Victor Davis Hanson: The Democratic Party’s Socialist Divide

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the latest edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc: All right, Victor. So we had primaries. Speaking of lots of money spent, and I think in Michigan they had the largest amount spent on a primary ever, and that was about $80 million. And that primary was between Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed. Apparently Haley Stevens spent up to $70 million, and she lost.

It seems to–well, I was wondering your thoughts on that primary in particular. It seems to me it’s a bellwether for the problems in the Democratic Party, because they really split, the Democratic Party split over those two candidates.

Victor Davis Hanson: If you look at the number of Michigan voters—Republican, Independent, Democratic—those who voted for El-Sayed, it’s a very small number, relatively.

But they got organized for the midterms. 

And it’s very funny because if you are a socialist-communist–and I’m not using that as a pejorative term, as when Mamdani says that he wants to seize the means of production or take property from people if he finds they’re poor landlords, etc., etc. And the agenda of the Democratic Socialists of America is take over utilities, break up corporate agriculture, seize people’s property. So, it’s not a slur.

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But the thing about all these people is, if you’re an activist like Hasan Piker or these other democratic socialists, then they come across as communist. However, if you’re running for office, you come off not even as a socialist. So he was renouncing a lot of the things he was going to do. Oh, they’re just, I’m just gonna do this. And then when they take office, they are not even socialist—they’re communist.

And so, he will be, if he’s the elected senator, he will have a communist agenda.

The other thing is, we think these people are so charismatic and young. I listened today to AOC, and they had clips of her on YouTube. When she went over to the Security Council, she was like a deer in the headlights. She couldn’t even explain U.S. foreign policy. She just says, well, and, uh, yes. She couldn’t talk.

And she’s not well-spoken. She’s not well-educated. She doesn’t have a lot of experience. I don’t see her as dynamic. I see her more like a Kamala Harris candidate.

And then everybody said Hasan Piker is the podcaster of the left, and he’s brilliant, and he’s tough. And I watched seven or eight appearances where he’s not behind this microphone. And what he does is he takes his phone, his cell phone, and he just looks at it, and then he looks at the crowd, and he says, like, it’s like, you know. He looks like, like, and you know, he looks like, you know. And he like, he looks at, like, the phone, like, you know, talking. You know what I mean? Like, like. 

And that’s what he does. He has a vocabulary of maybe 800 words, maybe 300 more than Kamala Harris. But I was just stunned at how poor he comes across when he’s not reading a script, and he can’t talk extemporaneously. He has to get his talking points.

And so, these are not a formidable group of people. They keep saying they’re so talented.

And when you saw the head of the Democratic Socialists with Shannon Bream, I felt sorry for her. Shannon Bream just said, these are basically communist positions. And you thought that she would try to, yep, yep, we’re with that. Yep, yep.

And there’s the other thing about them. They’re so arrogant. Here we are in–going to be the 238th year of the republic, and these people come over to this country, not as immigrants of the past who came legally. They were gracious. They wanted to assimilate, acculturate, integrate. They loved the system. They wanted to adapt to it.

Hasan Piker and El-Sayed and Mamdani and Chevalier and Quiros—they come over here either in the first or second generation, and then they start telling America what’s wrong with their system. We don’t like the Electoral College. We don’t like the nine-person court. We want two more states. We want to get rid of the Senate. We want to get rid of the presidency. This is a terrible system.

Why did you come over if it was so terrible? And why is it so wealthy? And Hasan, how did you get a $3 million home in West Hollywood? Why are you driving a Porsche? Mamdani, why did you leave your settler-colonial elitism as the 1% that controlled the money in Uganda and you come over here as a child? If it was such a terrible system, how did your parents get so much money in the United States? Ph.D.s? Come on.

And Ro Khanna now is doing the same thing. How did your father-in-law get $200 million? Why is your wife driving a $200,000 automobile?

So my point is they do very well, and they show nothing but ingratitude. And then they start lecturing Americans–and they’re Americans–what’s wrong with their country.

And it doesn’t go down well. It doesn’t. People–and they’re not formidable. They’re not educated. They’re arrogant, but they don’t know much about the country.

And I just don’t think they’re going to do well in a national election when independents—who poll about 20% in favor of socialism. Most of the independents are disaffected conservatives that bolted from the Republican Party, to tell you the truth. And they are not going to vote for a socialist, if they are honest that they’re socialists. But, you know, they may be like Joe Biden and just be a waxen effigy and then run as good old Joe Biden from Scranton and then outsource his whole agenda to socialists that destroyed the border and all that stuff they did.

Sami Winc: Yes. And can I add something? They’re also violent. Like El-Sayed saying they’re only going to listen when the ogre’s head is on a pike. Or, I can’t say anything because these people might be worried about the Ayatollah, who was a violent person. 

Victor Davis Hanson: I mean, yeah, he loved him. One of the reasons that he said that he wasn’t going to rejoice in his death, he admired somebody who killed 40,000 people.

It’s going to be very funny. I think everybody realizes, or should realize, what Marxists are. They like violence. They say they’re for the people and they want to empty–oh, we don’t, we’re going to abolish the prisons.

If you’re a homeless person and you go into one of Mamdani’s stores, and it’s 30% off, and you do what you do to a capitalist owner—you get your little trench coat and you open it and you start putting steaks in there—they’re going to go after you and they’re going to prosecute you.

And it’s not going to be, Well, it’s less than $950, shoplifting. No, that’s a felony against the people. That’s how they’re going to look at it. You watch that.

They’re capitalists, is what I’m saying, that masquerade as communists. I only say that because they live like capitalists. They’re wealthy people. You know, you see Jane Fonda from her mansion today deploring poor people and homeless people in Los Angeles. They’re not, open up your mansion.

You know, when Stanford University and all these universities during Trump’s first term were saying Trump has cages and these people are coming across the border and they have nowhere to stay and he’s putting them in–those were the Obama detention cells that they used for a while.

And then you thought, well, wait a minute. There are a million and a half students—more than that—that are not in school right now in the summer. And Stanford and Harvard and Princeton, I bet they could house 20,000 people. And so you should tell the undocumented or the homeless, your champions want you at the university. Then you could have internships during the summer. You could say, you know what? We have Stanford Law School. We have a lot of interns. Now, we chased out a federal judge and yelled that his daughter might be raped. We kind of messed up his hair a little bit, but we’re here to give you legal counsel.

Then the head of the medical school says, oh, don’t leave us out. We have a lot of residents, and they’re woke, and we’re going to come in and give you cradle-to-grave health care, at least that kind of health care, while you’re on our campus. And then we’re going to have the professors, well, since you’re here and you’re illegal, now you’ve got a room and you’ve got food and you’ve got health care and legal advice, we’re going to tutor you so you can take free classes.

They never do that.