things are more intangible, but that revolution was never a French Revolution.   Sami Winc: One moment, though, just to clarify for the audience, that the Bill of Rights for the United States is the first 10 amendments, and then they flow after that.  Victor Davis Hanson: There are 17 other ones that followed, and they’re very hard to pass. You need a two-thirds vote of Congress, and then you need three-quarters of the state legislatures. So unless it’s something like the 18-year-old vote or women’s suffrage or repealing prohibition, it’s very hard to do—to get an amendment.  Sami Winc: And you were saying that it’s not like the French Revolution either.   Victor Davis Hanson: No, it’s not like the French Revolution because it was limited. In other words, the colonists were not objecting to British free market capitalism. They were not objecting to the language. They were not objecting to the role of religion.  They were not rejecting—claiming that they wanted the poor to take over from the rich. They were not angry at both the British colonialists and the large landowners like Washington and Jefferson.   So it was basically a one-dimensional political revolution, and it said we want autonomy and to be self-governed.  We do not want to be a colony of Britain and have no say in taxation or representation, et cetera, et cetera. That was a much easier revolution.   But what I’m saying is it kept intact the strengths of the British system, the British Enlightenment. And so when we became a nation, there was Christianity, there was Anglicanism—there was all these religions.  They were all tolerated. Nobody had gone out in the countryside and lynched nuns or beheaded priests as had happened in the French Revolution. There was no year zero. There was no renaming the months, the days. There was no god called Ratio that everybody bowed down to.  There was nothing like—I mean, Thomas Paine was the most radical of the founders, but he was nothing like the Robespierre brothers.  He wasn’t even like [Georges] Danton. He was a much more reasonable person in comparison. So that was a big step—that we kept the traditions of the Anglosphere, except political.  And then there were cultural things that were embedded from the beginning. One of them was that there was no peasantry.  There was no serfdom. Those were European ideas. So Jefferson especially said the country was based on the nuclear family and the independent agrarian—the farm—and that person was self-sustained.   He was autonomous, self-supporting. He could feed his own family from his farm. He could control his own destiny, and these were the ideal citizens then to be entrusted with voting and making their own laws and directing their own affairs.  So it was a republic of virtue, and that stayed through—that in the United States, nobody—I’m not Sir Hanson. You’re not Lady Sami. And we have no class distinctions formally. We have a fluidity of classes. Wealthy people have children that are bad seeds, or they don’t want money, and they get poor. Poor people have children, and they become millionaires.  So there is fluidity, but we are not based on class. We’re not based on race. We champion the middle class, but we don’t institutionalize it. Nobody asks in America, “Where was your father born? How many acres does your grandfather have? What was your parents’ education?” Maybe the East Coast or West Coast elites do, but that’s not American tradition.  And then finally, we’re a nation of emulation, not envy. So we’re not like the British. I’ve said that before in this broadcast. It was the old maxim that if you go to Britain and somebody sees a Bentley, they want to kick it in.  And they come to America, they want to know how much a Cadillac—or maybe now it would be a BMW or something—costs and how you finance it.  And I can remember, when I was a young person, we had no money. We lived in a 1,100-square-foot home. My mom stayed home with us. My dad was a high school teacher initially, and then a junior college teacher, but he was a coach, and he tried to farm on the side.  But we would get in cars when we went to Disneyland or we went up to San Francisco, and my mom insisted we drive through wealthy neighborhoods and not say, “Oh my gosh, look at that. Look at how much money the Gettys have.”  She would say, “Oh wow, I love those cypress trees, the way they’ve done that. That’s a good idea. When we get home, let’s plant some. Or then she would say, I love those colors—that gray and white. I like that match.”  Or she’d say, “Wow, some of those Victorians are tacky. They’re overdone with that gingerbread cut. I don’t want that.” In other words, that was a very common thing.  That’s why the Wall Street Journal has one of its most popular features, Mansions USA, because people love to go in there and look at these beautiful lakes and tennis courts and gables. But then they look at the price—Montecito, 30 million.  It’s not that they can ever buy it, but they get little ideas. So say that they’re in Fresno with a 1,500- or 1,600-square-foot tract house, and then they go there and they look at these places and see how they park their car there. Maybe I can make a little version of it.  So in Europe, I don’t think that would be the reaction. That would be the aristocracy, and you’d say that we should burn those houses down.   And I’m kind of worried because that is sort of the attitude of Los Angeles to Pacific Palisades—not that this was a great asset to have these beautiful homes, but, “Oh, they lost their home. Too bad. Let’s not rebuild them.”  When we get to be an envious country, we won’t succeed.   And by the way, when we used to nation-build, or any country used to nation-build, they never said to Iraq or Afghanistan or South Korea or Vietnam or Europe itself after World War II, “We’ve got a really good system for you. It’s called a Senate, a lower house, a Supreme Court, a president and a Bill of Rights, and here’s how you do it with a two-party system.”  No. They have a parliamentary system because it’s much easier.  Ours is a very complicated system. It’s very hard to reproduce. It’s designed on one principle: people are no blank good.  And I think many of the founders said if we were angels, we wouldn’t need a constitution. But it assumes that unlike the French Revolution, Rousseau—you know, we’re all born into chains—that we’re not.  We’re all born evil, bad, fallen—the Christian notion—and we need to be redeemed. We need to curb our appetites and our excesses, and one of the things we have to curb is the desire to power and to tyrannize others.  So we’re going to make a constitution where you cannot have a dictator. And they can say all they want about Trump. The closest we’ve ever had was FDR. He had four terms, but he did things that are just unthinkable.  You know, go to The New York Times and say, “If you write another bad op-ed about me, I’m going to pass antitrust legislation or inheritance taxes that’ll ruin your family.”  So it’s a wonderful system, but it’s very intricate and complex, and it requires an educated populace, and we don’t seem to have that to the degree sufficient anymore.  So I’m kind of worried. That’s how we survived for 250 years. We publish a variety of perspectives. 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