Victor Davis Hanson lost his war

Victor Davis Hanson, or "VDH" as he's known, is a longtime contributor, directly or not, to the Instapundit / pjMedia side of "conservatism". Bret Devereaux is, over the past weeks, taking him down. And taking some of his fellow neocons like Kagan with him although I am not entirely against Kagan, pace Vox Day.

Devereaux claims to keep politics out of his takedown - to which I call shens. What I can report is that VDH is at heart a Jeffersonian: a believer in the pastoral Small Farmer. Of course Jefferson himself was hardly a small farmer; he was a Virginian aristocrat. Jefferson's ideal wasn't his life... and that ideal didn't ever really exist.

Classical Greece didn't scale to Virginia anyhow. What Greeks had instead was what Soviets call the kulak. Greece had enough of these to support forces of kitted-infantrymen, bearers of ὅπλον. The polis (city-state) guaranteed to the landowners they'd not be subjected to populism - they'd call it "democracy" - as long as they agreed to use their resources to defend the politic interest. This wasn't so different to how it went with the Franks and their chivalry.

VDH based his military-history analysis on a British strain which goes back, as does so much interwar Brittery, to the nineteenth-century Prussians. And Devereaux gives to the Prussians their due: they studied the craft, they mastered the craft (for nineteenth-century tech), and as historians they used the available evidence as best they could. But 400 BC wasn't 1872 AD. (1914 AD wouldn't be 1872 either BUT ANYWAY.)

Devereaux accepts that the Shield Wall existed in antiquity. The Romans designed their shields for "Tortoise" closed-formation; we all saw the Vikings do the same in Last Kingdom. The hoplites, plural hoplitai, also could form shield-wall. But that was more a thing in the grind-out battles of the 300s BC, and beyond. To be a hoplite was mostly just to be a well-kitted infantryman and those fought in whatever formation the battle required.

Although Frankish-style noble ideals existed in Greece, especially in the Homeric era; the late-Frankish - the properly French - Tournament, or Xōchiyāōyōtl, is not translatable into classical Greek. This system was of planned near-mock battles, where the losers were captured, maybe ransomed. This did not exist in classical Greece.

In place of The Western Way of War, Devereaux would revive Snodgrass.