The State of the Union | Victor Davis Hanson

but my point is if you tell middle-class people you're not going to be able to afford to fill up your truck at seven dollars for diesel fuel or you're not going to turn on your air conditioning because it's a sin and we're going to make it 30 kilowatt and you're going to be on that forklift at 18 and you're going to pay taxes for this guy with a gender studies major at stanford on his loan forgiveness you're playing with fire professor victor davis hanson is no stranger to this series of conversations he's the martin and early anderson senior fellow in residence in classics and military history at the hoover institution at stanford university he has many prestigious academic posts he's a historian of both ancient and modern history he has a particular ability and background in the history of warfare he has his own podcast the victor davis hanson show where he speaks at length about global and american affairs and cultural issues with a vitality and a freshness and a knowledge base that is really impressive his latest book is the dying citizen how progressive elites tribalism and globalization are destroying the idea of america victor thanks so much for joining us particularly given that you're still recovering from covet well all bad things come to an end i hope we're all i think uh right around the world very interested in what might happen in the upcoming mid terms we've watched the current team under biden doing very badly in the polls and the polls seem to be indicating that there was going to be a major red wave yes and that the republicans would take the house and the senate again now people are saying the polls are faltering the biden administration is recovering despite all of the challenges that seem to be in front of it um you've had roe versus wade how might that impact at all you've had the raid on mar-a-lago the uh on president trump's home by the fbi how are you reading all of this because it's so important for america and indeed the world yeah i think there's two issues and one is is there are the republicans really stumbling so for example today a poll came out and joe biden has dropped and the reuters which ipsy's pole which is considered center left pole he's gone from 41 back down to 38. and so there's this kind of media because of the passage of his so-called inflation fighting bill and the student debt there's not been polling on those issues but they feel that's momentum so it's been gender up in the media but when you actually look at biden's polls they've gone down this week and when you look at key races that they felt were indicators of republican stupidity by nominating people who had no political experience jd vance in ohio he's up in some polls blake masters in arizona he's within one or two points in some polls uh herschel walker that everybody thought would was a disaster he's actually ahead of warner so i i don't think i think it's uh not quite the landslide that they thought but it's going to be a big win the other issue is what is the democratic strategy that gives them this confidence and if you look at the political landscape no one is talking about an open border and three million people crossing joe biden blew up immigration law it doesn't exist in america on the southern border nobody's talking about gasoline prices because and their way of thinking if they've gone up three dollars and they went down 50 cents that's a cut but they're still much higher and people know that inflation went from nine point two and now it's 8.5 but 8.5 is extraordinary the fed is going to tighten up people are still this is the anniversary week last week was of the afghanistan debacle so they don't want to talk about those issues so what are they doing so we had the january 6 commission of which there was no republican on the committee who did not vote to impeach donald trump or who had a political future the two people on it have no political future at least in the congress and they voted impeached trump and that psycho drama then led into the raid on more logo we've never had a president's home rated in the history of the country and we've had a series of narratives each one has replaced the other one when it ran out of uh credit credit credit graduality and so what i'm getting at is they don't want to run on the record the problem is with the republicans that they are reactive and so if they were to follow the 1994 newt gingrich paradigm in which donald trump or whoever is the nominative head of the party they would say this is what we're going to do in the first hundred days should we take the house and the senate this is what we're going to do on energy here's how we're going to fight inflation here's what we're going to restore to deterrent foreign policy we're going to be very skeptic we're going to let the states divide decide about abortion it's not going to be a federal dictate and if they would have the candidates then run on those national issues rather than well we did we're not insurrectionist you're defaming us we're not fascists you shouldn't have rated this is this terrible so they're reacting to news cycles of these melodramas that are concocted and it's taken a lot of momentum at least out of them whether i don't think it'll it'll change but at some point some adult in the republican party is going to have to say do your worst and we're going to do our best we're going to have a national agenda and it's going to be the antithesis of this disastrous two years and we're all going to be on the same page and this is what we're going to run on and i think they'll be okay i would have thought politics 101 is to set out a vision you've got to be able to say to people we think x y and z are real problems and here's how we're going to resolve them otherwise you're defined yeah by your political opponents i think at some point maybe i'm being a little extraneous there's a waterloo moment with donald trump in the republican party and that is i think people who are running for office are going to tell him the 2020 election is history and to the degree that there is a legitimate criticism about the outcome it was probably lost in march and april when the voting laws were changed and that was not addressed by the republican and right now we need to look at the future and each moment that you go back there you play into the fake narrative of an insurrection and fascism and that's what they want you to do and so donald trump is going to have to decide which is more important to him to be the leader of the republican party and to look ahead and not to do what he did in 2020 when he fixated on the election he let the georgia races the two senate races sort of you know he basically told his supporters that the vote won't be valid and then the independency seemed to be distracted so they elected two neo-socialists in georgia of all places and so that should have been a warning and so he's going to have to get that message to barnstorm the country and help these candidates and not talk about what happened and if he doesn't unfortunately for him there's an array of very talented people unlike the democratic party there's a a successful governor ron desantis in florida there's tom cotton a good senator there's mike pompeo there's nikki haley there's marco rubio there's all this talent and they're waiting for an opening and if he doesn't take the responsibility to to run on the agenda and to make sure that other people other than himself win this time around i think he's going to be in real trouble it does raise the question does it not of as an outsider i want to be careful about sounding critical about a major american figure because i'm not an american except that this is so important for the world donald trump runs the risk i think of a perception that it's what happens to him is more important than what happens to the country yeah because this is a crisis moment globally we're at a civilizational moment and what happens in america is unbelievably important it is as to whether or not we go under so how does he square that circle yeah there's only one solution to the dilemma that you posed and that is he's got two choices he can be a tragic hero and say that i had some personality excesses that people called me crass and crew but i got this agenda we were successful and now i paved the way for a new republican party but the very sturman drang of that process made me unelectable or maybe not going to be the right and i'm going to write off in the sunset and rest on my laurel or if he wants to say current then he's got to shift attention from himself to the agenda i know that he has a great confidence in himself but he can say that i gave you this agenda and everybody seems to agree that we have to restore the industrial capacity of the united states we've got to be tough on china we've got to have a border that's secure we have to have a different foreign policy we have to have responsible monetary policy we've got to pump oil and gas and people were not talking about it like i was and now we're all on the same page so as long as people agree with this agenda that i have established the personalities myself included are not so important and i think that would be wise for him to do that he'd ironically he would get more credit if he would do that but if he takes the third alternative and that's what you hinted at and he keeps dwelling on the injustices that were done to him he's kind of like a sophocline ajax where the entire play is about all the wrongs that people did to ajax all of which were legitimate greatest critics everything he says has legitimate grounds but it doesn't matter now the matter is the future of the united states and the world yeah and so it really is that big isn't it the problem is the ir he's putting himself into a paradox where the effort to get justice even if he were to achieve it would be such a distraction and such controversy that his agenda would be overshadowed and there's people all over the united states that need that agenda and it would be fascinating to see that agenda voiced by a lot of legitimate candidates that he would run against and debate against because it would put the say for example the left and the never trumpers in a very strange position because they wouldn't fixate on donald trump alone yeah and what would the never trumpers say they say we've been conservatives all our life but the fingerprints of donald trump on the agenda made it unpalatable but now he's not there this candidate has these positions that we've sort of supported all our life and i would like to see what they're saying my suspicion is they've gone left and that would put them in a dilemma because they wouldn't want to say tom cotton ron desantis mike pompeo pre-trump these are the people that i would want i don't think they would want them now so there's all these questions we want answered and i think the left is there are people on the left that are that are warning the left now and they're saying in these quasi-illegal things and blatantly illegal and you saw sam harris the left-wing intellectual said you know what it was the laptop was all fake uh we we knew that the the objections that it was russian disinformation were fake it was an authentic laptop but it didn't matter that the fbi and the dnc and the left colluded with social media because there are ends of getting rid of donald trump were morally justifiable these means and so they are fixated on donald trump and yet there are people on the left in the democratic party they'll say be careful because in your pursuit of destroying donald trump's viability you're you're going to empower other people that might be more effective emissaries of this agenda see um let me test the theory as i see it we're at a great moment of sort of a civilizational moment nothing less frankly in the west you've got a situation where we're either going to renew ourselves or we're going to have to find a very different way of running ourselves and to me i'd have to say if it's a sort of cross between cultural marxism and post-modernism that seems to be on offer i'm not sure how that's going to go or frankly we're going to go into decline now in those circumstances i think what all those good people in i think this is true in australia anyway i think it probably is in america who have disengaged from politics because they're so disillusioned with it all they're looking for someone to lead the old line you know where's the churchill so leadership becomes incredibly important in this context and i think i i'm asking do you see it as seriously as i do or am i overplaying it and b i think i'm saying it looks to me as an outsider as though the current president couldn't run again if you look beyond the midterms and the people behind him are not really very appealing to the american people whereas the republicans you've hinted at it have actually got some fairly impressive people yeah they could be two points and the easier one very quickly is i think a lot of people would translate your worries into the nuts and bolts of or the details would be that donald trump has a unique ability to incite the left and therefore there will be billions of dollars and psychodramas and melodramas that otherwise wouldn't exist with a republican candidate that would be more easy to focus on the issues the second when you use the word civilizational i take that as transnational that meaning yes western civilization in general but the english-speaking peoples maybe in particular yes we're saying there and what you're saying is that we're at a divide and there's half of the western world is saying we believe in consensual government small government national defense self-sufficiency and energy and production traditional values that have worked and we're not we don't have to be perfect to be good and we have mechanisms within our constitutional systems that will adopt for changes that are necessary we're not fixated on race we're ecumenical we want people not by we don't care about the color of their skin whether we don't care we just want them to be on the same page as far as our values go and we welcome legal measured merocratic immigration that group of people is about half now and there's another and the other half is saying the united states in particular but the west in general is flawed at its birth it's got these elemental sins it'll never recover and borders are an artifact of the past it's a racist sexist uh xenophobic culture inherently we've got to destroy it there's other paradigms we see around the world of socialism or whatever and we're at a point now where the latter the latter group the critical group the anti-western group controls the corporate boardroom they control i think a lot of big tech silicon valley the traditional media social media professional sports hollywood entertainment all of the foundations that fund all of these various sorrows projects uh da's that don't believe in traditional crime and punishment deterrence and incarceration indictment and so the odds uh are with the left they have the money in this new globalized economy they have the connections they have the influence they have the reach so to speak all we have is the people the middle class and so if you put it that way then personalities are not so important the traditionalists are saying we appreciate what donald trump did he was he was a general in in the army but we we're not about a general we want gen all generals to appear and the person who's going to be the most effective is going to get our allegiance and be and how do we define effective it means do not give the left and inroad because you have no margin of error so every time you talk about something that they want you to talk about or every time you tweet something that they can pass off as being crude they win we don't we at this late date given the resources of the opposition we have no we have no margin no laxity we have to be serious 24 7. and i think that's what the issue is it's a little it's getting each four year cycle in the country it's getting harder and harder for traditionalists and conservatives to maintain the civilization and i think that's where we are now and it's up to donald trump to decide whether he wants to again to lead the party but if he were to lead the party there can't be any of you know you can't say anthony falci throws a ball like a girl that's one day out of the news cycle you lose you can't say that liz cheney is an idiot and a corrupt and all of that's one day half a day out of the you can't do you're not talking about closing anwar down or you're not talking about uh canceling the keystone pipeline these are existing are telling the our closest allies in the mediterranean the israelis the cypriots the greeks were against east med pipeline as biden did so there's really issues that are important and you can't you can't waste one second it's it's five minutes to midnight in western civilization i think my point and i i take all of that on and what you tell us is grave and i think needs to be that's why i wanted to come and hear you say it in that way or anticipated you probably would i think it's incredibly important that we'd be utterly realistic about what we're facing but can i just tease out for a moment you say it's in the balance pretty much evenly divided isn't that the case then that that makes it more important than ever that that the traditionalists if i can put it that way are led by somebody who's not wildly offensive to the other side that they won't flush out quite as much anger quite as much division and that at the same time we'll re-engage a lot of the good people who are just so despair you've outlined the dichotomy that is now the subtext of all the republican discussions about 2024. yeah and one question has been resolved we're not going to go back to we're going to slice social security and right off the the industrial heartland they should have coded their losers uh laissez faire creative destruction all that stuff i don't think is it viable and we're you know that we're gonna have an open border because we need cheap labor for corporate america that's so the trump agenda within reason is sort of the orthodoxy now then the question is well can you have trumpism without trump i guess he would say well can you have sunlight without the sun but the point is uh if you had can you have what republicans are saying under their breath i'll be candid with you is we want somebody that has the trump fire in the belly that will not be a marcus of quinsbury gentlemen like john mccain or mitt romney and be walked over but and hands it back in kind to the left but does so wisely rather than emotionally and donald trump at times was too emotional and he gave his enemies advantages that he didn't intend to but they turned out to be fatal almost to our cause not just his so what they're looking now is they're saying here's ron desantis harvard graduate he can't be he's got the what the left considers a serious education he's been in iraq under wartime conditions he's run a state here's tom cotton same thing basically and here is mike pompeo same thing they have these sterling credentials they understand the left very seriously they seem to have the fire in the belly and we're going to see and if they can emerge and avoid and show the same passion how would that be defined i suppose it would be nobody's asking them to get 50 000 people a rally but could they get 10 or 20 or have that natural appeal if they can do that then they're going to win and i i think but if they don't do that then people are going to say i'll be candid again with you and i'm talking about midstream republicans they're saying well trump's an sob but he's rso being all we got but if if he's not all we got and somebody has the same passion and charm and charisma and combativeness and yet it uses it much more wisely and adroitly for purposes other than themselves i think they're going to resonate and i think that's what the left is terrified if you notice they're going after ron desantis almost as if he's donald trump yeah they're trying to destroy him yeah and there's no mercy there's no common decency there's no let's have a debate no it's we want to cancel you we we we're going to march there's no debate because the well the left has conceded that the agenda that they embrace is ideological and there's no compromise and they don't care whether people pete butterjig said that he said these prices are hard and they're difficult for you but they're valuable because they're going to make fossil fuels unaffordable and therefore we'll be forced to go to and we'll see and we know where that ends up if you look at germany that's where they want us to go they don't care about the misery that will entail thousands millions of american families if you have ten dollars a gallon gas that's what they want well has this happened how have the democrats the party of the left come to the point where the little people and the vulnerable don't matter two things happen in the globalized world we woke up in the 21st century and those markets that had been 330 million were eight billion seven eight billion there were particular people on the coast one looking at the eu one looking at asia who had skills that were transferable in a global sense insurance capital investment law academia media and they had these huge markets and the level of money was staggering yeah and it was all within an intellectual and culturally left veneer this is where stanford is this is where caltech usc harvard yale they're on the coast and we created this elite left-wing culture and they turned on their own base they said you know what the deplorables the clingers the irredeemables the chumps i'm just using their language they didn't code they missed out on it and we don't need these people anymore and then the second attitude they substituted race for class so they said to themselves if you are not white and this was barack obama's contribution it's no longer a 90 10 88 12 dichotomy black white the historical problem of slavery and the discrimination the racism and now it's everybody who's not white it's 30 percent it's the wealthy punjabi immigrant that just arrived it's a multi-millionaire um person from hong kong who came it is the spanish aristocrat who's a professor of literature they all have grievances and we're going to say that no matter how wealthy they are no matter how accomplished they're victims and that's the new dichotomy it's not poor rich and we're going to project uh a racism onto the the middle white classes that are failing and it was really a contempt for them they almost said they lack our culture and values and they lack the romance of the of the of the poor but they're basically now the left is the party of the very wealthy the by coastal elite and the very poor that are subsidized if you actually look at subsidies what the broad the left is brought in if you're a middle-class person your income has been stagnant for 12 or 14 years why entitlements have have grown so the the actual income of a family working with two or three children is not much different than somebody who's subsidized in among the poor and that that's what the democrats accomplished they have a instinctual dislike the new democrats dislike i would even say a venom toward the middle class yeah the white working class they cannot stand it and they will turn on the hispanic white working class if they feel they're no longer they don't have fealty to them at 30 70 to 30 if it should be i don't think it will happen but people are saying it could be 50 50 in the next election in terms of the latino vote i think you'll see the borders close very quickly can i put a proposition to yeah one way of looking at this is a lot of these new elites uh uh despise traditional christian faith but in a way it's strangely religious you could look at the transition there was a time when there was a sort of a christian sort of predominance that said you know um human beings are a high point in the creation and they matter and they ought to go forth and make the work world work for them perhaps sometimes they abused it other times they stewarded it well then there was pantheism we're just part of nature now man is the problem man is the bad guy the evil that's destroying gaia the goddess earth and people are the problem so you've almost got this view emerging in the elites that it's sort of the old lifeboat ethics thing there's too many of us we're destroying the planet um and the real prospect that we'll decide that a whole lot of people don't matter i mean this is pretty ugly stuff well it's a result again i don't want to stress it too much but it's partly a result that if you turn for all the problems the world is having the western world if you look at the oppertunces the western citizen has if we define it by access to cars cell phones instant communications worldwide video games square feet that they have for their house air conditioning they're wealthier than an aristocrat 70 years ago yeah that wealth we've never seen this uh level of affluence and leisure and that allows people to think of things who are very very wealthy they have no problem satisfying their appetites they can go across the world in their gulf stream in that but then they take on these boutique issues well what would happen if and this and that and they lose contact with reality where the middle class are worried am i going to be able to drive my truck to work do i have enough food for the week can i keep the house warm but our elite have com and so they have these theoretical ideological agendas and it's also predicated on sort of a soviet idea that for us to be true revolutionaries we have to be exempt from the consequences of our ideology so if i'm a celebrity i i need to i'm not if i'm john kerry i need a private jet that's the only way i can stop global warming if i want to have teachers unions and every i have to have my kid in a private school if i want to have 30 cents a kilowatt hour power i've got to live on montecito where it's 70 degrees year-round if i have to say to people we're going to be inundated pretty soon because of global warming and our coastal properties will be underwater if i'm barack obama i still get to have martha's vineyard estate and a new place in hawaii so this is kind of a versaille wealthy left group that play act like marie antoinette they dress up in peasant garb because they can and they're wealthy and they're privileged and so that that explains a lot of what's happened and the the other the other idea is that i don't want to be two but we're creating the cloud the davos class the great reset group they're basically agnostics and atheists and they have lost any idea that the degree to which you act as a human in this lifetime affects your soul and it's what socrates said that songs are everywhere but they come into reality when you have an instrument to play them but if you if you break your lear liar or you break your your horn it doesn't mean the song disappears we have a soul it it's manifest only because we have a body for a short time but if you don't believe that and they don't they're secular humanists then every single issue right now is all that matters it's not whether you lie it's not whether you're a good person in terms of traditional say just take one exact christian morality it's whether you were right on the issue of global warming you were right on the issue of critical race theory you were right on this radical and what is the agenda it's a radical equality of a result if you sum up the woke movement today in every aspect environmental social cultural economic it is that any inequality anywhere in the western world can be attributed to some sort of exploitation it doesn't matter about a person's individual circumstances whether they are aggressively a workaholic or inert or lazy or whether they have good genes or bad genes or whether they have a big inheritance or whether they have a bad back all the millions of things that we can't we can't control in the tragic view so we say to ourselves we want a quality of opportunity everybody gets us an equal shot and we'll try to help people that have disadvantages but no it's that person is not like that person i'm anointed to adjudicate on the back and i'm going to have an equality of result and i need power to do a lot of tough stuff and this is the motto of everybody from you know from pole pot to stalin to my it's a bad path and that's what they want to do they want the power so they can determine everybody's life you are using too much you've got your air conditioner on too much a poor person in fresno doesn't have no he doesn't have that so i'm going to take that away from you but i'll keep mine going yes and i'll go out and buy some carbon credits somewhere yes with some chunky scheme they always think of that don't they yeah i can have a nobody should live in america more than fifteen hundred square feet but i have five twenty thousand square foot homes but i have had the carbon offsets that's what they do they dream up these things so that i i feel like they're they're creatures at versailles and they're very dangerous and uh it's very hard for us to criticize them because they're so moralistic and they're always the right is always i'm for the individual and when the individual makes more than another individual my duty as a western citizen is to appeal to the better angels of their nature or their religion and or their shame or their culture their family and say share it with your your poor brother or your cousin doesn't have enough or help your child or if go beyond that with a community or help but they don't trust the individual they say no no we are the state and we're going to tell that person we're going to take him away he got that only because he exploited somebody and he didn't have it not because he used drugs not because he committed a crime not because he it was only because the system was unfair to him there's some truth in both sides but not that's not the truth let me test two theories with theories with you then the first is that you've mentioned verse i they're playing with fire the social disharmony that will result if we continue because i've been in government long enough to see the pattern since the great financial crisis through covert and now in the name of arresting climate change we're pursuing policies that are indeed continuing to make these squillionaires wealthier than ever whilst everybody else's living sanders are being pushed down yeah the marie antoinette moment let them eat cake yeah said in contempt resulted in her losing her head yeah so we've never these are intelligent i don't suppose i know history because they don't think history matters because history would tell them they're playing with fire and they are and so in the united states we had 120 days of rioting in may to november of 2020 continuous 35 to 50 people were killed two billion dollars of property damage uh fourteen thousand people arrested and let go uh fifteen hundred police officers and that was that was exempt from criticism kamela harris who was going to shortly be the vice president candidate said the rioting should that the protests should and she knew they were violent they tried to storm the white house ground uh nicole hannah jones the architect the 1690 said ah theft is not a crime property is not a crime if you take somebody's property so we're the left said that's okay we had one day of a bunch of bufoonish people who rioted over the election and so they went and that's a threat to democracy that was a threat to democracy what they don't understand is not that i want to not that i want to downplay the stupidity no i think it was a terrible thing that happened i want anybody who committed a felony to be properly punished but my point is if you tell middle-class people you're not going to be able to afford to fill up your truck at seven dollars for diesel fuel or you're not going to turn on your air conditioning because it's a sin and we're going to make it 30 kilowatt and you're going to be on that forklift at 18 and you're going to pay taxes for this guy with a gender studies major at stanford on his loan forgiveness you're playing with fire with of going after them and then you keep calling them semi-fascist so if you stop and think a minute the president united states between 2009 and 16 barack obama said these people clung to their guns he just ridiculed them joe biden has called them chumps and drags hillary clinton said they were irredeemables and deplorables and she made fun of them in west virginia you know cole's going to be we're going to wipe out your livelihood and when you call them fascist and uh you have this the fbi members of the fbi say how do we stop this president or no or peter strzok says i went into walmart and it smelled like trump people or a cnn reporter says i went to a rally and i had more teeth than everybody in this rally and you combine that public or kevin kleinsmith an fbi lawyer who forged a document and he writes in a tweet viva la la resistance if you if you marry that with an agenda that makes it impossible for people to have upward mobility and you you articulate your hatred toward them and you call them if you're the chairman of the joint chiefs and you say that you're exploring their white rage or you're the secretary of defense and you say that you're going to go in the ranks and you're going to find out who are all these races but you bring no data the only data that i know that's race specific is the military always tells us who dies by race and when you look at the statistics in afghanistan iraq white males die at double their numbers of the general population so when you go after them you said well how long will will they take it they're playing with fire well they already have the the recruitments in the u.s army are down 45 percent yes this year and the reagan library just did a poll and they asked people you have confidence in the us military it used to be 85 percent it was less than 50 percent and the u.s air force academy is not getting that it has a recruitment crisis about applicants the applications have gone down but especially the applications that qualify of kind of people they want so we're starting to see people say no we have a kind of a rejectionist half the country it wasn't just that they're not going to disneyland or they're not watching the super bowl or nba they're not joining the military and they're not they don't want their children to police out a man yeah they're saying no and that's that's half the country and that was the left always operated on the premise that they were the critical intellectual elite and they would look at the system and they would poke holes in it but was always the assumption that the system was there that there was always some guy fracking oil there was also some guy perched up on 150th floor uh washing windows there was always a guy to fix their car put in their granite counter bring in their always someone to generate the money so the specialist there was always somebody when you wanted a nation build in iraq there was always a guy in rural pennsylvania that family had been four generations from world war ii to create a vietnam and he was going to go over there and god knows where and die for this agenda and that's how they existed but when they take power and they destroy the energy energy industry and when they uh destroy the military and when they destroy the reputation of the fbi there's no there there anymore and so the people who kept the country running and allowed these people to be professors and lawyers and media critics they're the the frill they're the the hair and the nails they're not the muscles and the organs of the of the organism and when you start attacking those people that make the country run it's not just white i'm not saying white it's everybody of the middle and working muscular classes they ward on them and uh and when they you don't want them in rebellion because they'll shut we saw that during the covet shutdown when they stopped working or when they uh you know and half of them stopped working they couldn't work their businesses were destroyed and then the other half were the only people that kept the country going the amazon delivery the guy who kept uh you know he was still irrigating the uh the great vineyard the guy who was still out there welding so that's who kept the country going and uh we all can't sit in our our house as terrified of kova live by zoom and have somebody knock on the door with our dinner and our amazon delivery that takes real people and if you offend those people as we're doing and uh was the real revolutionary thing in the united states now is the left was so obsessed with race it's almost that they're you you hubris brought on nemesis because now what's happening you're starting to see a subtle but definite trend that people who the left calls non-white feel there's a war against them if you're a mexican-american painter or you have 10 people working in your electrician business you don't want people going into your diet diocese and disrupting it over transgendered issues you don't want partial birth abortion you don't want critical race theory you don't want somebody playing the knock-up game or they walk up to somebody and hit them in the head on a street in new york and they're out the same day so they're offending those classes and they're creating a new a new political reality of class i think is starting to slowly reassert itself and that if republicans are wise they'll be able to take advantage of that now the other great danger that i just wanted to run by you it seems to me that these uh highly educated certainly by their own beliefs very clever people i can't believe they're playing so lightly really with the liberal global rules-based order that has served the world so well since the second world war because america's essentially policed it yeah the progress around the world and lifting people out of poverty creating opportunity spreading democracy until recently has been quite remarkable but it's depended upon a strong and cohesive even a coherent american society to do it and if you're worried about climate change for example if you really think we're destroying the planet surely the worst thing you could do is to put at risk and uh you know it really is at risk the liberal global rules-based order the arc of autocracy as some people in my country call it you know who hate western democracy china russia iran north korea they don't care about climate change they don't care about walk either they don't care about climate change they don't care about any of this stuff isn't that the second danger that these highly intelligent people are missing it's very ironic because these remember these people are not empirical they're ideologues so once they get i think everybody knew that stalinism had failed by 1935 or 36 earlier during the great fam it didn't matter he didn't change national socialism mao failed but the ideologue does not care we saw that with a virginia pushback against the left they didn't care they doubled down on critical base theory so in germany as we're talking right now they're going to be burning wood which is the most polluting of all fuels this winter to survive we in california have no forest management because we felt that it was uh empowering timber companies you know very careful cons conservative uh trimming of dead trees and and logging so what do we do we have these huge fires these biblical fires and they put more uh fossil fuel emissions into the air than cars do but they don't care because it's ideologically correct to have a particular forest management problem and so that's where we are there we've created a very wealthy elite protected class and they have controls of the influence in the western world and by that i mean the books that are published the podcast not this one but there's very few of us the media social media network news pbs npr foundation all of it and they have a huge megaphone and they have the money the wealth if you look at the fortune 400 these are not ancient fortunes based on manufacturing or assembly or oil or mining or gas or transportation their finance investment insurance high-tech bio media and they're very left-wing people they have a global market they're very wealthy they're ideological and they have an agenda that they feel is good for us this is their religion as atheists and agnostics they feel we're going to convert these people we don't want to do it by the sword if we have if we can avoid it but they're going to do what's good for them and we know what it is we've seen their visions it's all of us are going to live in high rises and we're going to go to a belt around a city on mass transit we're going to give up our individual cars and we're going to use a particular type of fuel we're going to think a particular way we're going to have a particular k-12 education and we're going to be the perfect citizen according to them and they don't believe in liberty they don't believe individual choice they don't believe that individuals can make better decisions than they can as government so they're very scary people and they they're not new in history every generation or two they have a new face if this was 1793 we'd be calling them jacobins if it was 19 you know 63 or 68 maybe in china we would call them maoist and uh if we called in and uh after 1945 to 50 in the united states we'd call them sympathizers with socialism or communism so i don't know how we defeat them other than the way we've always defeated them and that is we a few people call them out and say it doesn't work and we're going to oppose you we're not going to put you in camps we're not going to violate the constitution but we're going to speak out against you and that's how we've always we have a better system we have better values and we care about people and we're humanist i don't think that they're anti-human as you said when aoc said that she didn't want children because because of climate change and when you tell the left that you can't have a society with a 1.3 fertility rate because you'll have a bunch of old people dependent on very few young people whose whole lives will be spent taking care of them they don't care that they like that the fewer people the less carbon imprint on the environment so it's very sad because it's insidious people with phds and jd's and mds and mas and bas who are very glib can do a lot of damage and as we get older i'm not trying to be romantic or naive but something about a person who works with their hands and they combine the mind with the body and they build or they mine or they harvest they're they're grounded a reality and they know human human they know human limitations and they believe that the world is tragic and you try to do your best and if you're not perfect it doesn't mean you're not good well you see that as a farmer you stay in touch that way and so do i yeah so on that night once again thanks so much for your insights well thank you [Music] you

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 299,191

Keywords: John Anderson, John Anderson Conversation, Interview, John Anderson Interview, Policy debate, public policy, public debate, John Anderson Direct, Direct, Conversations, Victor Davis Hanson, United States of America, Biden, Trump, Republican, Democrat, Mar-a-Lago, America

Id: vmMNVEv6fI8

Length: 49min 15sec (2955 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 15 2022