The Democrats Have Descended Into Utter Nihilism
Victor Davis Hanson /
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson.
I’d like to talk a bit about Democratic nihilism. By that, I mean the Democratic Party, such as it is in the last 10 years, at least from the advent of Barack Obama, bears no resemblance to what we saw as lately as the 1990s, with the 1992 and 1996 Democratic platforms.
They seem like Republican platforms. So, what has happened? I think the answer is they’ve descended into utter nihilism.
Take Iran. Last year, when Donald Trump had not yet bombed the nuclear facilities in Iran, but had threatened to, and then had extended negotiations, the Democrats came up with a word, “TACO.” Trump Always Chickens Out.
And they presented the image of a fickle president that was too afraid to take on Iran, which they said had to be taken on. And then suddenly he did this. And now they’re calling him a warmonger that’s going to cause World War III and destroy the economy.
They have this idea that genocide is being committed by the Israelis at a time of war, but they’ve said nothing about the Iranian government that slaughtered over 30,000 of their own people. So, there’s no consistency.
A lot of it has to do with Trump Derangement Syndrome. There’s something about Donald Trump. I don’t know what it is entirely. His Queen’s accent, his appearance, his utter disdain for the media, the academic world, the deep state, the corporate boardroom, I don’t know what it is. But he drives the Left into, kind of, a state of madness.
And you can see it with some of their leaders.
Take California Gov. Gavin Newsom, for example. Gavin said he wanted to punch Trump in the mouth. He went over to Europe and said that the Europeans had knee pads, as if they were performing some, I guess, he meant foul sex act on Donald Trump.
He’s completely flipped out. He told a black audience that his test scores were low and, therefore no different than theirs. The subtext of that was that you, typically, as a group, have low test scores, and I am a white person who has lower than average. So, I don’t compare myself to people at large, but only to you.
It was a foolish thing to say.
From time to time, Sen. Cory Booker, “Spartacus,” resurfaced just to scream and yell. The latest manifestation of him is at the airports, where he is yelling and screaming about Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and you look at all the people’s faces and, as they pass the ICE officers who are filling in for the unpaid TSA employees, they’re happy. They’re delighted. And Booker doesn’t seem to understand that.
If you take the crazy left-wing protest out of the picture, ICE wouldn’t have to have masks on. They don’t have masks at airports because nobody is going around taking pictures of them and trying to dox them so that they could be killed or shot by their enemies, especially the cartels. People think they’re doing a great thing, and so they’re completely unhinged.
And think of what we see.
It’s just since Donald Trump came back, there has been nothing but the Tesla demonstrations. Remember that? Remember when Donald Trump had a military parade last summer, that there was an alternate one that the Left staged. It was kind of foul.
There was the “No Kings” protest. There was those congressional videos where female members of Congress were kickboxing. There were the ones that said we’re going to UN-FU word, foul mouth.
We had the other congressional [members] and senators making a video where they essentially advocated for military officers to disobey orders.
This is all the aftermath of the Trump collusion.
Even as I’m speaking today, new developments have come out that the Democrats under Barack Obama and later Joe Biden. They spied on U.S. senators. They spied on representatives. They spied on current FBI Director Kash Patel, all in an effort to create a hoax that Donald Trump had colluded with the Russians.
And then after that was exposed as a fraud, they went right into impeachment, and then they went right into Russian disinformation in 2020, which was exposed as a fraud. And then they went right into a second impeachment. And then they went into the first trial in U.S. history of a president when he was out of office.
And then they did the what? The raid on Mar-a-Lago. First time we’ve had a president’s home residence, for doing what? Doing what Joe Biden did for 30 years. Bringing a few classified files out and under his ownership or temporary ownership, but much more secure at Mar-a-Lago than it was in Joe Biden’s garage.
So, we had the five trials, we had the crazy Letitia James real estate trial. We had the crazy Alvin Bragg bootstrapping a campaign violation, it’s a federal matter, onto a state. We had Fani Willis’ circus in Georgia. We had Jack Smith, who’s always in the news for some unethical act that he committed, while he had this vendetta against Donald Trump.
We had the E. Jean Carroll trial, which was a fiasco. We had efforts to take him off the [2024 ballot].
What I’m getting at is there’s no consistent message. There’s no one in the Democratic Party saying, OK, here is our blueprint for a foreign policy, and it differs from the Republicans, and it’s more suited to the American interests.
OK, we’re going to have a new immigration policy, and we’re going to do the following: A, B, C, D.
OK, crime has risen under Donald Trump. It’s gone to historic lows, but it’s not because he’s stopped illegal immigration. We have a different theory, and here’s what it is.
Here’s our new Green New Deal. 2.0, 3.0. Here it is. They don’t even offer a left-wing agenda. It’s just nihilism, nihilism, nihilism. There’s no coherence.
So, what happened to them? What happened to the party of JFK and Harry Truman? Well, we saw what Jimmy Carter did to it. But Bill Clinton tried to restore and go back to the middle.
But I think there’s been three or four cosmic changes that have accelerated the destruction of the Democratic Party into a nihilist entity.
The first is we’ve opened, under a lot of administrations, the borders wide open. We have the highest number of foreign residents ever in the United States. 53 million, 16% of the population. And it comes at a time when our balloting laws have never been so suspect. That people, whether it’s mail-in or early balloting or voter ID, the Democrats have one consistent position: Get as many people to vote with as few reviews of their eligibility as possible.
And that is a new, big constituency. And that constituency came from places that were poor, autocratic, and need massive inputs of federal subsidies and state subsidies. And that’s a viable constituency.
We see it with questions of Israel. The new DEI constituency does not like Israel. It’s radically changed the Democratic Party. We see it with visiting students. We see it with green cardholders.
The second phenomenon was globalization.
Globalization from basically the millennia until now rewarded people with a 7 billion-person market. If you had skills that could cross borders. If you were in the media, if you could open a university in Dubai, if you had an insurance company that you wanted to have offices in Latin America, if you were a lawyer, in global legal terms, anything that dealt with information, finance, media, insurance.
You went from 340 million people, that’s today’s population in the United States, to 7 billion consumers and customers. And that enriched people, along the blue coast, that had those skills. And they made an amount of money that was staggering, and that gave the Democratic Party the billionaire class.
Go into the Fortune 400, look at two things, the size of the fortune and the political leanings of the billionaires. They were mostly left-wing, and that enriched the coffers of the Democratic Party, through foundations and PACs, and gave them these boutique issues from green energy to transsexuality that they pushed down our throats, all fueled by money, all without popular support.
And finally, there’s a blue state flight.
Their paradigm of high taxes, fraudulent entitlements, lax on crime. Overregulation leads to poor unsafe streets, poor schools. People who feel they can’t stay in the middle class because they’re taxed too high, they can’t afford a home. I’m talking about places that particularly like Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, and California, and people are leaving, and the Democrats are doing what?
They’re appealing to a shrinking constituency in local and state politics that has no national residency. It doesn’t resonate with the national population. So, if you can’t win an election because your agenda either doesn’t exist, but more likely, if it did exist, would offend people as a 70/30 issue—they being on the 30%—you go hysterical. You go nihilistic.
You do what the Democrats are doing today.
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