Ep 543 ｜ How the West Was Lost ... and How to Win It Again ｜ Guest： Victor Davis Hanson
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Summary
Victor Davis Hanson joins us to talk about his new book, The Dying Citizen, and why he thinks the United States is in trouble. He also talks about how we got here and what we can do to turn things around.
Transcript
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Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Hope everyone's having a wonderful day. Today I am talking
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to Victor Davis Hanson. You guys know him. We had him on the podcast last year, which
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ended up being an extremely popular episode because the guy is brilliant. He is so interesting.
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He seems to know everything about everything. And so my ability to kind of hone in on just
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one subject or a few subjects to talk to him about in a matter of 30 minutes is limited.
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But I try today. I try it. We're going to talk about his new book, The Dying Citizen. It is
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not going to end as a depressing conversation about how America is over or anything like
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that. It might start out. It might start out that way, talking about all of the things that
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we are enduring. But we end this conversation with the hope of positive change. But first,
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he is going to analyze in the very smart way that he does many of the issues that Americans
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are uniquely facing today and how we got here. Then we'll talk solutions at the end. So
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without further ado, here is our friend, Victor Davis Hanson.
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Okay, thank you so much for joining us again. You recently wrote The Dying Citizen. Can you
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Well, I wrote it mostly in 2019 and 2020, right before the outbreak of the virus. And then I
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tried to update the bad year 2020 and 21 in an epilogue, an update at the end. But so whatever
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was going on now that is depressing was going, I tried to cite things that were the precursors
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of the mess we see today. And they were open borders, tribalism or the return of identity
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politics, wokeness, and the decline of the middle class. So these were organic forces I felt that
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were undermining citizens and reminding us how fragile citizenship was. And most people throughout
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history across time and space had been, you know, subjects or slaves, or just residents without
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particular rights and control of their own elected officials, if they had any. And then I also in the
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second half of the book called it the postmodern assault on citizenship. And those were people who
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were political activists, legal scholars, academics, who wanted to change the system. And one thing,
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one chapter is on the unelected. These are the 2 million people in the federal government,
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but specifically the hierarchy in Washington and the DOJ, IRS, FBI, CIA, Pentagon, who exercise,
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I don't know, I guess we'd say judicial, executive, and legislative power all in one person.
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And then I had final two chapters, one on what I call the evolutionaries. These are people who don't
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believe human nature is static, that it's fluid, it's mobile, it can be improved if you give government
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enough power. And they want to change the system because it hasn't given them the results they
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wanted. And whether it's the Electoral College, or the filibuster, or the nine person Supreme Court,
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or the 50 state union, they want to change the system according to their own ideas, even though a
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lot of these traditions and customs and even constitutional law have 180, 233 years precedence of
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traditional. And then finally, the globalists, these are mostly bi-coastal elites that really
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profited with trade on a global scale in the 21st century, both with the EU on the East Coast mostly,
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and with Asia on the West Coast. And they believe that they're citizens of the world, that harmony of
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the economy on a global scale means we can have political centralization, the Davos elite, or the UN,
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or whatever the particular transnational organization we talk about, it should have
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precedence over the American voter, especially those voters on the heartland that sort of missed out
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the elite felt on globalization due to their own culpability. Right. That's a book.
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Right. Right. Well, thank you so much. And I'm interested to know, you started this in 2019. You said that
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you've tried to update it. Do you think all the problems that you just listed got worse in 2020
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and in 2021? Or do you think that they just kind of became more pronounced? Certainly what you just
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said, that last part about the global elites really thinking that, you know, we can have this,
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everyone becomes a global citizen. No one really cares about nationalistic pride. And certainly
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nationalism they see as an affront to their ideology and their goals. That, I think, has become more
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pronounced over the past couple of years. A lot of, you know, regular people have maybe opened up their
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eyes when they hear language like the Great Reset and things like that. But from your perspective,
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have you seen some of these issues worsen over the past couple of years?
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Yeah. If I could use a simile, I think we had been implanting improvised explosive devices in our
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society for years. And by that, I mean, the open border was an old issue. And so was the declining
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economic and political power of the middle class. And so was identity politics. It was increasing.
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People were identifying by their tribe as essential to who they were rather than incidental. And the
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other things I mentioned, like the growth of the unelected or the attempt to change constitution.
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But what happened in 2020-21 is we had blasting caps that set these things off. And maybe we would have
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survived one or two of them, like maybe COVID and maybe the lockdown, the first in our history, a national
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lockdown that put people inside their homes, depended on their computers for news or their televisions, which
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wasn't unbiased. And maybe we could have survived the first artificially induced recession and huge
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drop in GDP and unemployment because of that lockdown. Maybe we could have survived the George Floyd,
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post-George Floyd death rioting. But I don't know. But when you added on to that, it was an election year
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and the hatred of Donald Trump and legitimate concerns that certain state legislatures rules
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about voting were overturned. And then you add that 102 million people voted absentee. You add that to
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those straws to the camel's back and it just collapsed. And so we weren't as resilient as we had been to
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withstand these pressures. But on the other hand, we've never had such a perfect storm of pressures
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before. So it's hard to know cause and effect. But I do think something about the election year,
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something about the hatred and the bias of the media toward Trump, and then something about the
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way in which we voted made the COVID and George Floyd problems just be overwhelmed the system that was
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weakening anyway. Do you think that it's accurate to describe the current Democratic Party or just
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progressives in general as anti-citizen, anti-citizenship, or certainly national citizen? And if so,
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how do you think that plays out in some of the policies that they put forth?
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Yeah. Well, I think that when I say citizen, what distinguishes the citizen from a resident?
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And there was always about six or seven unique privileges and responsibilities that the citizen
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took on. One was, of course, he served in the military, she served in the military. Another was
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they were uniquely eligible for federal support. Another was they alone in the modern era voted in
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elections. They alone held office. They alone could go to and from their own country without asking
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permission. They had passports. But if you look, and they could hold office, as I said. But if you look
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at that, I can't think of a single privilege that's left other than holding office. Now we hear that
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illegal aliens they've been doing in California for years are going to vote in municipal and state
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elections. Maybe not yet because against the law in federal elections. So we are eroding the idea of
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citizenship. And that's because mostly of numbers. When you look at what Bill or Hillary Clinton said in
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the 1996 Democratic Convention during his reelection nomination, it was tougher than anything Donald Trump
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said about borders. They were talking about illegal alien as a plague, alien influxes as a plague upon the land
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that they had enforced a law. Chuck Schumer outdid them. But when you have 24, 25 million maybe people here
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illegally residing or 2 million people are scheduled to come across in the 12 months of Joe Biden's first year in the
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presidency. Or you have 50 million people who were not born in the United States, legal residents and illegal.
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Or in California, 27% of the population was not born in the United States. Then these policies reflect that
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in a democracy, they reflect that constituency. And so the Democratic Party says, you know, with open borders,
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it's a long term investment. People come across, they have small children, they get amnesties, or they vote in
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local elections, or they become naturalized. They're wards of the state when they arrive. They feel
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indebted. They have field to us. It's a good investment. We flip California from red to blue.
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There'll never be a Reagan. There'll never be a Pete Wilson. There'll never be a George
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Tickmation. There'll never be an Arnold Schwarzenegger governor again. That's the model. And they flip
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Nevada, New Mexico, maybe Arizona and Texas, surely Colorado, maybe Georgia. So in their view,
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open borders are deliberate. And they feel it's a long term strategy to change the system. If they
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can't change the laws, then they can change the demography. And they're very open about it.
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I don't think there's any effort to hide what they're doing.
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But they do, they will argue, for example, they always go after Tucker Carlson for
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for spreading some kind of conspiracy theory that they think is, or that they call white nationalist,
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that they would say, oh, he's arguing that they're trying to, that we're trying to reduce
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the white population and replace it with a brown population. But like you said, they are open that
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demographic change is good for the Democratic Party and open borders lead to that demographic change.
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And so why do they kind of play this game, do you think, of simultaneously trying to hide and
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obscure that strategy from happening and calling anyone who calls it out racist while simultaneously
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they are open about it? They they want this. They want citizenship to be more flux for the reasons
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that you just listed. Well, we should remember people like Joy Reid celebrate
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any statistic that shows the so-called white population is declining proportionally. So
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I think they're happy about it. But you're right. Some of them try to be disingenuous about it.
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And that's because when you look at the polls and you ask in any poll, left or right or international
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Pew poll, any poll and you ask Americans, do you support illegal immigration and open borders?
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They 65 percent say no. I think it's 65, 68 percent oppose Joe Biden's policies. And remember,
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these are not just so-called white citizens, African-Americans, Mexican-Americans overwhelmingly
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object to open borders. Now, why would that be? Because the Mexican-American diaspora is starting to
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follow 19th century Italians who were poor Catholic from Southern Europe, faced discrimination, voted
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entirely democratic. And then guess what? As they became more prosperous, assimilated, intermarried,
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integrated. They became politically hard to gauge. We're starting to see that right now on towns in
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Texas. And we're starting to see it here in California, in the San Joaquin Valley.
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And so they're very they're very worried that if they say we want more people to come in and we
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want like these open borders, then there's no public support for it. So what they do is to their own base
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on CNN or MSNBC or in conventions or in literature. Yes, they say we have to have open borders.
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And they're even candid about why. But when they get out in the public domain for a larger audience,
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they like to say, you know, that that they are if you meet a secretary of New York,
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who says the border is just as secure as it ever was. And, you know, they lie about it.
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Right. And that's this part. But they do that on almost everything now, whether it's inflation
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or they either ridicule the voter and say, oh, you know, worries about inflation or just for high
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class people. Or if you talk about disruptions in the supply chain, they say, oh, you didn't get your
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treadmill. Ha ha. Yeah. As if it's an elite thing. Right. Oil. When you say we should can't we pump
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the two million barrels we lost under Biden's direct. Oh, that's hilarious. So they ridicule
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people or they lie or they do both. Yeah, because they're not affected by it. They're not affected by
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these policies that they put in place. It's the same thing with defunding the police or eliminating
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single family housing zones. The people that are most affected by those policies are not the people
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putting the policies in place. They are affected. They're they're mostly affecting working class and poor
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people. It's also like Representative Cori Bush from Missouri when she was asked about the hypocrisy
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of her wanting to advocate for defunding the police, even while she spends, I think it was two hundred
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thousand dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars on personal security. She basically said, look, I'm
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I'm different. I've got I've got different threats. I am, you know, a public figure. And so you do see
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that kind of belittlement, that open condescension from them when it comes to specifically, like you said,
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open border policy. My question would be, what changed? You talked about Bill Clinton and how
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strong they were, at least rhetorically, when it came to when it came to immigration policy.
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When did the Democratic Party realize, oh, well, if we're if we're less strict on this border policy,
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we actually let more illegal people come in. Then that politically benefits us. When did that shift
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happen and why? I think there were two things short term. They looked at California and they had said
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California is where the conservative moment really started with Reagan. And they looked at it. You know,
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it had four very popular Republican governors. Maybe even Arnold Schwarzenegger could be included
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among them. But then they started to look in the 21st century. They said, you know, when Jerry Brown got
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reelected and and there's no statewide officers in California and the Latino vote is now 70 percent
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Democratic and we don't we have super majorities in both state legislatures. And at one point there
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were only seven out of 53 Republican House seats that were from California. And they said, we hit on
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something. This is a single party state. And so therefore, we don't have to be as careful about
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opening borders because we all on the Democratic left side realize what we did with California,
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because 42 percent of the the demographic are now Latino in California. And then they did something
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even more importantly. And I think it's entirely underappreciated. I talk about in the book is that
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they took this word diversity that was kind of an arcane academic word for people that were not
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white. That's what it really meant in the academic world where I had to work. But Barack Obama mainstreamed
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it. And he said, you know what? Class doesn't matter anymore. You can be a victim as long as you're not
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white. So all of a sudden, the old binary of blacks at 12 percent and whites at 88 and maybe Latinos at six
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or seven, it just grew enormously. So all of a sudden I noticed in the university that people who were
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very wealthy from the Punjab or people who were very wealthy were immigrating from South Korea or Native
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Americans that had entirely different issues. Everybody was now 33 percent victimized and it had
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nothing to do with class. So the old Democratic Party that used to talk about class, class, class didn't want
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to touch it. And they found that you could be a permanent victim. In the old days, you know, as
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things got better, people got out of the middle class. And so they got to the upper middle class.
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But now the Democrats on the left were saying it doesn't matter. You can be Oprah and your 90 million
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dollar mansion talking to Meghan Markle and her 15 million dollar mansion, both in Montecito, and they can
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trade stories help victimize. Or Michelle can walk out of her Martha Vineyard estate and say, you know,
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I'm worried about my girls in a racist society. And so LeBron can, you know, be a lackey and be a
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billionaire due to Chinese money and the oppression that goes on in China. And yet he can put on his
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Malcolm X glasses and look like he's reading and he can start saying very racist things, attacking the
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police, but he's the victim. And so that was a very powerful change in the Democratic Party. Then
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finally, besides the end of class considerations, the Democratic Party, let's face it, it's the party
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of the very poor and the very wealthy, the subsidized poor. And when you look at any indication,
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congressional districts by income, zip codes by income, per capita income of registered Democrats,
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even with the poor included versus Republicans, it's radically flipped. The Republican Party is
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the party of the lower middle, the middle middle and the upper middle class. And the Democratic Party
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is the very wealthy and the very poor. And the Democratic way of thinking is we really don't need
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that much public opinion anymore. All we need to do is use our vast financial resources to help change
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the system, change the system, and it will give the results in a way that we don't have to count on
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necessarily having issues that resonate with 51% of the people. And what do I mean by that? I'm talking
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whether it's George Soros and funding, pouring money into what were once obscured district attorney
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campaigns in big cities. Nobody even thought that would happen. Or secretly or quietly or under the radar,
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changing the state voting laws and careful, careful swing states, or maybe you could say Mark Zuckerberg
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infusing $414 million in select precincts and swing states. So they had ways of massaging the vote that
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were legal, but they reflected the vast resources. So they were the very wealthy and you're absolutely
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right. They've never, the wealthy Democrat is never subject to the consequences of his own ideology.
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So whether it's living in gated estates in Palo Alto or Menlo Park, and then damming the uselessness of
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walls on the border, or just talking about, we don't need water transfers for agriculture. That's so
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19th century, but we do need Hetch Hetchy water for the Bay Area from the Sierra. Almost every issue,
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it's predicated on the idea that, remember when John Kerry said that when he was attacked for using a
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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
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advocate for reducing the carbon footprint of my private jet. And so that's who they are now. They're very wealthy
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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
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look at Europe between 800 and 1400 and that's exactly what it was. It was a feudal elite and a
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keep. And then there were peasants, there weren't citizens. Right. And that's what, that's what they
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are doing. They absolutely despise the middle class. They always have, but they feel the middle class lacks
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the romance of the poor and it doesn't have the taste of the rich. They just can't stand it. You can
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really see it when you remember the CNN reporter went to a Trump rally. He said, I have more teeth than
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everybody put together. Wow. And then you, Anderson Cooper said something similar. I think it might
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have been after January 6th. I don't know, but he said, Oh, um, they're just going to stay at the
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Holiday Inn and eat Olive Garden. Yeah, he did. And, and Peter Stroke said he went to Walmart and you
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could smell them. And then we had all those, uh, Joe Biden said, these are chumps or dregs. Obama
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started it with deplorables and then, um, Hillary really trumped that with deplore. Um, he said
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clingers, excuse me. And then he trumped that with deplorables and irredeemable. Right. Right. So we do
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see that kind of antipathy towards the working class. And I guess that answers a lot of what you
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just said answers a question that I think so many people are asking about the Biden presidency right
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now is that why are they doubling down on things that are not ending well, that are not having a
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good effect? Like why hasn't he gone back on his energy policy that is obviously making gas prices
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rise? Why do they seem to be actually maybe okay with inflation? Why are they exacerbating our economic
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problems by trying to push forth this unconstitutional vaccine mandate? Why does it seem like they just
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don't care that the results of their actions are not good? And I guess you answered that in saying that
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they don't really need the consent or the approval of most Americans. But my question is, okay, what are
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they going to do though for the midterms? What are they banking on? Why are they doing so many things that
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are so widely unpopular knowing that there will be another election? Yes. So I have, they have two
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points of view. One is they're optimistic and one is their fallback position. Their optimistic view is
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they're in a media bubble to begin with. But as Ben Rhodes said in the Obama administration,
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the media are 30 somethings, they know nothing and we create echo chambers. So they feel they
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manipulate and can count on the media. So we just talked about some examples. Inflation is just a,
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the media will take care of it. They'll just say it's a high class worry. Borders, they'll just report
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that everybody's whipping, the border patrols whipping innocence on the border. They've already done that
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for us. Afghanistan, they'll say that it was one of the greatest logistical successes in our departure,
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not an absolute humiliating defeat. You know, they can say the media Rittenhouse, he is a white
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supremacist and he shot down three upstanding heroic people. He should, and he should, if he had any guts,
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hit him with his fist or the Waukesha murders, it's a self-piloted SUV. It has nothing to do with race.
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So they, they count on that media narrative and they've been very successful at that. I mean,
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six out of the last seven popular votes, they have won at the presidential level, even though
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at the local and state level, they haven't done very well. And even we haven't, we being the
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conservatives or Republicans have not won 51% of the popular votes since 1988, since George W. Bush
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beat Dukakis. But we've been very successful at local where the national media is not as important.
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And Obama lost over 1100 state and local seats when he was president, even though the media loved him.
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So that's their position that they're going to do this as ideologues and the media is going to make
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the necessary judgment. Now, when that starts to fail and the media starts to be completely discredited
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and it gets worried that, you know, they've got nuts on there, they're losing market share because
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they are corporations. Then their attitude changes a little bit. It's, it's kind of like a Leninist
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position. We don't have public opinion. We know that even the media can't lie anymore for us, but
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we do have two years where we have control of the gut, all the branches of government, maybe not the
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courts completely, but we do have a legislative and president and we're going to ram this stuff
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through and we're going to institutionalize it. So they're going to run up in this 42 years,
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at least they're going to run up another five to $7 trillion in debt. That's good from their way
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of thinking. That's modern monetary theory, more inflation that erodes the power of capital that
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have it and gives it to people who don't. They're going to cut back severely on fracking, horizontal
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drilling, pipeline construction that will take years to redress. They have really set back racial
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relations 50 years. They have made race essential to who Americans are, not incidental. They think that's
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going to be institutionalized with critical race theory and stuff. So in their way of thinking,
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okay, we were so humane and so morally superior that these dregs and their deplorables didn't
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appreciate us if that's what they want. And even the media couldn't, couldn't snap these people out
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of their stupor. So we're going to push this through and we got a year to do it. And then we're
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going to laugh at them because it's going to take years and years to correct. And if we're successful
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in getting rid of the filibuster or getting rid of the electoral college or getting more Supreme
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Court justices, then it won't matter. Yes. I don't know if they're going to be able to pull it off or
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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
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
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
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.
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
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,
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.