Back in the day, conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss adapted the esoteric/exoteric distinction to politics. He argued that, down the ages, if you wished to challenge The Narrative you needed to do it in an indirect, esoteric way that didn't grab the unwelcome attention of the powerful, but only the people whose minds were tuned to receive your message.

So here was I, reading a piece by Victor Davis Hanson for Imprimis in which he discusses the blind violence of the various empires down the ages -- all in the best interest of their victims, of course. Famously, the Athenians sent a naval force to the island of Melos and told the Melians:

You’re either with us or against us… and if you are against us we will destroy you.

So the Athenians killed all the male Melians and enslaved all the women and children. Because.

Julius Caesar went into Gaul and killed a million people and enslaved another million, according to Hanson.

And yet in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and in later Roman literature, we read that Rome brought civilization to Gaul.

And here I thought all along that Asterix, Obelix, and Getafix had Julius Caesar and the Romans on the run.

But, glorious as empires are, the benefits seldom match the costs.

The costs of control seem to outweigh the benefits, even though -- human nature being what it is -- the imperialists tend to be oblivious to the expenses, perhaps because of the power and grandeur that come with empire.

Today we have two ambitious empires, writes Hanson: China and Klaus Schwab's globalist WEF for the Davos set. Hanson compares the Davos crowd to Alexander the Great, who killed a couple million in his wars. But it was all for our benefit.

Alexander was an effective propagandist, as is the Davos crowd with their argument that the totalitarian rule they want to impose is for our benefit and the larger brotherhood of man.

I wonder if Victor Davis Hanson is indirectly telling us -- those of us that can interpret his esoteric narrative -- that the glorious empires of history, from the Roman to the British to the American, aren't all they are cracked up to be, especially after the departure of the imperial founder, the Caesar or the Alexander. He closes with a reference to Rudyard Kipling's "Recessional," a poem written in celebration of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee:

“Recessional” is a poem of lamentation in which Kipling, known to be a great supporter of the British Empire, seems to be warning that it is destined to fail. Maybe he had been studying history.

Do you think that Victor Davis Hanson is gently telling us that the Great American Empire is reaching its sell-by date, and that the American Empire is no longer in its glorious expansion years, featuring tough guy Teddy Roosevelt, noble college president Woodrow Wilson, and jolly old Hudson Valley squire Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and that if we continue to act imperial in the age of Obama and Biden -- as we fight the imperial wars of climate and systemic racism -- we are going to encounter the most awful sorrows, as our leaders blunder into disaster after disaster?

I think Hanson has made it pretty clear that we don't have any Caesar-grade imperators here in the U.S. right now. But whatabout overseas? I think we can agree that Vladimir Putin is not quite in the major leagues.

But whatabout President Xi? Does he have the chops to be a world-class imperial conqueror? Would he even want to conquer an empire? I wonder. China, as I have understood it, already thinks it is the center of the world, and doesn't even need to defend the border that much, because all invaders of China have ended up being sinicized and softened up by Empresses in the Palace. The Belt and Road Initiative, experts agree, is a resumption of the old tribute system that operated when the Middle Kingdom was the center of the world.

Of course, as we all know, China was tragically infected with a lethal European intellectual virus about a century ago. The most notable victim of this virus was a certain Mao Zedong, son of a wealthy farmer. It is still not certain whether this pandemic was deliberately created by European imperialist intelligence agencies; more research is needed. But Mao, the unfortunate victim of western intellectual infection, never managed a full recovery from the dread disease now known to intellectual pandemic experts as Marxism. Experts agree that after surviving his Marxist infection Mao caused the death of at least 50 million Chinese, and very likely more.

So it is possible that President Xi may stage a world conquest in revenge over the Marxist plague that so devastated China.

Or maybe not.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Chuck Grimmett