Victor Davis Hanson: You’re Not a Socialist—You Just Chose a $200K Degree Over a Trade
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: So, Victor, let’s look at some of these primaries. We already talked a little bit about Francesca Hong, who lost to David Crowley, which was a good thing, but I think it was by a very small margin. And I don’t know the hope for the GOP in that primary, but you’ve suggested it’s not very good.
And then in Minnesota, we have a governor’s race and a Senate race that are very important. We might take the Senate. Michelle Tafoya.
Victor Davis Hanson: I like Michelle Tafoya.
Winc: Yes.
Hanson: I remember her when she was a network sideline newscaster. Sportscaster.
TRENDING ARTICLES
Winc: And she apparently has a pretty good chance against a hard-left candidate, Peggy Flanagan, so that will be a very interesting race.
Hanson: It will. She’s an underdog because it’s Minnesota. This, again, these socialists, the demography of it is the democratic socialists are 85% white and 70% with a degree. And they are focused in Minneapolis, Washington state, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, Denver, Chicago, Boston, New York, and Washington. They like big-city enclaves and urban areas, and they are degreed.
But they go to these schools, and they run up a couple hundred thousand dollars of debt. And then they rent apartments and they pay $4,000 or $5,000 a month for rent. And they love, as a single, the big-city dating, going to rock concerts, going to cultural parties and getting to know players and shakers and movers, and they’re very glib.
But given higher education today, and given in particular their degrees in psychology, sociology, public policy, gender studies, race studies, leisure studies, recreation, you name them, they’re poorly educated, but they’ve got a very strong sense of self. In other words, they’re ignorant and arrogant.
So, then they get in there, and they live there. It’s exciting for a couple years, and they look around and say, “I have a friend who I met at this party. He’s a lawyer, a corporate lawyer. Hey, I know a guy who works on Wall Street. Oh, you know what? I just know a guy and his wife. They’re both doctors at Boston General, and they have beautiful homes. And you know, I’m just like them.”
No, you’re not. They made choices that you didn’t.
“But I have $200,000 in debt, and houses are $2 million. This is so unfair. I’m a socialist now.”
Well, you may be a socialist now, but you would like to be a capitalist, and you can’t be because of the choices that you’ve made.
And so just this week, I live in a predominantly … Oh, I’ll say the last two or three weeks. I had one person come, and he was an electrician, Mexican American, a master electrician, and he’s very expensive to pay.
He works on weekends as an independent contractor, and he works with a salary, and electricians are very highly paid, and he’s living in his house.
I had another guy who was Hispanic, and he was a master gutter maker. I mean, he made the gutters on the house here. He had a machine to do it. And then he was very well paid, and he makes a lot of money. In fact, I won’t tell you his name or anything about him, but he wanted to show me his total income, and I would tell you that the income he made was equivalent to a provost or a dean at the CSU or UC system in Fresno County, of all places.
And then I don’t even ask the electrician. And then in addition to that, there’s a guy that came out and worked on the pump. I was out there with him, and I was talking to him.
And my point is, none of them are socialists. None of them are radicals. I would say they were all Trump voters because I talked to them, and my point is they have homes.
But you know what? They don’t live in San Francisco, and they don’t have any student debt, and they’re not unemployed. They’re turning down jobs. So there is a demand for those types of people who have skills, trade skills, but not a psych major.
And then I started to be curious because I always knew that the homeownership rate was 62% of the population living in their own homes. So I looked it up. I had to debate Piers Morgan. So I wanted to check my facts after I did, and I was correct. It’s 65%. It’s above 62.
So when everybody said, “Oh, the socialists are coming because of affordability,” and then I looked up the aggregate inflation rate. Under Donald Trump, the first year of his second term, and so far, it’s about 2.8, 2.9 that we know of. It’ll get higher because of oil. Under Joe Biden, the average was 5.3.
And that was not … And if you looked at what counted, not paper clips, but car insurance, house insurance, food, gas and diesel, the price of cars, the price of homes, they all went up over 21% over his four years.
So, this affordability, the Republicans have been really inept at trying to show everybody that we had this huge COVID-19 spike where the government just handed out money. We had all these low interest rates, and it sparked inflation.
And now they expect Donald Trump to lower that. You’re never going to lower that 20. It’s like a rat in a snake. It’s there. It’s making its way through the economy.
But my point is that you can’t say that. I was on Piers Morgan, and I tried to be … He said, “Well, affordability, you can see why … ”
I said, “No, I can’t see why they’re socialists. I see people working all the time across America that aren’t socialists. And they don’t do what these people do. They go out, and they look at the job market, and they say, ‘Do they need sheetrockers? Do they need plumbers? Do they need electricians? Do they need high school’ Whatever it is. And then they say, ‘I want to get married, and I want to have children. Can I do that in New York?’ No. ‘Can I do that in Denver?’ No. ‘Can I do that in San Francisco?’ No. ‘Can I do that in P—’”
I go to Palo Alto, right? And I have colleagues that work at Stanford, and they tell me they’re hurting because they’re younger and they can’t buy a house. Well, a 1,500-square-foot home is $3 million. Over here in Fresno County, you could probably buy it in Selma for $220,000. They would never live here.
So, yes, it’s unaffordable if you have these certain demands, you know, that I have to live in this area, and I have to have this type of house, and I have to have this type of job.
But, you know … Another guy came. He’s looking at my foundation, and he’s very happy. He’s doing very well. But I thought, wow, he has no student debt, and he likes …
I said, “What do you do every day?”
“I crawl into crawl spaces.”
And I said, “Well, I know my crawl space.”
And he said, “Victor, you have 3 feet of crawl space. You have a lot of ducting, but that’s heaven compared to where I go under.”
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
