Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 543 ｜ How the West Was Lost ... and How to Win It Again ｜ Guest： Victor Davis Hanson

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Hope everyone's having a wonderful day. Today I am talking

00:00:15.660 to Victor Davis Hanson. You guys know him. We had him on the podcast last year, which

00:00:22.680 ended up being an extremely popular episode because the guy is brilliant. He is so interesting.

00:00:28.560 He seems to know everything about everything. And so my ability to kind of hone in on just

00:00:38.160 one subject or a few subjects to talk to him about in a matter of 30 minutes is limited.

00:00:45.080 But I try today. I try it. We're going to talk about his new book, The Dying Citizen. It is

00:00:52.760 not going to end as a depressing conversation about how America is over or anything like

00:01:00.980 that. It might start out. It might start out that way, talking about all of the things that

00:01:05.860 we are enduring. But we end this conversation with the hope of positive change. But first,

00:01:12.500 he is going to analyze in the very smart way that he does many of the issues that Americans

00:01:18.440 are uniquely facing today and how we got here. Then we'll talk solutions at the end. So

00:01:23.960 without further ado, here is our friend, Victor Davis Hanson.

00:01:28.900 Okay, thank you so much for joining us again. You recently wrote The Dying Citizen. Can you

00:01:35.160 tell us why you wrote the book?

00:01:36.620 Well, I wrote it mostly in 2019 and 2020, right before the outbreak of the virus. And then I

00:01:47.560 tried to update the bad year 2020 and 21 in an epilogue, an update at the end. But so whatever

00:01:55.860 was going on now that is depressing was going, I tried to cite things that were the precursors

00:02:03.520 of the mess we see today. And they were open borders, tribalism or the return of identity

00:02:09.980 politics, wokeness, and the decline of the middle class. So these were organic forces I felt that

00:02:16.740 were undermining citizens and reminding us how fragile citizenship was. And most people throughout

00:02:22.820 history across time and space had been, you know, subjects or slaves, or just residents without

00:02:28.660 particular rights and control of their own elected officials, if they had any. And then I also in the

00:02:34.780 second half of the book called it the postmodern assault on citizenship. And those were people who

00:02:40.260 were political activists, legal scholars, academics, who wanted to change the system. And one thing,

00:02:47.620 one chapter is on the unelected. These are the 2 million people in the federal government,

00:02:51.620 but specifically the hierarchy in Washington and the DOJ, IRS, FBI, CIA, Pentagon, who exercise,

00:03:00.640 I don't know, I guess we'd say judicial, executive, and legislative power all in one person.

00:03:05.740 And then I had final two chapters, one on what I call the evolutionaries. These are people who don't

00:03:11.200 believe human nature is static, that it's fluid, it's mobile, it can be improved if you give government

00:03:17.240 enough power. And they want to change the system because it hasn't given them the results they

00:03:21.600 wanted. And whether it's the Electoral College, or the filibuster, or the nine person Supreme Court,

00:03:29.580 or the 50 state union, they want to change the system according to their own ideas, even though a

00:03:35.040 lot of these traditions and customs and even constitutional law have 180, 233 years precedence of

00:03:43.320 traditional. And then finally, the globalists, these are mostly bi-coastal elites that really

00:03:48.360 profited with trade on a global scale in the 21st century, both with the EU on the East Coast mostly,

00:03:56.200 and with Asia on the West Coast. And they believe that they're citizens of the world, that harmony of

00:04:02.200 the economy on a global scale means we can have political centralization, the Davos elite, or the UN,

00:04:09.480 or whatever the particular transnational organization we talk about, it should have

00:04:15.800 precedence over the American voter, especially those voters on the heartland that sort of missed out

00:04:21.000 the elite felt on globalization due to their own culpability. Right. That's a book.

00:04:27.680 Right. Right. Well, thank you so much. And I'm interested to know, you started this in 2019. You said that

00:04:33.520 you've tried to update it. Do you think all the problems that you just listed got worse in 2020

00:04:39.560 and in 2021? Or do you think that they just kind of became more pronounced? Certainly what you just

00:04:46.240 said, that last part about the global elites really thinking that, you know, we can have this,

00:04:53.580 everyone becomes a global citizen. No one really cares about nationalistic pride. And certainly

00:04:58.140 nationalism they see as an affront to their ideology and their goals. That, I think, has become more

00:05:04.440 pronounced over the past couple of years. A lot of, you know, regular people have maybe opened up their

00:05:09.160 eyes when they hear language like the Great Reset and things like that. But from your perspective,

00:05:14.320 have you seen some of these issues worsen over the past couple of years?

00:05:19.120 Yeah. If I could use a simile, I think we had been implanting improvised explosive devices in our

00:05:25.680 society for years. And by that, I mean, the open border was an old issue. And so was the declining

00:05:32.900 economic and political power of the middle class. And so was identity politics. It was increasing.

00:05:39.940 People were identifying by their tribe as essential to who they were rather than incidental. And the

00:05:44.740 other things I mentioned, like the growth of the unelected or the attempt to change constitution.

00:05:50.780 But what happened in 2020-21 is we had blasting caps that set these things off. And maybe we would have

00:06:00.460 survived one or two of them, like maybe COVID and maybe the lockdown, the first in our history, a national

00:06:08.140 lockdown that put people inside their homes, depended on their computers for news or their televisions, which

00:06:14.100 wasn't unbiased. And maybe we could have survived the first artificially induced recession and huge

00:06:21.620 drop in GDP and unemployment because of that lockdown. Maybe we could have survived the George Floyd, 0.51

00:06:28.900 post-George Floyd death rioting. But I don't know. But when you added on to that, it was an election year

00:06:35.940 and the hatred of Donald Trump and legitimate concerns that certain state legislatures rules

00:06:42.980 about voting were overturned. And then you add that 102 million people voted absentee. You add that to

00:06:50.500 those straws to the camel's back and it just collapsed. And so we weren't as resilient as we had been to

00:06:57.620 withstand these pressures. But on the other hand, we've never had such a perfect storm of pressures

00:07:02.580 before. So it's hard to know cause and effect. But I do think something about the election year,

00:07:09.940 something about the hatred and the bias of the media toward Trump, and then something about the

00:07:17.060 way in which we voted made the COVID and George Floyd problems just be overwhelmed the system that was

00:07:24.420 weakening anyway. Do you think that it's accurate to describe the current Democratic Party or just

00:07:35.300 progressives in general as anti-citizen, anti-citizenship, or certainly national citizen? And if so,

00:07:48.260 how do you think that plays out in some of the policies that they put forth?

00:07:51.940 Yeah. Well, I think that when I say citizen, what distinguishes the citizen from a resident?

00:07:59.300 And there was always about six or seven unique privileges and responsibilities that the citizen

00:08:05.380 took on. One was, of course, he served in the military, she served in the military. Another was

00:08:11.380 they were uniquely eligible for federal support. Another was they alone in the modern era voted in

00:08:17.620 elections. They alone held office. They alone could go to and from their own country without asking

00:08:23.540 permission. They had passports. But if you look, and they could hold office, as I said. But if you look

00:08:28.900 at that, I can't think of a single privilege that's left other than holding office. Now we hear that

00:08:35.220 illegal aliens they've been doing in California for years are going to vote in municipal and state 0.76

00:08:39.780 elections. Maybe not yet because against the law in federal elections. So we are eroding the idea of

00:08:46.580 citizenship. And that's because mostly of numbers. When you look at what Bill or Hillary Clinton said in

00:08:53.620 the 1996 Democratic Convention during his reelection nomination, it was tougher than anything Donald Trump

00:09:01.700 said about borders. They were talking about illegal alien as a plague, alien influxes as a plague upon the land

00:09:09.940 that they had enforced a law. Chuck Schumer outdid them. But when you have 24, 25 million maybe people here

00:09:18.420 illegally residing or 2 million people are scheduled to come across in the 12 months of Joe Biden's first year in the

00:09:25.780 presidency. Or you have 50 million people who were not born in the United States, legal residents and illegal.

00:09:32.900 Or in California, 27% of the population was not born in the United States. Then these policies reflect that

00:09:40.260 in a democracy, they reflect that constituency. And so the Democratic Party says, you know, with open borders,

00:09:46.180 it's a long term investment. People come across, they have small children, they get amnesties, or they vote in

00:09:52.180 local elections, or they become naturalized. They're wards of the state when they arrive. They feel

00:09:57.700 indebted. They have field to us. It's a good investment. We flip California from red to blue.

00:10:04.260 There'll never be a Reagan. There'll never be a Pete Wilson. There'll never be a George

00:10:08.420 Tickmation. There'll never be an Arnold Schwarzenegger governor again. That's the model. And they flip

00:10:14.180 Nevada, New Mexico, maybe Arizona and Texas, surely Colorado, maybe Georgia. So in their view,

00:10:20.340 open borders are deliberate. And they feel it's a long term strategy to change the system. If they

00:10:27.300 can't change the laws, then they can change the demography. And they're very open about it.

00:10:32.580 I don't think there's any effort to hide what they're doing.

00:10:35.860 But they do, they will argue, for example, they always go after Tucker Carlson for

00:10:42.420 for spreading some kind of conspiracy theory that they think is, or that they call white nationalist,

00:10:48.100 that they would say, oh, he's arguing that they're trying to, that we're trying to reduce

00:10:52.900 the white population and replace it with a brown population. But like you said, they are open that

00:10:58.580 demographic change is good for the Democratic Party and open borders lead to that demographic change. 0.91

00:11:05.860 And so why do they kind of play this game, do you think, of simultaneously trying to hide and

00:11:11.460 obscure that strategy from happening and calling anyone who calls it out racist while simultaneously

00:11:17.620 they are open about it? They they want this. They want citizenship to be more flux for the reasons

00:11:24.260 that you just listed. Well, we should remember people like Joy Reid celebrate

00:11:30.500 any statistic that shows the so-called white population is declining proportionally. So

00:11:35.860 I think they're happy about it. But you're right. Some of them try to be disingenuous about it.

00:11:40.740 And that's because when you look at the polls and you ask in any poll, left or right or international

00:11:46.340 Pew poll, any poll and you ask Americans, do you support illegal immigration and open borders?

00:11:51.860 They 65 percent say no. I think it's 65, 68 percent oppose Joe Biden's policies. And remember,

00:12:00.660 these are not just so-called white citizens, African-Americans, Mexican-Americans overwhelmingly

00:12:07.700 object to open borders. Now, why would that be? Because the Mexican-American diaspora is starting to 0.88

00:12:14.820 follow 19th century Italians who were poor Catholic from Southern Europe, faced discrimination, voted

00:12:21.700 entirely democratic. And then guess what? As they became more prosperous, assimilated, intermarried,

00:12:27.220 integrated. They became politically hard to gauge. We're starting to see that right now on towns in

00:12:34.100 Texas. And we're starting to see it here in California, in the San Joaquin Valley.

00:12:37.940 And so they're very they're very worried that if they say we want more people to come in and we

00:12:45.700 want like these open borders, then there's no public support for it. So what they do is to their own base

00:12:52.260 on CNN or MSNBC or in conventions or in literature. Yes, they say we have to have open borders.

00:12:58.180 And they're even candid about why. But when they get out in the public domain for a larger audience,

00:13:04.660 they like to say, you know, that that they are if you meet a secretary of New York,

00:13:09.940 who says the border is just as secure as it ever was. And, you know, they lie about it.

00:13:16.980 Right. And that's this part. But they do that on almost everything now, whether it's inflation

00:13:22.980 or they either ridicule the voter and say, oh, you know, worries about inflation or just for high

00:13:29.140 class people. Or if you talk about disruptions in the supply chain, they say, oh, you didn't get your

00:13:36.260 treadmill. Ha ha. Yeah. As if it's an elite thing. Right. Oil. When you say we should can't we pump

00:13:42.100 the two million barrels we lost under Biden's direct. Oh, that's hilarious. So they ridicule

00:13:48.340 people or they lie or they do both. Yeah, because they're not affected by it. They're not affected by

00:13:54.520 these policies that they put in place. It's the same thing with defunding the police or eliminating

00:13:59.340 single family housing zones. The people that are most affected by those policies are not the people

00:14:04.580 putting the policies in place. They are affected. They're they're mostly affecting working class and poor

00:14:10.660 people. It's also like Representative Cori Bush from Missouri when she was asked about the hypocrisy

00:14:16.580 of her wanting to advocate for defunding the police, even while she spends, I think it was two hundred

00:14:20.860 thousand dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars on personal security. She basically said, look, I'm

00:14:26.320 I'm different. I've got I've got different threats. I am, you know, a public figure. And so you do see

00:14:32.300 that kind of belittlement, that open condescension from them when it comes to specifically, like you said,

00:14:39.680 open border policy. My question would be, what changed? You talked about Bill Clinton and how

00:14:46.420 strong they were, at least rhetorically, when it came to when it came to immigration policy.

00:14:51.900 When did the Democratic Party realize, oh, well, if we're if we're less strict on this border policy,

00:14:58.100 we actually let more illegal people come in. Then that politically benefits us. When did that shift

00:15:05.620 happen and why? I think there were two things short term. They looked at California and they had said

00:15:12.300 California is where the conservative moment really started with Reagan. And they looked at it. You know,

00:15:19.620 it had four very popular Republican governors. Maybe even Arnold Schwarzenegger could be included

00:15:26.540 among them. But then they started to look in the 21st century. They said, you know, when Jerry Brown got

00:15:33.020 reelected and and there's no statewide officers in California and the Latino vote is now 70 percent

00:15:40.280 Democratic and we don't we have super majorities in both state legislatures. And at one point there

00:15:46.780 were only seven out of 53 Republican House seats that were from California. And they said, we hit on

00:15:54.020 something. This is a single party state. And so therefore, we don't have to be as careful about

00:16:01.840 opening borders because we all on the Democratic left side realize what we did with California,

00:16:06.720 because 42 percent of the the demographic are now Latino in California. And then they did something

00:16:13.280 even more importantly. And I think it's entirely underappreciated. I talk about in the book is that

00:16:18.040 they took this word diversity that was kind of an arcane academic word for people that were not

00:16:25.380 white. That's what it really meant in the academic world where I had to work. But Barack Obama mainstreamed

00:16:32.780 it. And he said, you know what? Class doesn't matter anymore. You can be a victim as long as you're not

00:16:38.920 white. So all of a sudden, the old binary of blacks at 12 percent and whites at 88 and maybe Latinos at six 0.86

00:16:47.700 or seven, it just grew enormously. So all of a sudden I noticed in the university that people who were

00:16:52.340 very wealthy from the Punjab or people who were very wealthy were immigrating from South Korea or Native

00:16:59.120 Americans that had entirely different issues. Everybody was now 33 percent victimized and it had

00:17:08.240 nothing to do with class. So the old Democratic Party that used to talk about class, class, class didn't want

00:17:14.160 to touch it. And they found that you could be a permanent victim. In the old days, you know, as

00:17:20.160 things got better, people got out of the middle class. And so they got to the upper middle class.

00:17:26.360 But now the Democrats on the left were saying it doesn't matter. You can be Oprah and your 90 million

00:17:32.380 dollar mansion talking to Meghan Markle and her 15 million dollar mansion, both in Montecito, and they can

00:17:38.880 trade stories help victimize. Or Michelle can walk out of her Martha Vineyard estate and say, you know, 1.00

00:17:44.240 I'm worried about my girls in a racist society. And so LeBron can, you know, be a lackey and be a

00:17:52.000 billionaire due to Chinese money and the oppression that goes on in China. And yet he can put on his

00:17:56.740 Malcolm X glasses and look like he's reading and he can start saying very racist things, attacking the

00:18:02.980 police, but he's the victim. And so that was a very powerful change in the Democratic Party. Then

00:18:08.960 finally, besides the end of class considerations, the Democratic Party, let's face it, it's the party

00:18:15.960 of the very poor and the very wealthy, the subsidized poor. And when you look at any indication,

00:18:22.080 congressional districts by income, zip codes by income, per capita income of registered Democrats,

00:18:27.980 even with the poor included versus Republicans, it's radically flipped. The Republican Party is

00:18:34.480 the party of the lower middle, the middle middle and the upper middle class. And the Democratic Party

00:18:39.600 is the very wealthy and the very poor. And the Democratic way of thinking is we really don't need

00:18:46.280 that much public opinion anymore. All we need to do is use our vast financial resources to help change

00:18:53.380 the system, change the system, and it will give the results in a way that we don't have to count on

00:19:00.380 necessarily having issues that resonate with 51% of the people. And what do I mean by that? I'm talking

00:19:06.000 whether it's George Soros and funding, pouring money into what were once obscured district attorney

00:19:11.540 campaigns in big cities. Nobody even thought that would happen. Or secretly or quietly or under the radar,

00:19:18.760 changing the state voting laws and careful, careful swing states, or maybe you could say Mark Zuckerberg

00:19:27.220 infusing $414 million in select precincts and swing states. So they had ways of massaging the vote that

00:19:34.440 were legal, but they reflected the vast resources. So they were the very wealthy and you're absolutely

00:19:39.540 right. They've never, the wealthy Democrat is never subject to the consequences of his own ideology.

00:19:46.540 So whether it's living in gated estates in Palo Alto or Menlo Park, and then damming the uselessness of

00:19:54.260 walls on the border, or just talking about, we don't need water transfers for agriculture. That's so

00:20:00.920 19th century, but we do need Hetch Hetchy water for the Bay Area from the Sierra. Almost every issue,

00:20:07.480 it's predicated on the idea that, remember when John Kerry said that when he was attacked for using a

00:20:12.400 private jet, when he was going to Davos and all over the world, he said, I need this so I can more effectively be an

00:20:20.000 advocate for reducing the carbon footprint of my private jet. And so that's who they are now. They're very wealthy

00:20:27.460 people and they're sort of like, the best image I always have is a medieval society. You know, I'm a historian and you

00:20:34.720 look at Europe between 800 and 1400 and that's exactly what it was. It was a feudal elite and a

00:20:41.920 keep. And then there were peasants, there weren't citizens. Right. And that's what, that's what they

00:20:47.120 are doing. They absolutely despise the middle class. They always have, but they feel the middle class lacks

00:20:52.420 the romance of the poor and it doesn't have the taste of the rich. They just can't stand it. You can

00:20:58.380 really see it when you remember the CNN reporter went to a Trump rally. He said, I have more teeth than

00:21:03.320 everybody put together. Wow. And then you, Anderson Cooper said something similar. I think it might

00:21:11.700 have been after January 6th. I don't know, but he said, Oh, um, they're just going to stay at the

00:21:17.200 Holiday Inn and eat Olive Garden. Yeah, he did. And, and Peter Stroke said he went to Walmart and you

00:21:23.460 could smell them. And then we had all those, uh, Joe Biden said, these are chumps or dregs. Obama 0.99

00:21:29.920 started it with deplorables and then, um, Hillary really trumped that with deplore. Um, he said

00:21:36.680 clingers, excuse me. And then he trumped that with deplorables and irredeemable. Right. Right. So we do

00:21:43.260 see that kind of antipathy towards the working class. And I guess that answers a lot of what you

00:21:48.120 just said answers a question that I think so many people are asking about the Biden presidency right

00:21:52.400 now is that why are they doubling down on things that are not ending well, that are not having a

00:22:00.360 good effect? Like why hasn't he gone back on his energy policy that is obviously making gas prices

00:22:06.600 rise? Why do they seem to be actually maybe okay with inflation? Why are they exacerbating our economic

00:22:12.880 problems by trying to push forth this unconstitutional vaccine mandate? Why does it seem like they just

00:22:21.100 don't care that the results of their actions are not good? And I guess you answered that in saying that

00:22:27.040 they don't really need the consent or the approval of most Americans. But my question is, okay, what are

00:22:34.780 they going to do though for the midterms? What are they banking on? Why are they doing so many things that

00:22:39.520 are so widely unpopular knowing that there will be another election? Yes. So I have, they have two

00:22:45.580 points of view. One is they're optimistic and one is their fallback position. Their optimistic view is

00:22:50.980 they're in a media bubble to begin with. But as Ben Rhodes said in the Obama administration,

00:22:57.360 the media are 30 somethings, they know nothing and we create echo chambers. So they feel they

00:23:02.260 manipulate and can count on the media. So we just talked about some examples. Inflation is just a,

00:23:08.180 the media will take care of it. They'll just say it's a high class worry. Borders, they'll just report

00:23:13.540 that everybody's whipping, the border patrols whipping innocence on the border. They've already done that

00:23:18.240 for us. Afghanistan, they'll say that it was one of the greatest logistical successes in our departure,

00:23:24.480 not an absolute humiliating defeat. You know, they can say the media Rittenhouse, he is a white 0.98

00:23:33.060 supremacist and he shot down three upstanding heroic people. He should, and he should, if he had any guts, 0.52

00:23:39.300 hit him with his fist or the Waukesha murders, it's a self-piloted SUV. It has nothing to do with race. 0.99

00:23:50.980 So they, they count on that media narrative and they've been very successful at that. I mean,

00:23:57.640 six out of the last seven popular votes, they have won at the presidential level, even though

00:24:04.660 at the local and state level, they haven't done very well. And even we haven't, we being the

00:24:10.880 conservatives or Republicans have not won 51% of the popular votes since 1988, since George W. Bush

00:24:17.400 beat Dukakis. But we've been very successful at local where the national media is not as important.

00:24:24.280 And Obama lost over 1100 state and local seats when he was president, even though the media loved him.

00:24:29.800 So that's their position that they're going to do this as ideologues and the media is going to make

00:24:35.860 the necessary judgment. Now, when that starts to fail and the media starts to be completely discredited

00:24:43.060 and it gets worried that, you know, they've got nuts on there, they're losing market share because

00:24:48.460 they are corporations. Then their attitude changes a little bit. It's, it's kind of like a Leninist

00:24:55.760 position. We don't have public opinion. We know that even the media can't lie anymore for us, but

00:25:01.080 we do have two years where we have control of the gut, all the branches of government, maybe not the

00:25:06.540 courts completely, but we do have a legislative and president and we're going to ram this stuff

00:25:11.520 through and we're going to institutionalize it. So they're going to run up in this 42 years,

00:25:17.820 at least they're going to run up another five to $7 trillion in debt. That's good from their way

00:25:23.680 of thinking. That's modern monetary theory, more inflation that erodes the power of capital that

00:25:29.080 have it and gives it to people who don't. They're going to cut back severely on fracking, horizontal

00:25:35.620 drilling, pipeline construction that will take years to redress. They have really set back racial 0.99

00:25:42.440 relations 50 years. They have made race essential to who Americans are, not incidental. They think that's

00:25:49.560 going to be institutionalized with critical race theory and stuff. So in their way of thinking,

00:25:54.340 okay, we were so humane and so morally superior that these dregs and their deplorables didn't 1.00

00:26:01.320 appreciate us if that's what they want. And even the media couldn't, couldn't snap these people out

00:26:06.000 of their stupor. So we're going to push this through and we got a year to do it. And then we're

00:26:10.620 going to laugh at them because it's going to take years and years to correct. And if we're successful

00:26:17.260 in getting rid of the filibuster or getting rid of the electoral college or getting more Supreme

00:26:23.000 Court justices, then it won't matter. Yes. I don't know if they're going to be able to pull it off or

00:26:27.960 not, because a lot of these Democratic House members and people in the Senate, a few of them

00:26:34.240 look at those polls and they say, you know what, Joe Biden's going to be gone, but I'm going to be

00:26:39.600 gone too. And I'm younger and I have a career. And so you're starting to see a few people,

00:26:44.700 but it's not really going to hit them until the polls get lower. I mean, when if Biden gets down

00:26:50.500 to 33, 32, and people start openly ridiculing them like they're beginning to do, and I think

00:26:57.200 that is on the horizon, then I think you'll see a mass defection before the midterm.

00:27:01.960 Right. Do you think that that will allow the country? I mean, it's just one, it's just one 1.00

00:27:11.060 election. Next year is just one election. But do you think that that could spell any kind of

00:27:17.240 course correction for the country? I mean, your book is titled The Dying Citizen, but it's not

00:27:23.540 the dead citizen. So is there hope for turning things around? It almost sounds like from your

00:27:31.400 second answer, talking about everything that America has endured, just the burdens that have

00:27:35.660 been placed on America, America's cohesiveness over the past couple of years, it kind of sounds like

00:27:40.980 you do not think that we can course correct. I'm optimistic, actually. And I'll tell you why.

00:27:48.800 Most of the people that I speak to that are mobilizing and getting upset about things are young

00:27:55.300 people. And another group, because I live in a community that's about 95% Mexican-Americans,

00:28:02.140 and I think about a third of them are here illegally from Mexico. And they're not from northern Mexico,

00:28:07.440 as happened in the 1950s. They're from southern Mexico, the impoverished indigenous people's part 1.00

00:28:13.340 of Mexico. And I watched that group vote consistently democratic my entire life. And they're not now.

00:28:22.300 45% of that group, according to exit polls, voted to recall Gavin Newsom. That was higher than

00:28:30.780 the white vote. And when you look at Mexican-American males, it was over 50%. And that's because when you 0.80

00:28:38.740 have open borders, and you have people coming from Oaxaca into your schools, and there's gang members,

00:28:45.120 they beat up people who don't speak Spanish who are Mexican-American. They increase criminality. 0.96

00:28:51.340 They don't follow the law. They burden local tax bases. So a lot of people say to when you talk to

00:28:59.380 them, I'm speaking to somebody, I have Mexican-American members in my own family. And, you know, why do

00:29:05.480 people have to wait two hours in a dialysis clinic, when somebody from Oaxaca just walks across the border,

00:29:11.800 and then the line gets twice as long, and there's not enough facilities to handle that. So these are real

00:29:17.020 concerns. We saw it in Texas as well, along the border. So I see groups that the Democrats count 0.74

00:29:23.940 on as constituents. And they're getting, they're getting very angry. The other group is, as you

00:29:30.140 probably know, as a, as I think, as I remember, you're a mom yourself, and is that younger moms and

00:29:39.460 suburbanites, and I have a daughter probably about your age with three children, one of whom has special

00:29:44.160 needs is that while she is apolitical and has been apolitical, when she gets the school shut down,

00:29:51.240 and she sees the deterioration in her special needs daughter, or when she goes to a beach in California,

00:29:57.540 and somebody comes up to her from the left and screams at her that her five-year-old who's severely

00:30:03.180 disabled doesn't have a mask on and starts berating her, then, or she goes to the park, and she sees

00:30:10.560 needles, and her child is worried about, she's worried about whether she can step on a needle, 0.56

00:30:14.780 or the homeless people across the street set a fire and the wind blew toward her. What I'm getting

00:30:20.700 at is we're reaching the point of a kind of a systems collapse, and a lot of people who were

00:30:25.940 either apolitical or just independent or voted Democratic because they were tired of Donald Trump's

00:30:31.640 tweets, they're starting to say, you know what, this is crazy. I get on a plane, and I don't know

00:30:37.640 if I'm going to get to my destination. I go to the store, and I can't buy a turkey. I want to buy a

00:30:43.940 car, and instead of finding a car, they call me up, the car dealer, and wants to buy my used car, and I

00:30:50.560 can't afford gasoline, and what's happened? It all happened in a year, so I think there's a lot of

00:30:57.020 constituencies that the Republican Party never counted on that are looking toward the Republican Party, and I

00:31:03.120 just hope that we don't go back to Romneyism, that the Republican Party said, well, we've got to get

00:31:10.900 Paul Ryan back here, because if they do that, that's suicidal. They need to be a populist, nationalist,

00:31:18.500 conservative, culturally conservative party that appeals on class affinities to people that are not

00:31:25.200 all white, and if they can do that, they're going to be even more conservative than they were under

00:31:29.480 Romney or McCain or the Bushian. Absolutely. I could not agree with you more, and I would love

00:31:35.480 to have you back to talk about that last part that you just talked about, what Republicans

00:31:39.380 can do better, because if Republicans haven't won the popular vote since 1988, yes, a lot of that has

00:31:45.200 to do with the media, but okay, that is what it is, and so what can Republicans do to appeal to a

00:31:53.280 wider base that the Democrats may be losing? That's a big question I'd love for you to answer in the

00:31:57.800 future. For now, I'll let you go. Thank you so much. We will include the link to The Dying Citizen

00:32:02.720 in the description of this episode. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on.

00:32:08.920 Thank you for having me. Thank you.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - December 28, 2021

Ep 543 ｜ How the West Was Lost ... and How to Win It Again ｜ Guest： Victor Davis Hanson

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