Victor Davis Hanson | US Election 2020

[Music] well today i'm joined again by historian and public intellectual victor davis hanson uh we've spoken before and there was enormous interest in what he had to say interestingly for me across your own country victor as well as here in australia and i appreciated that hugely so to go straight to it the eyes of the world have been on the american election it's hard to avoid the conclusion that to some extent it's a sort of gridlock it's certainly not what the poll said would happen can you give us a feel for how you're seeing this momentous event well very briefly i think there's three things that you're comfortable to understand if i could help enlighten them i don't know if i can or not but donald trump was supposed to be wiped out in individual states on the eve of the election he was supposed to be 17 down in states that are dead even he was supposed to lose the national vote in cnn's poll by 12 he's down by one 380 000 a 380 electoral college landslide for joe biden that's going to be very close to 270 or 280 victory if he wins so the polls are confounded the problem we're having is that there's anomalies that no one can explain so why is the nevada vote still going on when next door utah which had him a clear winner was over election night why is michigan going on when its neighbor to the south ohio finished with a trump victory election night why is wisconsin's vote just settled but it took two days whereas uh iowa next door why is georgia going on but alabama's not and the the reason his supporters are angry and all of the states that i'm mentioning that are out nevada north carolina georgia pennsylvania and arizona they all uh had trump leads or he was dead even in nevada and they're taking a long time to tally the votes in a way that no other states are doing and his lead keeps going down down down and we're talking about 400 000 vote lead in pennsylvania or 200 000 wisconsin and they're all blue states and the votes are all coming in from big cities to overwhelm the rural small town pro-trump so people are suggesting why is it in the year 2020 that we have record turnouts of 90 88 of registered voters we've never had that in the history of the united states and why are they all in these cities and why are these cities all delaying their vote voting of their states and so that's where we are as far as the official the way our system works each secretary of state of the 50 states has to certify that the vote is valid and therefore those validations then uh instruct electors from their state to meet in about 60 days to vote in the electoral college and they have to represent the plurality of votes in their state and there's about five lawsuits based on the premise that the u.s constitution says how people vote in an individual state is determined by the state legislatures but in all of these states that are under contention in the last 20 days state governors electoral boards or registrars have added to or subtracted to the law they felt that covet meant that they could extend the days that you were eligible to vote or they said it doesn't have to be postmarked in extremists the way that law and so the trump forces are arguing that any state that went beyond what their legislature had prescribed those all those ballots are invalid that i think is legally cogent but to invalidate that many votes would overturn the election as it's going now and then finally the reason that people are upset i think is that they are bombarded with a series of events that they can't process in 2000 20 years ago there was one state florida that was held up and people said this shall never happen again now we have five floridas 2016 they said the pollsters are not pollsters they're vote suppressionists they come out with these wild leads that they won't show us the data by which they read and i'm talking about reuters politico abc uh monmouth and they cannot be right and then when election day came around they were all discredited at the state levels way off and trump won and people said to them you were trying to suppress the trump donations vote uh get out the vote operations and you probably succeeded and that's a gift to the hillary clinton campaign and they said we're never going to do this again we've learned that we won't do this will spot the reluctant and they did it again and people are very angry and then they said you people called votes too early in states that were going trump and you called them for hillary and they said we'll never do it again on the media but on election night they called arizona when it was very clear that it was tight and it was very clear that florida and texas were strong trump states and they wouldn't even though they were traject their trajectories were trump they wouldn't call them until very late so people said then the narrative went out that trump's base barry goldwater arizona has forsaken him and so what's the use of challenging a vote because if he can't win arizona he's not going to win and that narrative went out all night long that trump was not going to be called for north carolina or arizona but he would uh but he would be uh he would be called negatively in those states and that suppressed so when you add up all of this stuff and then you you see that there are record numbers of actual voters in a way that no one feels is possible the trump supporters are very angry disillusioned that and their way of thinking i talked to some of them today they said things along the following we don't care about jack dorsey and the ring in the nose bearded guy we don't care about him we don't care that facebook deep platformed us and censored ads we don't care that google massage we don't care if the pollsters work as voter suppressionist we don't care what happened in florida in 2000 we don't care about 2000 because we live in the united states and the one thing we know is we're not a third world country and we have open transparent and on election day we're going to rock the world and they came out massive rallies and joe biden had almost no attendance trump worked 19 hours a day joe biden didn't do anything he was in his basement and yet now when they feel they had won the election they lost the election and so we feel tonight if you voted for donald trump that we're living in a third world country yeah so certainly uh the feelings run very deeply can i focus on this aspect of um a lot of commentary in australia saying this yet again proves that the pollsters have smashed their own industry they get it wrong you're painting a picture of them actually being part of the problem in terms of their own ambitions and their own behavior but there's another aspect of this that i'd really like your views on that goes to the heart of the culture wars and the so-called cancel culture if you think of the way in which the polls have misread a lot of things recently brexit here in australia they misread the last election uh twice now in america you yourself the last time we talked made reference to um a man you knew in your local area who told the pollster that he was going to vote biden but indicated to you that he only did so because he felt that if he ran against what he was expected to say his name would end up on a list isn't there a real issue here there's a terrible reflection on where our culture's gone to and the viciousness now of the way in which many technocrats if i can use that word behave the people who think the democracy is bad because the people get it wrong people are not just self-centering they're saying things they don't believe surely that should be deeply concerning that in free cultures people no longer feel they can speak their mind it's in other words this is a problem goes well beyond the pollsters yeah i think in the english-speaking world there are these similarities where on their coastal elite corridors there were a lot of people who made a fantastic amount of money in global trade finance media entertainment insurance law and the muscular classes within the interior their jobs or their industries that could be replaced agriculture mining timber steel were replaced and they didn't do as well and these pollsters are products of these elite classes and in our country they're they're situated between san diego and seattle and boston and washington and they claim that they as they did with brexit that it was an inadvertent error after 2016 in america they said maya culpa we didn't understand the red state voter we didn't go to youngstown ohio we never went to bakersfield california teach us but now we're learning that that only lasted enough six weeks just to deflect the criticism against them and the criticism against them they ignored from the right but they did take seriously the left the left said to them you gave us hope you got we didn't even we didn't even worry about the election hillary was ahead in every state by seven or eight and what they basically said was you didn't prepare us so that we could take ma uh preparations so we gave them a pass and the the narrative was here i think in brexit too maybe in your country it was well the posters just are in an echo chamber their blinker they don't know how to go out to a guy in perth and talk to him they don't know how to go out in rural uh england and a small hamlet and say what what what are you feeling about mass immigration or globalization we want to get your views we want to know how to count you and so we took them at their word and now we're seeing in this election they had plenty of warning about the stealth trump voter we had the the democracy institute the inside vantage poll the trafalgar poll they all pretty much call the election just as it was neck and neck with worries about massive voting fraud in fact they said that and everybody said you know this isn't the new york times come on this isn't washington post they have no cachet so we were giving them one chance and now what's happened is people are suggesting that if you have a poster and they tell you brexit is going to lose there's just no way or your prime minister can't win re-election or our president can't and they continue to do that there is a large number of people that that affect so if i'm a rural store owner in wisconsin and i pick up the abc news that night or read washington post and says donald trump's going to lose by 17 points i say to myself oh my god i thought we had a chance maybe i shouldn't write that 100 check to the campaign does it really matter if i have to go out and vote i was going to vote in person i don't think i can it's kind of too late now i was going to sign up at the local republican party and take people to the poll i don't think it's worth it and that's what post pollsters have become they're agents of the media and they suppress the vote and it's very ironic because we're always lectured on the evils of voter suppression but uh that and then the media telling you every single day that hunter biden did nothing wrong that the biden family has never made a penny off china when you're then you say this laptop these emails these participants in these texts they've all said the opposite don't listen to them and if you put them on your platform we're going to censor it if you have an account in facebook it's going to be frozen so there was it an effort by big tech and big media and big posters to massage a result that they felt would reflect more in the globalized international communities agenda and they didn't have the numbers to perpetuate that goal they didn't it was clear that when you looked at rallies when you looked at signs when you looked at levels of enthusiasm when you looked at more disinterested polls they just couldn't do it and so i think the trump people were a little arrogant and a little complacent they said do your best to us and we're going to do do your worst to us and we're going to do our best and you're going to come up short just like you did last time so there was a sense in the trump community that we were invincible you didn't have to worry about cheating because we would have such huge you know how can you cheat when you have a 400 000 vote advantage in pennsylvania with only a million or two out how can you lose a 250 000 vote with 90 percent of the votes in in wisconsin so that kind of attitude uh i think really hurt the trump cause it was a reversal of 2016 when the trumps people were really eager and desperate to show that they had the majority and hillary was complacent and this time i think the left learned their lessons and they said you know we're gonna outspend them two to one michael bloomberg spent 150 million dollars on senate races we're going to use all of big tech and we're going to not apologize for it and they don't and we're going to use these posters in a new and inventive innovative way as suppressionists and then we're in places like milwaukee and detroit and philadelphia and pittsburgh and phoenix we're going to make staff these procedures and protocols with bureaucrats who are not going to follow the state law and we dare them to we're going to present them with a fate accompli and then after a week people will be so used to president biden they'll be demoralized and they won't pursue this as whiners in a supreme court uh writ or something i think that's a long windy answer john to where we are well the given all of what you've said the extraordinary thing is that uh despite that uh this is hardly a thumping endorsement of biden and the democrats it seems to me despite all and we'll talk a bit about the challenges confronting uh non-liberal forces in a moment but i'd just be interested in in teasing out this issue despite all of that the reality is that the american people perhaps just enough of them have said uh you know the president's just a bit too crude he's a bit embarrassing the way he behaves etc etc etc we're worried about his personal style and covert hasn't helped despite all of that it seems to me that there's been this massive turnout if i think if my maths is right biden looks as though you'll have the highest number of presidential votes ever uh in a in a presidential race and trump will have the second reflecting the extraordinary turnout so americans have been engaged and they have seen a lot of americans have seen what is happening and to an outsider it looks a bit like what they've done is to say okay well we need somebody who's a little less controversial uh and maybe a different style in the white house but we don't want his policies so they've actually they've they've cut the democrats numbers in the senate and it looks like in the in the house and that looks as though and again i'd be interested in your views um they've um uh uh you know they must have been americans who actually voted for biden but voted for a republican senator that's absolutely true and so when you look at if one were to go back to election day and look at cnn as i did an msnbc and abc nbc and pbs and npr and read the washington there was a giddiness a jubilation that they were going to take the senate and not only take the senate but they might not even have to get rid of the filibuster because they were going to have a super majority they were going to add 10 to 15 seats in the house and joe biden was going to have this record landslide and with it a mandate and you know they believe that because they went down into texas of all places which was never going to flip and they spent about 150 million on biden and another 100 million to get rid of john cornyn all for not texas was trump by six but it shows you the mindset and so what happened was the american people said you're not going to get rid of susan collins or lindsey graham or john cornyn or mitch mcconnell so that the senate will stay in republican hands they picked up anywhere from 11 we don't know yet to 16 seats on the house nancy pelosi has a very thin majority they put the fear of god into a lot of house races that barely survived and the candidates today are saying why in the world are we saying defund the police or were aoc and bernie sanders socialist agendas we that's going to kill us they're panicky because a record number of black voters 15 16 percent went with donald trump the supposed racist and maybe as high as 35 percent latinos and much higher in terms of male latino and black voters but more importantly to your point there's no alternate agenda that was raised in the biden election no one said we're being too hard on china let's go back to the obama appeasement no one said well wait a minute let's get into that iran deal and get the embassy back in tel aviv and let's give the golden heights make sure the assad dynasty gets it and put the palestinians back in the center of things with 700 million a year until the emirates don't recognize israel no one is saying that no one is saying we're really overspending on the pentagon and why is donald trump so pro-japanese pro-south korean pro-taiwanese pro-australian and he's encircling china and he's saber-rattling and this is prov they're not saying that in other words they have no al trump reversed a lot of american foreign policy initiatives and he so did it that there's really no alternative to it so i think donald uh i think joe biden where he to be elected is going to say we've got to get back on that iran deal but he won't or we've got to be reach out to china but he's not going to be able to there's no public support or he's going to say we really need to stop fracking uh horizontal drilling and people are saying you know what we like the income we like the idea that we're completely independent from middle east oil we like the idea we help our allies with energy and uh we like the idea there's never going to be an arab boycott again of anybody in the western world and we like the idea of crashing prices for russia and iran so that's going to be an debt on arrival and so to finish he's left what this election has left us with is senators and house members on his side are reluctant to go back to that primary leftist agenda because they think they'll be wiped out and if they do it in two years and joe biden himself to the degree he's cognitively facile he's very worried about coming out against the elements of the so-called trump agenda we saw that with a covet policy he rattled all of these things wrong with it but he offered nothing other than what trump's did and he couldn't explain why we have high numbers of death because to do so is to focus on four or five democratic states like new jersey new york massachusetts connecticut that fatally put people with the virus into rest homes and account for almost 40 percent of the debt despite 11 percent of the population so when you see there's no alternative to agenda to trumpism you can see that he hit on something but the 64 thousand dollar question is though do you have an emissary of trumpism without trump and by that i mean it's easy to say among swing voters we like the trump agenda we just didn't like the tweets but when you lose the tweets and the brashness does a marco rubio or nikki haley or any of these other alternatives do they have the guts to say i'm going to appoint a supreme court judges whether they like it or not right before the election a strict and then do they have the guts to say it's not going to be a david suter or an anthony kennedy it's going to be a rock solid original conservative do they have the guts to say we are a western country and whether you like it or not our legacy is from the western in particular the english-speaking world and those are our friends foremost does anybody they just had a poll and you can see the difference that america who do you like the best well australians were number one you said that to me i was very cheered by that now 76 and then british and then canadians well that was part of the trump transformation from obama we were told that we were going against our roots it was a multi-racial cultural we we should be identifying with asia and africa and no and people didn't think that was right and not just so-called white people everybody and so what i'm getting at is that there was something to the idea that trump was chemotherapy and chemotherapy makes you sick but it's a medicine strong enough to kill a cancer and do you want somebody that believes there is a cancer but for a variety of reasons is so invested or complicit or leveraged by this system that he's not able or willing to do the necessary things and um when you talk to people they say you know we we have to restore the first amendment on campus and they can't continue to deny free speech to speakers or deny people accused of so-called sexual harassment due process and people will say to you when we brought this up to senators and to the bush administration they say oh my god let's not go there and they said that when they went into trump he said what do you want me to do you're right just tell me what you want me to do speeches senate executive order i'm with it or when they said you know what the border fence is a joke we've got a million illegal aliens coming to in the country it's it's destroying the idea of the melting pot he said what do you want me to do how high how wide when can i do it so i'm not sure that the people who agree with the agenda that is a popular agenda would a be able to implement it to the degree he has uh and would win the popular support of the people necessary to further that agenda now the alternate view is yes they would because he wouldn't offend people by tweeting but i'm not sure at all and we'll see so um you look you did send me that uh research that showed that americans uh regard australians as their best friends it was very interesting research and thank you for it also showed and i found this interesting and it's germaine to my next question that americans still um uh they're still deeply committed to their country as i understood it and love it very much they're concerned for it but they're still committed to it whereas you would think from the extreme liberal perspective that plays out so strongly in this day and age that americans actually think they're the world's worst they're the world's most racist that they are illiberal that they are somehow grossly immoral people but there is a gulf there isn't there and it's shown up in this election there is a clear repudiation of what might be loosely bracketed together now under the sort of new religious heading or heading of the new religion the social justice warriors with a capital s capital j capital w this election surely has shown that middle america still packs punch and rejects extremes if i can put it that way despite the way we've been led to believe americans feel about themselves and their future absolutely i think what americans are saying to the world is the american that you see that travels overseas the international corporate business person the america you see on your hollywood movie or your new york sitcom the america you see with a massage google search or a facebook uh sort of ad the america you see when an nba player editorializes the america you see on our uh international cnn tv shows the america you read when you read the international herald tribune that's not america that is a very influential powerful 30 percent of the country and they misrepresent what america's america is what the people feel and you you're never going to really understand america unless people come to america and meet those people because they don't have access to explain america they don't own the media they don't own silicon valley they don't uh they don't have the they're not the big banks they're not wall street they're not corporations but they're in the majority and they're very good people and they're very proud of their heritage and they're not racist they're me the families are interracial they're intermarrying at a record rate but they do believe that if you come to america from mexico or asia you came for a reason that you wanted something better than the alternative which was your homeland and they're will perfectly willing and able and eager to assimilate you to intermarry with you and to integrate with you but they do not want you to form a identity politics uh balkan rwanda iraq model of tribalism and they don't want you coming here and attacking the traditions the protocols the icons the statuaries the names of a tradition and a country that has no apologies for its past that's not to mean it's not cognizant of our shortcomings but no apologies and so that's that's the message and i'm i didn't want to depress your listeners at the beginning because as i was telling my wife i was astonished how close the election was because i kept saying these people are going to really cheat and they've got pollsters that are not disinterested and the media has gone crazy and social media has gone crazy and the internet moguls are openly telling congress we can do what we want we don't have to be fair and they made donald trump into a monster and yet as you say 50 percent of the country voted for him but more importantly on the down ballots all of his all of the candidates basically won that could win and they're in a position now i think that if the democratic party wants to pursue this agenda it will it will really lose power in two years it'll be a nerd and right now if joe biden is president he will get no legislation through because the senate will not approve any of it he will get no justices through because the senate will not approve it he has no popular support the country's bitter at the way he was elected i think he's at a in a cognitive and physical state where many of the trump people said he will be shortly relieved of his duties by the socialist kamala harris i think that may be true within a year or two and that will be a disaster for the democratic party because she articulated positions that have zero public support she didn't get one delegate not one in the democratic primary that seems to me to be highly significant because even here in australia you've had what you would call the liberal media almost salivating at the thought of the vice president becoming the president you can you can feel it because they want those values up but but they would be a disaster wouldn't they that would absolutely guarantee that there was a change next time around the results show it the american people are not up for embracing the extreme left to use that term agenda they're not going to wear it it's it's very clear to me as a former politician that they've said look donald's just a bit too rough for us he's too crude he's too divisive the tweets are too much as you put it um but um they have not repudiated the the disruption if you like and the reset the major reset and to ignore that i guess it seems to me it would be politically fatal for the democrats well i think that if i could articulate the american mindset and by extension suggest maybe in some parts of it reflect the australian or the british mindset it's something like this the left is giving us a choice between join uh joining them and cultural suicide in other words they're telling us that the entire premise of western free-market capitalism private property constitutional government rationalism religious tolerance multiracialism instead of multiculturalism all of that was flawed at the beginning and you have to be perfect in our perfect eyes to be good and we're going to use the standards of 2020 to go back into the past and not see it as tragedy when it disappoints us but as melodrama we're going to pick our winners and losers and yours are going to be losers and we're going to race it in the fashion of trotskyization and i think most people say you know what i kind of had it with that i don't want a lot of people who don't live in the real world and who seem to enjoy the benefits of our system our advanced medical care our great material wealth our homes our streets our security they all seem to be beneficiaries of it especially immigrants that want to join it and understand the difference and yet they deprecate the very forces that create it and sustain it and so they're almost like court jesters they live at the court and they make fun of the court but they're products of the court and so that's a choice that people are being given and i think if they keep pushing it uh and i can tell you uh john that there's other fissures that you can look through this wall outside of polls and elections and you get a glimpse of what you're talking about i'm sitting in the most liberal left-wing state in the united states if you want to go buy a firearm today you're gonna have to wait nine months not because the state is making it difficult to buy is because very liberal people supposedly have rushed to the gun stores and fright at what they see with the defunding and they've ordered if you want to go buy nine millimeter 32 caliber 30 you cannot buy it it doesn't exist that people have decided that the second amendment is a good thing if you look at the nba's ratings it's at a record low nobody's watching nobody even knew there was a world series they've tuned out of it if you look at hollywood movies they have to rely on chinese markets as does the nba there's no people have just said you know i'm living in a monastery of the mind i'm going to be armed i'm going to speak my mind but i'm not going to participate in this socialist dominated culture i'm not going to watch the nba i'm not going to a movie uh i'm going to not going to watch network news and so all of these institutions that had a monopoly of the cultural political economic and social landscape of the united states are very worried because they got their wish but they're sort of like the midas touch they thought that it would be wonderful to turn everything to gold and it turned out to be dross in other words you can't eat gold and everything they turn and touch it turns to dross and they know that now and they're in a dilemma but don't ever underestimate them because cultural life and public opinion is often massaged by what we see on television what we read in the newspapers what we hear on the radio what we see on the internet how we communicate those are very powerful tools in their toolbox but for now they they got rid of donald trump who as i think last time i said is kind of a tragic hero he's a john right out of a john ford western maybe the searchers of some of your viewers watched it with john wayne or high noon with gary cooper or maybe the magnificent seven with steve mcqueen where we call in one of these guys who has some aspects that we find i don't know bothers them at best and maybe uncouth at worst and we say to them we we don't have the resources we don't know how to fight these cattle barons or the bandeau what do we do and he said i'll take care of it and he takes care of it and the more the better way the better he does the happier we are and the more relieved that he's going to write off in the sunset so in that famous john ford scene and the searchers when he brings back natalie wood but he's been so tough and foul-mouthed about the processes in which he operated he hands he hands her to the family they celebrate and then he turns around and walks out that door and you see the shadow walk and nobody says thank you ethan edwards just like gary cooper throws down the uh the badge and nobody says thank you marshall kane you you got rid of all of our problems thank you and that's kind of where we are you want judges he gave you judges you want deregulation he gave you deregulation you want record low minority unemployment he gave you that you want record high republican participation by more minorities he gave that you want a new middle east he gave you that you want to defang iran he's doing that you want to confront china he did it you want to uh change the tax code in in and favor investment he did it but he did it in such a fashion that now that it's happened a lot of the people on the independent did not come out and support him and they think you know what it's time for him to go but there's always a sequel you never know people may say it's getting bad again where did that gunslinger go what town is the end somebody come and get him back for another turn that's an interesting point i'll come back to that in a moment but but before we do see as i said these uh election outcomes actually mean both political parties in america face a massive reset we've talked a bit about the democrats we'll come to the republicans in a moment but there's another aspect that that that affects both of them i mean the ultimate charge of uh against anybody you disagree with now in western culture is to call them a racist now of course trump was seen as a very embodiment of racism a white male supremist couldn't be worse but that doesn't seem to be the way that many colored people in america saw him at all i would have thought this blows an enormous hole in the intellectual case for a lot of the nonsense that's passed for the race debate right across the western world in recent times as just looking at this um i understand he won probably the highest share of non-white voters of any republican presidential campaign candidate since 1960 um 26 percent of the people who voted for him uh at this election were not white in florida about half the latinos voted for trump uh and the nation at large 18 of black men voted for trump uh and the female black vote for trump was also up so what do the democrats do with this repudiation of the um the line that they've not you know been very willing to run against him uh well there's democrats and then there's democrats aren't there so if you're part of the democratic intelligentsia i can tell you in the last 48 hours they have a canned exegesis and it runs something like this we have to ferret out the naive and the traitorous in our midst because they bought into this fable of white supremacy and they want to be white they want to be middle class they want to be heterosexual they want to be familial and donald trump fooled them and so that's what some of them but then we had a representative who was almost beat and she's beaten and she said i don't want to hear the word socialism again i don't want to hear aoc again i just want to go back to what we used to be which was on a you know party of the middle class and social net and all what the democratic party what they think fdr was and so those voices of reason and sanity i think are in the minority and the nancy pelosi's and the chuck schumer's who have gone over to the hard left nothing is going to disabuse them of that until these numbers are such that they lose and and why you brought that up is because we're a country about 67 percent white now and the democratic mantra had been anybody who is not white will be dependent on big government to a greater degree and therefore on us so we want unlimited and even indeed illegal immigration because we flip california it's now never going to vote in our electoral system republican and we flip nevada we have flipped new mexico we have flipped colorado we're just about to flip and we probably did arizona we only got one big state left and if we flip texas they can never win again but then the republicans have discovered that well maybe we can re-flip them with the people who are supposedly going to flip us and so if you're a county down on the border and you're a mexican community and it's illegal what happens it means that somebody comes in from oaxaca state into your community with tattoos and he starts calling all of your children who are there two generations gringos because they don't speak good spanish or you go to across the border into mexico and somebody's squatting on your home and saying get out or your school district where i live 95 mexican-american all of a sudden you work so hard to get advanced placement courses so your mexican-american children can be competitive and go to places like pepperdine or stanford or see berkeley and guess what you have to drop them because you're flooded in with people who don't speak very good spanish they speak mix of a mix of tech a baja that's an indigenous language so that group is starting to wake up and say i don't like these wealthy white liberals and these various uh elite minorities because they're always exempt from the consequences of their own ideology and it's just starting now and that's why they're so scared of this because if donald trump can do it who doesn't mince words they're afraid somebody even more effective a communicator might be able to be even more effective and so when you get those numbers up to it's disputed was it 15 or 20 of blacks was it 28 excuse me 30 to almost 40 percent of hispanics but you go another three points another four points and you hit a calculus that the democrats can never win because they have so alienated the white working class that white males are voting about 65 percent anti-democratic and women of about 54 and they have so turned off the white middle classes that you don't need 50 black and browns or an asian you just need to get up to the 40s and they're done and so that's where we are they're frightened and the irony of it is that they invested so much money and rhetoric and time into donald trump the racist donald trump as charlottesville donald trump who said that haiti was a [ __ ] country that they didn't realize that most people tuned that out and they said i got a job i'm mexican-american so for the first time in my life i'm hammering up on this roof or i'm out picking peaches or i'm plumbing on a new construction site and somebody comes over to me and says you're making 18 an hour but i can pay you 20. another guy comes by and said i'll pay you 21. we're short labor we can't get cheap labor from across the border anymore trump shut down the illegal aliens and we need your labor and the attitude of the worker if you talk to him is i have dignity the first time in my life the employer is begging for me i'm not begging for him and then trump did that that reversal mindset and it started to show up for the first time in my lifetime in the polls so that's what scares the left that somebody who was a droid as he would could could develop that further that's interesting you use that word dignity because the last four years again i don't i'd hate anything i said to sound patronizing about america i don't want to sound that way at all it's a western problem we have it here in australia but these elites these technocrats have not learned the lesson of a little humility and the need to recognize that people out there may not have college education or whatever but they can think and they can understand so what they're picking up is that they're not respected their dignity is not respected they're seen as people who couldn't know their own best interests and this seems to me to be a massive problem it's surely part of what gave rise to the whole trump disruption this patronage this um condescension this you couldn't possibly know what's best for you attitude i think um as i said that was never going to change unless people were staring defeat in the face and that's what this election has shown is that americans are are going to stand up or enough of them are going to stand up to force something of a reset i i think so and though you almost word for word articulated the canned speech to tell you the truth of donald trump he said you people lost out in china and somebody else benefited and these are the people who outsourced and offshored and profiteered and that's not going to happen anymore and because you're valuable people and you've got a lot of things going for you you got the cheapest energy in the world you got a good infrastructure you don't have any transportation costs for the amer and you're skilled and we're going to do the same things uh here that they said we couldn't do and had to go to china but it i think it opens a larger question to your point about this condensation and this elitism and throughout classical and western culture there was this tradition of what the greeks called uh tokuseon meson the golden mean mind and body that you had to be a thinker but you had to be muscular you had to use your muscles and your brain and you had to check your theory and your abstraction by concrete reality and to tell you the truth the embodiment in classical literature in hesiod or virgil was the farmer because he was using all of his mind as the independent yeoman he had to know the markets he had to know how to graft he had to know uh profit and loss but he had to do the physical labor and so in that matrix what we've created is a drone class we've created a bunch of millions of highly sophisticated people they don't know anything about which way the wind blows or what season we're in or any where their food comes from or why you can't stop fracking or whether granite counter comes under a mountain the granite they have no idea what a stainless steel is for their refrigerators they love hardwood floors but they don't want to cut down a tree and they're very they're almost infantile prolonged as adolescents and during this lockdown we had a hundred million people that grew food they transported it they created fuel they they served us they waited on us so you could stay where i am and here and i could order something on amazon and somebody out there put a mask on and they drove the truck to deliver it or they sorted it at a plant or they made it at a plant or they grew it in their farm or they mined it onto the ground and we said to them you have to have your mask on 24 oh i saw a picture of you in the and you were driving your truck and your mask was off or you know what we looked at you and you came in and delivered my washing machine you didn't use hand sanitizers and so that class of nervous nellie's they're almost anal retentive they run the country so to speak but nobody has any respect for them and they're entirely dependent on the muscular classes they told us that we had to have our computer their computers and their finance and their investment and their entertainment and the lockdown showed us that you know what we can get by for a while without the nba we don't really need to go on to social media but you have to eat and you have to have somebody give you gas and you have when your thermostat goes out and you're in a new york apartment some guy who deprecates got to go up there and take it apart and fix it and so that that's what what a lot trump the last three weeks of the campaign quite brilliantly that was the theme of his campaign i took risks just like you did i know that everybody makes fun that i got covered but i'm not going to sit in the basement i'm going to go out and see you you're going to see me some of us are going to get coveted some of us are going to get sick those that have comorbidities may die and you know what i was really ill i took a experimental drug they said don't take another one you can't mix it to we don't know the consequences then they said if you take a steroid and the regeneration and the anti-viral who knows and i took them all why because i'm your president and that turned out to be in a very effective uh churchillian message you know and people said you know it's like churchill's saying uh mr prime minister you can't get in to a halifax bomber and fly over north africa when you have a slight case of pneumonia and he said i'm prime minister of her majesty's government i'll do damn well would i please i can be replaced but the idea of an active prime minister can never be replaced and so that was a very good that was a reminder that this coastal elite uh why they're so influential is funny most people are not fond of them and we see them on the streets with the antifa rallies they spit in the police face they scream and yell they burn and then when they're arrested they go into a fetal position with sort of this nasal voice please stop you don't know who i am i have a resume i can't go to jail i just can't get it on my record and then when you start reading the list of the arrested it's a it hits a perfect pattern mr joe smith mr j mrs jane doe ba master's degree two years of college and then they have massive student debt they majored in environmental studies or race studies or sociology and you get the you get the image that there's a lot of disaffected people with 1.6 trillion dollars in debt that are highly educated pretty ignorant about the world but they feel the world did not appreciate their genius they didn't get hired at google at the highest level so history's most dangerous people are people who feel they're educated in the system whether there's they come suicide bombers or jacobins or bolsheviks the system didn't appreciate their training and their intellectual prowess and didn't renumerate them accordingly and they want to burn it down and so we're run by those people but we're also endangered by them because when they think they don't get their just desserts they go out and try to destroy the system in revenge well to come back if i could just backtrack for a moment you you talked about democrats saying we can flip the c uh the state or that state or whatever there's been a lot of flipping going on you now have the extraordinary situation where as i understand it the three or four wealthiest states in america are massively pro-democrat and the poorest states in america are in fact republican so going forward it's a segue into just considering for a moment if you could um the realities of the enormous challenges that now confront uh the democrats but then you come to the republicans uh the wealth the media the much of the academy and big tech form a very very wealthy and a very influential a block in america and they are of there's no other way to put it that's certainly true in my case they are so often essentially not interested in democracy because they know better and they think it's all right to censor views they don't like they think it's all right to manipulate the process if they get an opportunity and ordinary people deeply resent that and you get this exacerbation of the polarization so there's two issues in there i just appreciate your views on this as we come to to time out recognizing that you have a great deal to do one is um this question of the the power and the wealth now that stands behind an illiberal anti-democratic view extraordinary as it is the very people who benefited most from what we have are the ones who are now launching the biggest attack on the second issue is how do the republicans ensure that they can go forward and what role might donald trump himself play in that he is now free to if he he it's not beyond i would have thought comprehension that he'd say well i'll continue to disrupt uh going forward i could have another guy now there's no two term limit on me i could have another go in 2024. well remember whatever he is he's four years he's always going to be four years younger than joe biden he may be quite older than the president by the time of the next election but if joe biden wants to run at 82 he'll be four years younger he'll be younger than joe biden is right now in four years so who knows about him i think what you're saying is very evident here in america used to be that the democrats were very strong on first amendment and they had the american civil liberties union and now the american civil liberties union is devoted to suppressing free speech on campus or changing the vocabulary and the reason they are is that they if you look at the united states by county and income or zip code or income or congressional district it's quite amazing that blue if that represents left wing all the money is in the blue states or the blue counties or the blue zip codes so the democratic party is a party of very very well healed professionals and billionaires and all of our as we said earlier big tech media investment insurance law or all democratic control and they're they have global markets now they adapted best and could adapt best to globalization and they don't feel any more that democracy gives them the desired result they feel that well we have an equality result uh quality of opportunity society and that's what we fought for our parents did we have the eight hour work day the 40-hour workweek disability quality of opportunity insured civil rights but we didn't get what we wanted what we wanted was a quality of result mandated and that's by date nature anti-democratic because if somebody opposes you on the road to utopia you get rid of them so now what a michael bloomberg says i don't want to cooperate with the democrats i want to spend 50 million in ohio to show everybody that i flipped ohio wasted i want to spend 100 million in florida to warp that election and show my power i'm mark zuckerberg i want to tell everybody that i d platform the president i'm the head of twitter and so they don't believe in democracy because they feel that now the businesses and that they operate in are so influential in opinion making or in providing informational services and their fortunes are not when i was growing up to be in the fortune 400 you had to be worth about 100 million in today's dollars and now it's six or seven billion probably they have so much money that they feel that they're sort of like platonic guardians and they can tell everybody the way the world is going to work at davos and we've this is the way it's going to work and it's not going to apply to us because we have to be healthy and have jets and estates and compounds and multiple but it's going to be we know best for you and they have nothing but disdain and hatred for the middle class as one of them once told me when i was arguing with him you are the guys that have snowmobiles and jet skis and tell me why you need a snowmobile or a jet ski that's what he said they have nothing they think that the middle class lacks the culture and the sophistication and the taste of the wealthy but it also lacks the romance of the distant poor so they they hate it they just hate the middle class and uh they're very dangerous people because they're also not nationalists so if i meet somebody of this class who's australian or american or british they don't believe they're british or australian or american they believe that they belong to an international uh elite that if somebody i meet from australia is in this group in sydney then he feels that he knows new york better than he does a rural town in australia if i meet one at palo alto he's never been to fresno but he can tell me every street in shanghai and that's how their mind works they're international globalist which is fine but they have no empathy for their own countrymen they have no empathy for their own national traditions they have no empathy for their middle classes and there are people like them in history and they're usually in the post-industrial revolution marxists that believe that their affinities transcend national borders so they hate nationalism with a passion they hate patriotism with a passion and i find them not just off-putting but especially after this election very dangerous people because it's very easy to see a right-wing greedy guy who says you know what survival of the fittest darwinism i won the lottery i've got more brains and i'm gonna get all the money and keep it okay i don't think that's a caricature but you know where they're coming from but when you see somebody who has the same mindset a zuckerberg or mark uh or mike bloomberg but i'm doing all this for you i'm using all my money i have to get more money i have to have more privilege i have to more control but i'm doing it for you as i define you that's very dangerous that's sort of orwell's animal farm or 1984 all over again well thank you very much indeed for your insights they've been invaluable can i could i ask you one last question uh do you feel more or less positive about america's future and and frankly therefore you know some sort of restoration of the global liberal order as a result of what i would call the capacity of the american people to see through the bulldust in this election all right you know they did flip presidents but only just one has the impression that was almost reluctant on the part of a lot of people but they've made certain he can't implement the things that are really dangerous i feel that they weighed in and on elections in which the media didn't was didn't have the resources and those were the senate and house and state legislatures they showed overwhelmingly their common sense and practicality and i truly believe had there been a fair vote count and i don't want to say this as a partisan but a fair vote count according to the rules established by the state legislature donald trump won that election i don't think he's going to be president because i think the forces of raid right now are against him but i'm in a much better mood than i was prior to 2016 about the fate of america and more importantly involves australia as well because prior to the obama years there was a sense in america that there were certain countries in the world that were at the forefront of the western experiment that they had courageous people they were daring people they were devoted to constitutional government and free markets and private property but they had traditions religion the judeo-christian traditions of humanity they had great literature they understood their flaws but they were self-correcting they were self-critical they were self-analytical and they they had enriched the planet as no other culture had and i thought that there were people throughout the western world who understood that the last 10 years the self-critical went into the self-hatred we had something i guess we call oikophobia hating your own country but i think we're coming out of that i think we've seen the alternative as something like seattle and portland and we don't want to go there and there's enough people that'll stand up and say you know just like 1939 1940 there were people in britain that said we are not going to roll over like the french did we're just not going to do it you can bomb us you can try to invade us but we're not going to be the french army that crumbled in six weeks so i think it's something to look forward and i think there's a lot of people throughout the world that that share that confidence thank you very much indeed i really appreciate your time thank you again john good to see you and hear from you thank you for watching this episode we appreciate your support if you value vital conversations like this one be sure to subscribe to the channel there and also click the notification bell to stay up to date with new releases you

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 2,099,939

Rating: 4.8359847 out of 5

Keywords: Victor Davis Hanson, Election2020, DonaldTrump, Joe Biden, Vote2020

Id: 6idYZ25Qq6w

Length: 65min 8sec (3908 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 07 2020