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.
One question that came up constantly during this 250th anniversary Fourth of July celebration was whether we were gonna make it another 250 years, 500 years. We could be longer than the Roman Republic. Longer than the Roman Empire.
And to answer that question, you have to know what allowed us to get this far, and for those who don’t like us, what they would like to do to stop us.
And it turns out that the reasons that we survived 250 years and the reasons that we might survive another 250 years are precisely the areas where our critics would wish us to fail or who are actively trying to see that we fail.
Take the first one, our Constitution. What’s brilliant about the American Constitution is its federalism.
TRENDING ARTICLES
It outlines all the duties and prerogatives of the federal government, and then it says anything that is not relegated to the federal government is up to the states, and that’s the majority of human experiences. It doesn’t mean the states can fight one another or pass laws against one another or pass laws against the federal government.
The federal government has ultimate authority, but this federalism means that if California wants to tax 13.3% and Florida wants to tax 0%, then maybe 300,000 people a year will go to Florida and still enjoy the American experience, and vice versa.
You can go to any state in the country and what it really means is you’re having 50 separate experiments.
You’re all united by the federal government and the checks and balances of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But you have 50 different interpretations of them based on local and regional concerns, and that gives Americans a lot of choice, and that means when you’re disaffected and you’re angry at your lot in life, you have 49 other choices, and it’s been a wonderful way of easing tensions.
The second is that we have been the beneficiary of legal immigration. We take more immigrants than any place in the world, and people have remarked that as we speak, the people who created Google, for example, or Elon Musk, were all legal immigrants, and they came to the United States because this is the only place in the world where you would have a free market economy, a protection of private wealth, and an encouragement of the population to be successful and to take risk.
And it’s impossible to envision a Silicon Valley in the Muslim Middle East. It just wouldn’t happen. Wouldn’t happen. You couldn’t have a Harvard or Yale or Princeton in today’s China. They wouldn’t allow free speech. You wouldn’t have most of our American institutions in any other place.
And that means we get all of these legal immigrants, and they enrich our country if they come in diverse fashion, in numbers that can be assimilated legally with some knowledge of our country and preferably with English language fluency.
The other third reason is we were very lucky naturally. Once the United States, whether you like it or not, embraced Manifest Destiny and decided we were not going to be a continent of warring states as was Europe, 30 or 40 individual nations, but one uniform state in North America, then it was richly endowed for all of us.
We had mining, we had gold, we had silver, we had iron ore, we had almost… We even have rare minerals, rare earth minerals we have not fully tapped. We have oil, we have coal, we have hydroelectric. We have the richest energy nation in the world. We’re pumping more oil and gas than any other country in the history of the universe.
We have plentiful timber. We have plentiful farmland. We’re the largest farming producing country by the value of our exports and our domestic produce in the world. We have two huge coastlines, not to count the Gulf of America.
In other words, we’re protected from the insanity that goes on in Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, and we always have been.
So the sheer size of the American continent, its role in American history as a frontier, its role as a safety valve where people could head west, young men, if they were disaffected by events on the East Coast, and they could make a fortune or make a livelihood farming or in timber or in minerals or in energy, you name it.
There’s a fourth reason that we’re very successful, and that is we have a free market, private property economy. We’re not a socialist, we’re not a communist country.
In other words, people flock to the United States from countries where there is no economic opportunity. It either is statism controlled by the state or it’s crony capitalist, and that’s why we have the most billionaires in the world.
China has more people than we do, four times more people. Russia has twice, three times the territory, but we have more people in the affluent class.
And finally, we have a middle class. Our middle class is the largest in the world. We’re not a pyramidal society of a few rich people on top that use their wealth for special dispensations or to affect the government or a mass of poor who are subsidized and always demanding entitlements.
Free middle class. Now, those are our strengths.
So if you wanted to hurt the United States or to ensure that it would not last 250 years, what would you do to stop that? Well, the first thing that I would do is I would start questioning the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. So what do we see now from, for example, the left?
They’re always attacking the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. They want to pack the court. They want to get rid of the filibuster. It is in the Constitution, the Electoral College. They want to ban or destroy the Electoral College.
They want to bring in two new states specifically, not one conservative and one liberal like the old Alaska-Hawaii compromise, but two liberal new states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., and get four senators.
Anytime you see anyone that wants to alter the system like that, you know that they don’t have the best interest of the United States because the system has worked for 250 years in most of these cases.
The second thing is you would want to, as I said earlier, you would want to say, We don’t want legal-only immigration. We want anybody to come in. So we have 30 million illegal immigrants right now. Ten to 12 million came in under Joe Biden. We have no idea who they are. You walk across the border.
Is he a criminal? I don’t know. Is he Albert Einstein? I don’t know. Does he have COVID? I don’t know. We were vaccinating in a mandatory fashion Americans in 2020 while people were flooding across in 2020, ’21, ’22, flooding across the border without border security.
And today, even though legal immigration has been the bulwark of what we’ve seen, we are getting immigrants who even come in legally and have nothing but hostile attitudes toward their generous host.
I’m thinking now of you, Zohran Mamdani, and your followers who can’t say a good word about the United States even though it welcomed you with open arms and many people helped make your family even wealthier than it was when it arrived.
If you also wanted to damage the United States, then you would look at what I just talked about, natural resources. You would say no mining. We’re in a problem right now with rare earths. We’re short. They’re critical to our economy. China has a monopoly, but we have some of the most abundant rare earth minerals in the world and we’ve been prohibited from using them.
We have the richest deposits of oil. Until recently, we did not develop them all. We did not develop coal in the proper way.
Our farming sector, the best and most efficient in the world, is under attack by environmentalists who want to cut off the water here in California.
I’m speaking from the richest agricultural county in the United States, Fresno County, and yet it needs water that has been sent out on the San Joaquin River into the ocean.
If you also wanted to destroy the United States or see it not last too much longer, you would kind of assault the middle class.
You would look at the United States as a binary, a Marxist binary. It is comprised not by class but by race. So 70%, 65% are white oppressors. They are mostly white male, to be more particular, or more sensational, white male Christian heterosexuals, or the white race or whatever we call these silly terms.
They are the exploiter, victimizer, and everybody on the other side is the victimized or oppressed. This is the binary that Zohran Mamdani and people like him in the Democratic Socialists of America use to alienate and divide the country, and it’s worked very well.
But in between those two racial binaries is a class system in which the middle class still is the largest class and was the exact form, shape of a class system that the founders thought would be essential to republican government.
And then finally, of course, one of our greatest strengths is we have institutionalized a free market private property economy. Do away with that, and we go the way of the old Soviet Union or Cuba or Venezuela.
And what do we see now? We have people in the Democratic Socialists of America that want to confiscate property, get the means of production, take over tenant-landlord relationships, and absorb the private sector into the state.
If that happens, we will be impoverished.
So we can make it another 250 years if we do what we did the last 250 years. But if we let people destroy those strengths that I enumerated, then we won’t last another 50 years.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
Read the first chapter of The Woketopus right now for FREE
Today, even with President Trump’s victory, leftist elites have their tentacles in every aspect of our government.
The Daily Signal’s own Tyler O’Neil exposes this leftist cabal in his new book, The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.
In this book, O’Neil reveals how the Left’s NGO apparatus pursues its woke agenda, maneuvering like an octopus by circumventing Congress and entrenching its interests in the federal government.
You can read the first chapter of this new book for FREE in this eBook, The Woketopus: Chapter One using the secure link below.
TRENDING ARTICLES
The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you.
RELATED ARTICLES
Don’t miss the
Don’t miss the signal
