Victor Davis Hanson: Our Postmodern Angst

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is The Savior Generals, published this spring by Bloomsbury Books.

In the globally connected and affluent world of the 21st century, we thankfully have evolved a long way from the elemental poverty, hunger, and ethnic, religious, and racial hatred that were mostly the norm of the world until the last century.

Yet who would know of such progress — and the great sacrifices made to achieve it — from the howls of our postmodern oppressed? In fact, the better life has become, the more victimized modern affluent Westerners seem to act.

Over ten women have come forward to charge Bob Filner, the current mayor of San Diego, with harassment — the liberal bookend to the political return in New York of former representative Anthony “Carlos Danger” Weiner and former governor Eliot “Client #9” Spitzer. Filner did not really deny that he has groped, grabbed, kissed, or verbally harassed lots of females; instead, he checked himself into some sort of sexual-therapy program. In the old days, Filner would have resigned in shame — suffering the stigma accorded a pervert, and terrified that an angry boyfriend or husband might surface to settle up with fisticuffs....