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 all practical purposes, there is no longer a Democratic Party, at least as we’ve known it for 50 to 100 years. What we’re witnessing in Washington as the opposition under Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries is something that we haven’t really seen before. It is a full-blown Socialist Revolutionary Party.
The players of that party that are running things are not even Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries. They’re people like [outgoing] congresswoman Jasmine Crockett. They’re people like Mr. [James] Talarico in Texas, Mr. [Zohran] Mamdani. Elizabeth Warren. The socialist Bernie Sanders, et cetera, et cetera.
They’re radical Leftists. And they believe in a mandated equality of result, perpetuated or completed by radically high taxes from people who have been successful and to transfer that money to people who have been unsuccessful. Not because of any fault of their own or any gift or success of the wealthy, but because of oppression.
And they’ve created a Marxist binary in the world. There’s 70%, the so-called, white population because they’ve confused and conflated race with class. That is the oppressor class. And the 30% that is the oppressed class.
And the victimized class feels that they have legitimate grievances against the other 70% for not having what they do. And therefore, the Democratic Party steps in and says that we will mandate an equality of result. That is the agenda. And you can see it on all fronts.
If people are poor, they want to come to the United States, then open the border. They should have a right to do that. And when they come to the United States, they can become better off than they were in Mexico or El Salvador or the Caribbean because they’re going to get entitlements. And those entitlements will be costly and expensive, fraud-ridden, as we’ve seen in California and Minnesota.
And that will require people to pay their, quote, fair share and higher taxes. Which is a good in itself. Not just because the money is transferred to the people who don’t have it through entitlements, but more importantly, you’re emasculating people who, quote unquote, “didn’t earn that.” “You didn’t build that,” as Elizabeth Warren said.
So that’s what the party is. You can see it on the border. You can see it with crime. They believe that crime is committed not by individuals who break existing laws, but by society, which created the conditions for crime.
And so, therefore, we see no-cash bail, or we see somebody who commits a heinous crime, and they’re let out. They’re either not jailed. They’re not indicted. They’re not convicted, and they’re not incarcerated, because of, I guess we would call it, critical legal theory.
Behind all of it, though, is, diversity, equity and inclusion. And this is what they’ve had a problem with because when the American public sees this, and they said, you’ve created a victim class that you represent, and then you’ve demonized the other 70% that are, so-called white, and people are saying, well, you’re on the wrong side of percentages.
Unless you can convince, as happened with Barack Obama’s candidacy, to get more white people to vote for him than maybe voted for Romney or John McCain. Or maybe more white people voted for Obama than they did for John Kerry, four years earlier. But the point is that it has nothing to do with class.
So, one of the problems that Democratic Socialists, or whatever these people call themselves, have is Mamdani’s a multimillionaire. His parents are multimillionaires. When he says he wants to go after white neighborhoods for equity, the wealthiest minority in the United States, today, ethnic minority, is Mamdani. It’s Indian Americans. Americans of Indian heritage.
And the next six or seven or eight ethnic groups are not white. And there is no direct relationship anymore between your skin color and your class status or your income. And so, if that’s not true, when you go after these people, then you are basically an out-and-out racist because they haven’t done anything to you. And the greatest number of people who are poor in the United States remain white.
Let’s just ask ourselves what happened to the Democratic Party. If we were to look at the ’92 and ’96 agendas at the Democratic Convention, and those were written by Doug Schoen and Mark Penn. It’s pretty much a Republican agenda now.
It was closed borders. Legal-only immigration. Strong support for unions. Trying juveniles who commit violent crimes as adults. Strong national defense. Balanced budget, achieved for four years under Bill Clinton, and with the help of Newt Gingrich. That’s all out the window. Anybody in the Democratic Party who espouses those views today would be considered a heretic or worse.
So between the Clinton phenomenon of ’92 to 2000, what happened? It’d be easy to say Barack Obama happened. That he ginned up latent racial tensions and grievances and used them for political purposes to get himself elected and reelected. That’s true.
But there were larger cosmic forces that created a Barack Obama. And the first, of course, was open borders. We have now 53 million people. It’s the largest in the history of the United States. In numbers, 16.2% of the United States resident population was not born in the United States.
Some of them are naturalized citizens, but as we’ve seen this last two weeks, whether it was the Old Dominion shooting or the attack on the synagogue or the IEDs that were thrown out in front of the New York governor’s mansion or the shooting in Austin, we have a problem with naturalized citizens.
They do not assimilate, acculturate or integrate in the way that they used to under the melting pot. And they formed constituencies for the Democratic Party. And they are told that you came here—and it doesn’t really matter under what auspices—if you’re part of the 53 million, and there’s probably 30 million, with the Biden additions that came illegally, you still had a right.
We don’t believe in borders, and therefore you come here. We will provide the entitlements. And we will water down voting laws. No voter ID, even though 70% of the American people want them. And you will be either a present or a future constituency.
So that was a big change. Demography is destiny, they told us. The new Democrat majority, they told us and that came true. That was a big factor in their rise.
The second thing was globalization. Globalization created two societies in the United States. The East Coast, from Massachusetts down to the Carolinas, looked out at the EU, and the West Coast, from Seattle to San Diego, looked out at Asia, the Tigers, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and, of course, mainland China.
And people who had particular skills that were globalized, and here they were in tech, insurance, investment, law, media, academia. They found that their audience, their constituency, was expanded from 300 million, let’s say 10 years ago, maybe 340 million now, to seven billion. But for those who mined or farmed or assembled or manufactured, they were outsourced offshore, or they couldn’t keep up with cheap imports.
This is what got Donald Trump elected, but it also explains the new Democratic Party. They used to rail about the importance of the middle class. They dropped that. That was the meme of Donald Trump. They found that by supporting the 30% DEI agenda and the globalized elite, they had a new constituency. And that was vast amounts of money. All of Silicon Valley and its $9 trillion in market capitalization, until recently, was put at the service of the Democratic Party.
So this party radicalized in two fashions. You brought in a lot of poor people, and you re-energized people of color to say that your problems were not your own, but they were committed by the deplorables, the irredeemables, the clingers, the chumps, the dregs, the garbage. And then you had the money to outspend your Republican candidates in vast numbers.
And more importantly, with the rise of left-wing big tech and the left-wing corporate boardroom and the left-wing academics, you could control institutions. The medium is the message.
So ABC, NBC, NPR, social media, Facebook, the old Twitter, you name it. There was a popular culture, professional sports. There was a monopoly on left-wing knowledge, and that was very, very valuable.
And finally, the old idea of integration, intermarriage, assimilation, the melting pot, that was not conducive to this new Socialist Democratic Party. They said, why would we bring in people who wanted to be American and wanted to identify essentially as American and only incidentally, in their former country?
We saw what happened, the Democrats said, in 1956 when we let in the Hungarians, anti-communist, they came over here. They assimilated as Americans. They became very, very conservative voters. We saw what happened in 1959 to 1980 when we let in all of these Cubans, who had been driven out by communism. They were very patriotic Americans. They assimilated, and they were a constituency that we didn’t like.
So, what we want to do is refabricate the immigration. Let in a lot of people, but not from particular countries that would mean they were successful, they had skills. We don’t want anybody from Europe. We don’t want anybody from Australia or the former British Commonwealth, such as New Zealand. We don’t want anybody coming in here, who is anti-communist as a refugee.
We want people who are poor and are accustomed to socialist countries and will come here and want more socialist benefits. That’s South America, Latin America, Africa, large parts of Asia. And they will be the constituency that allows us to have an unpopular message that existing Americans have never liked and do not like at all.
And the result was the Democrats can’t win elections with open, transparent balloting, one-day balloting, and they know it. But if you take over the institutions and you use this globalized financial power and you appeal to very, very wealthy people’s sense of noblesse oblige or guilt or whatever strategy you use, and you combine that with a mass of very poor people who came in very recently, many under illegal circumstances, you have a constituency that required one thing.
You had to give up the white middle working class. The union class that you used to champion. The Hubert Humphrey, John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman class. You despise those people. And we know that because you didn’t just give up on them and accept a globalized agenda and an expanded welfare state, but you created a vocabulary of disparagement.
As I said earlier, these were the clingers. These were the people who had no teeth in their head. These were the people who Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, texted about smelling up Walmart. All this disparagement for a class of people you despised, and I don’t think you’re going to win them back.
But just to finish, there is no Democratic party. There’s a Socialist Party. But it’s a very weird Socialist Party. It’s a pyramiddle party with a lot of very wealthy, globalized elites that run things at the top. Nothing in the middle of the pyramid. And then an expansive big base of poor people, of immigrants and of people who claim that they identify mostly in their diversity, equity, inclusion person, and not necessarily as a full-fledged American.
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