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 for The Daily Signal. We’re heading, this year, in November, to the midterms. There’s a lot of opposition to the Trump counterrevolution. There’s talk of a Democratic resurgence.
But before we write off the Republicans—and I’m very confident. I think they’re gonna do well in the midterms, for reasons I’ve outlined before. Do we really want the alternative?
Because I think the way to characterize the new democratic socialist party is it’s sort of a graveyard of bad ideas. That is that, especially in the Obama administration and in the post-George Floyd period, we were told that there were new paradigms, new exegesis, new protocols, agendas that were going to be lasting and permanent, and change America for the better.
And they have been tried under former President Joe Biden, and they’ve been found wanting. And I think they’re mostly, now, relegated, as I said, to the boneyard, maybe, of bad ideas.
One of them was this idea that a previously small minority of people that suffered from gender dysphoria—maybe 0.001% of the population—was actually a huge group of oppressed peoples, in the manner of the civil rights plight of African Americans or Latinos. And therefore, we had to recognize separate restrooms for trans people. Boys—biological men, I should say, competing in female sports. And we just went whole hog.
I think all of us at work, all of a sudden, one day, we woke up and people were listing their pronouns. I haven’t seen that recently.
Anyway, we were told there was this large stealthy constituency of oppressed trans people and that they had innate grievances against the majority. And they were quite big.
I don’t think people bought into the idea that there are more than two biological genders. The rest, I think, as a recent Czech diplomat lectured former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Munich, Germany, the rest are socially constructed.
Nor did we really look at the effect of biological males competing in sports, especially contact sports—that can be volleyball or things like boxing—the effect of a biological male on female sports, and the fairness, or I should say unfairness, of it.
And of course, the transitional surgery, the effect on hormones. The Left had been so careful to warn us about Big Pharma and the medical industry and unnecessary procedures, and yet they were very undiscriminating and just kind of approved whole-hog the idea that you can make these radical surgeries on young teenagers and give them very dangerous drugs—steroids and hormones, antidepressants. And I think now we’ve seen the result of it. And it’s not gonna recur.
Open borders were another bad idea. And we had 10,000 people coming across the border. I think the iconic turning point was when Alejandro Mayorkas, the former Biden homeland security secretary, was standing on a podium and saying at the border, “The border is secure.” And you could see thousands of people coming in—10,000 a day, 10 million to 12 million over four years.
I don’t think anybody realizes the enormity of the task to find those 10 million to 12 million. They added to a pool of 20 million, giving us 30 million illegal aliens. And we had another 20 million people not born in the United States that were residents. Some were citizens, some were legal residents, some were on student visas.
But the point is, we have 53 million people, 16% of the population wasn’t born here, without any idea how to assimilate, acculturate, or integrate them into the body politic.
So, I think the idea of open borders, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointed out in Europe, is a dead letter. Nobody’s gonna come back and say, “We have to let in another 10 million or 5 million.” It impacts the poor. It swamps our social welfare network, as we’ve seen with 500,000 criminals. It spikes our crime.
Another one is the idea that we’re gonna live in a United Nations utopia and you really don’t need a deterrent military. Europe went down that path after the end of the Cold War, 1991, all through the ’90s and the new millennium. They disarmed. Germany went from having the biggest army in NATO to having one that wasn’t really an army anymore. Europe, despite its $20 trillion gross domestic product and despite its 500 million-plus population, is totally disarmed.
We ourselves let our defenses lax under Biden. I think everybody sees now, after the Iranian nuclear threat, what China’s up to, what Russia is doing in Ukraine, that you have to deter your enemies. And that requires a strong defense budget.
I think, as well, we owe—we’re getting into the trillions of dollars. And we’re anticipated to get to, in the next decade, I don’t know, it could be $40 trillion in debt. It’s not sustainable. The interest on the debt, right now, is larger than the defense budget. Europe is suffering the same malaise. But the idea of modern monetary theory—the Left told us—or that since we are loaning the money to ourselves and bondholders, it’s turned out to be bogus.
The fact is we ran up all of this debt because the Fed, during the Obama and first Trump administration and the first Biden administration, kept interest rates low, so we borrowed billions, trillions of more dollars, at rates as low as 2% or 3%. And now the rates came up. And we saw what a catastrophic idea that was when we have to service it.
I don’t think anybody’s gonna make the argument that we need more socialist entitlement programs funded by borrowed money. If you borrow the money and it’s unsustainable, you only have three choices: you can default on it and ruin the nation’s credit rating, you can confiscate money, or you can inflate your way out of it.
There’s a fourth, but I don’t see Europe, yet, learning that lesson: You can grow your economy and get greater revenues. That’s what we’re trying to do in the United States.
Fifth, finally, very quickly, I think diversity, equity, and inclusion has sort of been exhausted. It’s showed not to be unworkable, that is, how do you determine who is a victim and part of the victim/victimizer binary, historical grievances? If you’re Latino or black or Asian, do you prove that somebody was mean to you? Your great-grandfather was a slave—great, great. It’s very hard, if you’re one-quarter white, half-Asian, one-quarter Latino, what particular group are you?
It was an emphasis on superficial appearance, contrary to the content of our character. It was on the color of your skin. That didn’t work out too well. It gave people exemptions, and it said that, I, psychologically, if I make a mistake or I don’t work hard or I wanna apply to Harvard, but I don’t have the SAT scores or the grades of other people, I should get that. Or if I’m in a pilot training program or I’m a surgeon and I don’t quite make the standards, there’s other criteria, kinda like the Russian commissar system, where if you were ideologically pure, then you were given exemptions from performance.
And so, I think we now see that DEI is disruptive, it’s discriminatory. And I think, after experimenting with this under the guise of affirmative action, but especially, the last four or five years, people are sick of it. It’s incoherent. And it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous. It puts people in key positions in the economy, where life and death matters, and they are promoted or assessed or retained on criteria other than merit.
And so, we can sum up by saying there’s four or five things that went full-bloom, full-blast under the Obama and Biden administrations. And I think President Donald Trump and this counterrevolution were able to show the American people that the trans fixation, the open borders, the idea of being pretty much disarmed, deficits—I call it deficit socialism—and DEI didn’t work out.
There was a laboratory United States that tried these things, and it hasn’t worked. And Europe, I think, would agree that it has to follow the same pathway of reform or it’s going to end up a Third World country.
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