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Nov. 8, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:07
Victor Davis Hanson | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 106
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There's an opportunity here to recalibrate not only race in America, but the entire Republican Party is the party of the middle class, of minorities, fighting against a party of the very wealthy and the very poor.
And that's what the Democratic Party is.
In the wake of the 2020 election, many Americans are left searching for answers and for any kind of sign as to what the future holds.
Our guest today will hopefully be able to bring some insight to that question.
Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, pundit, renowned classicist, and military historian, has studied enough history to have some idea of what might come next.
A prolific author, Dr. Hanson has written acclaimed history books ranging from Ancient Greece to the Iraq War.
Although he's a student of the past, he has notably used history as a lens to address policy and conflicts in the present.
As unprecedented as our current politics may seem, a historical perspective might just be the most salient.
The outcome of the election is still uncertain and in bitter dispute.
Not only that, many have questions for the future of the Republican Party itself.
Without President Trump, will there be a reversion back to the party some have said we've lost?
Would that party be one that would even be accepted by the coalition Trump has built?
Will so-called never-Trumpers return and attempt to pick up the mantle of the party?
With the strong possibility of an incoming Biden administration, where do the liberties conservatives have fought so hard to maintain now stand?
Professor Hanson joined me to discuss all of this and more.
I think you'll enjoy it.
I really appreciate you being here.
Thank you.
So let's start with your overview of the 2020 election and how it went.
As we're recording this, obviously, we're still awaiting sort of the final outcome of the election.
There are questions about possible voter irregularities.
The Trump campaign has filed a bunch of lawsuits in swing states.
But this was a much tighter election than anybody in the polling arena thought it was going to be.
Obviously, they were suggesting it was going to be a massive blowout.
There are people suggesting that Biden was going to win 400 electoral votes, that he was going to win the popular vote by seven, eight points.
What do you think happened here?
I think two things are going on.
One, I'm very worried that the foundation of citizenship is voting, and we're starting to warp that process.
We're doing it on multiple levels.
I guess because of the fear of COVID, we had a lot of governors and their associates go into the code of voting procedures and lengthen the days that you were eligible to vote early voting, lengthen the days that mail balloting could come in.
We have pollsters that were so far beyond the realm of the possible that you have to question, to be frank, their motives.
I mean, when ABC Washington Post says that They think Wisconsin is Biden plus 17 when it's basically dead even, or when CNN two days before says 12 points in the popular lead, or you mentioned the electoral college, I think it was YouGov, colleagues of mine at Hoover, was up to 370 blowout.
So why are people doing that when they should have learned in 2016?
And it begs the question that They feel that they can create momentum or depress momentum.
And by that I mean, if you're sitting in Wisconsin three days before the election and you're told that 17, and it's the Washington Post and ABC, and your candidate's 17 down, why vote?
Why give money?
Why knock on doors?
I think that's the intended effect.
And then this idea that you call states based on some sophisticated analysis that hasn't really proven completely reliable and you let a state like Texas or Florida that are pretty much won by Donald Trump and you don't call them and you call Arizona, when it's still out even today.
And the point would be, why would you do that?
Why would be the effect of it, whether it was intentional or inadvertent?
And we know what the effect is.
It's part of this large narrative that Trump was not going to win.
It was going to be a landslide.
And then the narrative on election eve is, wow, even his own red state base is starting to defect.
And then if somebody says, you know, I'm in Michigan or I'm in Wisconsin, there's voting irregularities, you say, yeah, but it won't make any difference.
He's going to lose in a landslide.
He's already lost Arizona.
If I'm voting in California, I want to go vote for David Valadao.
But I want to vote for Trump.
I'll say, you know what?
I just saw Arizona called.
I'm not going to do that.
And I think all of these things, when you add them to these blue states and blue mayors and blue city councils and blue prosecuting attorneys, The people have no redress against any voting fraud.
So when ballots start to come late or appear and you have the pollsters and the media, it's really warped the entire foundation of citizenship.
So what do you think is the next step here with the election?
So let's say that Joe Biden is, as many people are expecting, is declared the winner by the media over the next 24, 48 hours.
What do you think the next step here is?
I know there are certain people who have called for I don't think there will be.
I think you'll see in the next 36 hours a lot of votes that have been mysteriously appearing in Atlanta.
There's talk about future lawsuits.
If faith in the elections is that far gone, is there any redress?
I don't think there will be.
I think you'll see in the next 36 hours, a lot of votes that have been mysteriously appearing in Atlanta.
I think he's, he has a good chance of losing now.
Donald Trump does Georgia.
I think he's won North Carolina.
I think he's not going to win Nevada.
I think he had a good chance in Arizona, but we'll see.
He needs to win Pennsylvania and either Nevada or Arizona and keep North Carolina and Georgia.
And that 24 hours ago was a very possible thing to achieve.
But if you lose Georgia, you can't do it.
I think people understood that.
So what's the redress is that there will be lawsuits.
There will be a candidate coming into power with a cloud over him.
Hunter Biden will probably be the subject of a special prosecutor.
Investigation.
He won't be a legitimate president in the sense that people will feel that the forces for Biden stole the election.
He won't have a Senate.
The House will be rebellious.
And I just see it's going to be an inert government.
I'd rather have an inert than an active Biden government.
But it's a very scary time because, as you saw, when he came out And spoke to the nation for a brief period.
He didn't look like he was in control of his faculty.
Some days he seems he is, some days he's not.
But the idea of that guy as president, it's a very frightening idea to be frank.
One of the things that I'm taking away from the election is actually a fair bit of optimism about the nature of the country.
Because if you had read the polls, as you've pointed out, prior to the election, you would have suggested that the left is running away with this thing.
They were going to pick up seats in the House.
They were going to turn the Senate.
There was going to be this vast blue wave that swamped the nation.
You'd end up with Joe Biden as president with Majority leader Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi running a dominant House majority.
And instead, it looks as though the Democrats are going to retain a very slim lead in the House, a very slim lead in the House because Democrats actually lost seats in the House.
Republicans look like they're going to maintain their Senate majority, even when it looks like a bunch of those senators that were Republican are going to go down.
And overall, it looks as though the American people Even if they had problems with President Trump personally, they really heartily reject a lot of the woke radicalism of the Democratic Party.
And you're seeing that turn up in places that historically it has not turned up.
You're seeing that turn up in the Latino community in Florida and Texas.
You're seeing it turn up in marginal parts of the black community in the United States.
You saw that Trump actually increased his support level among black Americans and black male Americans pretty substantially.
That seems like a room for optimism for Republicans going forward.
I think it is.
What you're saying is, despite posters, despite the media, despite Silicon Valley, despite the so-called administrative state, despite Hollywood, despite professional—Donald Trump and the people overcame it, almost, and that's something to be optimistic about.
I think there's going to be, nevertheless, a great sense of disappointment, because people, as they saw those historic rallies and they saw this surge, And they saw the alternative.
I think there was a sense of euphoria on his side and people thought, and I heard this from people and I did a lot of interviews and went back and forth in these interviews, that no matter what they do, they can't stop the people.
The electoral college system compartmentalizes the vote.
Maybe you can steal a national vote, but you can't steal enough cities and states and municipalities to warp an entire election.
So there was a confidence that the people were on the side of Donald Trump, and against all odds, the people were going to speak, and they couldn't do anything about it.
And so I think that there's a disappointment that they did do something about it.
The other thing is, I'd be very careful that a lot of people say something like the following.
They say, well, we've kept the Senate, and we picked up the House, and I agree with you, we should be really happy about that.
But Trump is probably going to lose.
But that might be not such a bad thing, because Biden will have no power really, and he'll be unpopular, there'll be a civil war on the Democratic side, and then we can come forward with a better candidate, a person that avoids the excesses of Donald Trump in four years.
I'd be very careful because one thing we have learned, whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, a traditional Republican was not going to do well in these swing states.
If you have...
We had not won 51%, not that we did with Trump, since 1988.
We lost, I think, four out of the last five or five out of the last six popular votes.
We continue to do it, but we could not win those states.
And that Romney, McCain, Bob Dole message was inert.
Just was.
We were not going to win.
We're not going to get somebody who was a retired auto worker in Michigan.
You're not going to get a mechanic in Bakersfield.
You're not going to get these people to come.
You're not going to get 15% of the black vote.
It's not going to happen.
Because what happened with the Republican Party The way they voice certain issues, which I agree with, free trade and lower capital gains taxes and all of these things, it came across to a lot of people that this is just a bunch of silk-stalking Republicans and they love to win, they love to lose nobly and then they go back to their own lives and they're pretty well off and they don't care about us.
And you can think of anecdotal evidence when John McCain rules out, I'm not going to speak about the Reverend Wright.
How dare you'd even mention I would do that?
Or, you know, Mitt Romney just lets Candy Crawley steal the debate, basically, in the second debate of 2012.
So the Republicans, if Donald Trump Loses.
I think they're going to have to look very hard at being tough on China and get rid of this idea that you have free trade when it's asymmetrical and totally unfair.
I think they're gonna have to look at the border.
I think They're going to learn, if anything, that Mexican-American communities are the most influenced by illegal immigration.
Their kids are roughed up by gang members.
Their school scores go down.
They don't have security and they want secure borders.
I think people feel that The interior of the country is not through that it has a great future that we have cheap energy, we got good workers, we still got a good infrastructure and the idea that Michigan or Ohio or Wisconsin was played out, sort of, I need a magic wand to bring back the jobs, or Larry Summers, you know, you need a fantasy to get 3% GDP in these places.
That's a losing prescription.
So they're going to have to incorporate those issues along with a foreign policy that We have to, in a cost-benefit analysis, not go on expeditionary incursions unless they profit the region in our own interest.
And so you put all of that together under the traditional Republican protocols, and then you have to have a candidate that wants to fight and doesn't want to lose nobly anymore.
And I don't see very many.
There's some elements of Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, but I'd be very careful that To say, well, Trump's legacy is here, now he's gone, and that's a relief.
Some people are saying that, I'm not suggesting you are, but I hear that today.
There's a lot of never-Trumpers that are very euphoric because they think Trump is gone, and now we're gonna walk in on this, the ashes of the Republican Party, and like a phoenix, we're gonna lead them back to the promised land, and I think there's gonna be so much anger about this election that it's just not gonna happen.
Well, I mean, first of all, I think that folks who are suggesting that are absurd on their face, because many of those same folks are people who are actively stumping for Republicans to lose in the Senate and in the House to go after Trump, which is just an absurd proposition.
It's very difficult to claim that you are the saviors of the Republican Party over the grifters of the Lincoln Project.
If if you are simultaneously claiming that the way to defeat Donald Trump is to defeat Susan Collins in Maine or something, which is what they were actually actually pushing.
But when it when it comes to Trump, and this is, I think, a broader question about the future of the Republican Party, because, I mean, frankly, Trump could run again in 2024, given how close he came to winning this time.
And if Joe Biden underperforms, one thing we know about Trump is the man does not like to lose.
So if he is declared the loser here and feels that he was job, he certainly very well could come back in a couple.
He'll still be for.
Everybody ages.
He's still going to be four years younger than Joe Biden if Joe Biden is around in four years.
We may not have seen the end of Donald Trump, even if this election ends this way.
But I want to ask you about sort of the intellectualization of Trumpism.
I wonder whether the question for Trump The general mode that people love about Trump is the culture war stuff rather than the policy stuff.
And whether the same sort of stuff that a lot of the, as you say, silk stocking Republican Party people hate is actually the stuff that wins him victory.
And the policy stuff is secondary.
I want to ask you about that in just a second.
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So I want to ask about Trump attitudinally versus Trumpism as a philosophy.
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So I wanna ask about Trump attitudinally versus Trumpism as a philosophy.
So there's been a bevy of attempts to sort of define Trumpism as a philosophy.
And it seems to me that what Trumpism really is is more of an attitude because Trump is not somebody who has a political philosophy.
He himself would tell you he doesn't really have a political philosophy.
He has a sort of a sort of kind of gut level patriotism for the country, believes the country is a good place.
He has a gut level like for business transactions and dealmaking.
He sees himself that way.
But there is definitely an FU attitude to Trump that was a perfect response For many Republicans to exactly the sort of attitude we saw with John McCain and Mitt Romney, the sort of milquetoast attitude where, OK, well, if we lose, we lose.
But at least we're still friends at the end of the game.
And and Trump isn't that.
And so I wonder if the future of the Republican Party runs not so much through the sort of economic populism that that some people have tried to build around Trump and that Trump has been kind of warm to as as much as a an attempt to resist the culture wars that Democrats are now Fully embracing.
In other words, it's possible that the Trump coalition is an anti-left coalition rather than a populist coalition.
What do you make of that proposition?
It is in some ways, but one thing that Trump showed us that he put teeth into sort of empty, if I could mix metaphors, empty talk of Republicans.
I'll give you some examples.
I heard ad nauseum we're going to move the embassy to Jerusalem.
Every Republican candidate said that none of them were ever going to do it.
I never, I always heard that the Palestinians were key to the Middle East.
They're not.
They never were.
I mean, they're no more key to the Middle East than Germans who left East Prussia in 1946 are still refugees.
I was told that you could never suggest that the Golan Heights was not going to go back to the Assad dynasty.
I was told that the moderate Arab sheikdoms would never make an alliance of Mutual interest with Israel.
I was told China was going to rule the world no matter what you did in 20 or 30 years.
That hegemony was foreordained.
We had to manage our own decline and accommodate China to the world community by giving them concessions.
The wealthier they got, the more democratic they would become.
You couldn't ever job, you could job on NATO, but you just had, it was just too precious an alliance to ever suggest that they were parasitical.
So Trump's comportment that you're talking about, I don't give a blank.
When you applied it to all of these issues, it just cut through and it was sort of like saying, wait a minute, the emperor has no clothes.
We stripped all the pretense.
Why doesn't Joe Biden or why doesn't John Kasich or Bill Kristol say, you know what, I can't stand this guy because when I get back in power or my guy gets in power, we're going to go back to Absolutely free trade with China.
Let them do with asymmetrical.
We don't care.
We're going to put that embassy back in Tel Aviv where it belongs.
We're going to get those Palestinians right back here.
We're going to get back into the Iran deal.
We got to have that.
They never say anything.
They never give an alternative.
To Joe Biden's credit, he says he's going to get back in the climate accord and maybe the Iran deal.
And so the same thing I think is true of the economic argument, and that is If you're a Republican and you say, well, we've got to have more pipelines or we've got to frack more.
But you know what?
My interior secretary says it's very problematic to allow more fracking on federal lands.
We just can't.
ANWR is a can of worms.
We just can't do it.
I know late term abortion that it's basically becoming murder when you kill a fetus in the birth canal, but let's not get into that.
Or, you know, I don't want to get a controversial Scalia guy.
We'll never get him confirmed.
I like the David Souter or the John Roberts or the Harriet Meyers type.
I don't see that happening.
I really don't.
As far as the comportment, you're absolutely right that a lot of people who felt that the global economy had enriched the coastal corridors between Seattle And San Diego and maybe Boston and Washington and that people that had sort of expertise in finance, big tech, law, insurance, media, entertainment did very, very well with a new market of 7 billion.
And the other people were written off as, I guess, Joe Biden has added to that vocabulary of irredeemables, deplorables, clingers by calling them, he called them dregs once, but now he's added chumps and ugly folk.
And I think They had it.
They're in a monastery of the mind right now.
If you talk to these guys, And I live among them, and they're in my family.
They just don't want to hear LeBron James.
They don't turn on the NBA.
They don't go to the movies.
They don't want to see another Hollywood movie.
They don't want to see a sitcom anymore.
They're just done with it.
They're done with the NFL's halftime show.
They don't want to see it.
They're tuning out on a lot of institutionals.
They don't watch the Oscars.
The Emmys are a joke.
And so that kind of don't tread on me.
I don't give a damn anymore.
That's it.
It can be a very dangerous attitude and somebody has to harness it.
Trump harnessed it and got a lot of good things done in his first administration.
I'd like to see somebody that would work With him, or if he doesn't win, can inherit that mantle.
And there's five or six people that seem to have gotten the message.
I really do think there are.
So I'm optimistic.
I'm optimistic like you are that They couldn't defeat the people, and they're trying to do their best.
And they look kind of ridiculous now.
When you look at Joe Biden and you saw those pathetic car, I don't know what you call them, car assembly.
They look like a, when I was a kid, we had drive-in movies.
They were like that.
You drive your car and you kind of honk at your friends.
When you see that kind of stuff.
Versus a Trump rally, and then you see those crazy people trying to fabricate that as grassroots support on MSNBC or CNN or network news.
You get the impression that this is sort of Brezhnev on the podium at a May Day parade around 1988 in Moscow.
I mean, nobody believes that stuff anymore.
This is one of the things that I think I'm really optimistic about is that I've been saying to people inside the administration since 2018, the same things that many of us who supported President Trump in this election were saying, which is, can you just tune it down like a little bit, right?
He doesn't have to take the he doesn't have to take it down from a 10 to a 2.
But if President Trump on Twitter, for example, would take it down from like a 10 to a 7, then that'd be good.
And as it turns out, If he'd even taken it down from like a 10 to a 9.7, he probably would have won walking away.
And even if he hadn't taken it down at all, if COVID doesn't hit, then he wins at walking away, as it turns out.
So that leaves a lot of room for optimism in terms of the range of people who could inherit the sort of attitudinal Trumpism that excites people.
I mean, he cut through the BS.
In the end, that's going to be the legacy of Trump in politics, is cutting through the BS on a wide variety of policy issues, as well as attitudinally.
And like you, I'm hopeful that there can be another Republican who cuts through the BS.
I do think that Trump does have one thing that nobody else in the Republican Party has and has had since Ronald Reagan, and that is the extraordinary level of celebrity that he brought to the office.
From the very outset of his campaign meant that he was nearly impervious to personal attacks because everybody in America had an opinion of the guy before he even set foot on the stage.
And it's so easy for the media to find unknowns that being brash and being bold becomes very difficult.
If you're brash and bold as an unknown, the media simply are able to paint a picture of you that that nobody there is no competing picture.
Trump I think that's true, because I think what you're getting at is, can you envision another Republican candidate at a rally like we saw the last two weeks and captivating 57,000 people?
in the right direction toward a more celebrity culture being cultivated inside the Republican Party.
What do you make of that?
I think that's true because I think what you're getting at is can you envision another Republican candidate at a rally like we saw the last two weeks and captivating 57,000 people?
And I think the answer so far is no, partly because they don't have the skills and partly as you say, they don't have a 12 year or 15 year pedigree on television.
So they haven't developed a celebrity culture.
But that being said, I think there was also this idea that Trump had no prior military or political experience.
So in my old generation, we watched Shane, The Magnificent Seven, High Noon.
It was a John Ford archetype.
Come some classical drama that you bring in an outsider who doesn't have any of the compromises or is prone to the leverage of the community and he has to get rid of You name it, the cattle barons, the bandito, whoever they are, the community cannot deal with these challenges anymore.
And he brings a set of skill sets, the Dirty Harry skill.
We see this throughout entertainment literature that are necessary, but they're also repugnant.
And that's why they become tragic figures, because as soon as they start to really get things done, tax regulation, radical changes in foreign policy, Record energy development, reaching out to minority communities.
Then people feel, wow, did we really need him at all?
These things, they all seem to be happening.
And Trump tweeted again today.
And it's almost like a gunslinger that drinks too much while he's cleaning up the town.
And then they, you know, it's that famous thing in the Magnificent Seven when I think Yul Brynner replies to Steve McQueen, he says at the end, he said, well, we got to go.
He says, they're very happy.
And they said they're very good.
They're going to be very happy to see us go.
And what I mean by that is Trump He seems bewildered that people don't give him the credit that he's earned.
And that's part of his appeal, that he's an outsider.
He didn't care.
You could see that after the Access Hollywood.
Everybody said he was done, and his basic attitude was, like, I talked trash, I got caught, I didn't know I was on tape.
Everybody does that.
Bill Clinton did this in the White House.
Screw you.
And it worked.
But I can't see how a traditional politician would come into that role since they've had a lifetime in politics.
They've had compromising to do.
They're subject to all sorts of pressures.
They have visions of their own role in the world or their self-esteem.
And they're not reckless like that.
And people like that recklessness about Donald Trump.
They feel, you know what, you can call him anything in the world, any scandal.
The Democrats learned that just to finish The last, oh, three weeks, they had all these little psychodramas, these October surprises.
Oh, Trump took away the mailboxes.
Oh, Trump didn't even object when they put bounties on our soldiers in Afghanistan.
Oh my gosh, Trump called our revered dead suckers and losers.
Oh my gosh, Melania's text was, private phone call, a text came out of it.
He didn't care, and they just vanished.
And so it'll be I think people want that type of attitude.
Reagan had a little bit of it.
He really did.
But they want that.
Do you think that Trump is a ceiling for the Republican Party in terms of their possible performance?
Or do you think that it's possible that he's a floor?
Because the optimistic side of me says that that again, if Trump had turned it down just a little bit, he keeps all the people he has and he doesn't alienate suburban women in the same way that he does.
And he ends up winning a fairly broad victory.
The pessimistic side of me says that there are not a lot of people who actually can do what Donald Trump does.
I mean, as a candidate, he does have unequaled star power.
He's basically a standup comedian on the stump.
He does have that FU attitude that you're talking about that very few politicians do because most politicians get in the business of politics in order to be loved.
And so there's almost a congenital aversion to the sort of attitude that you're talking about while being a politician, because to be a successful politician very often, especially if you're moving from low level to high level, you have to be somebody who tends to pander.
And yet once you get to the highest level, that's precisely the opposite of what so many Americans want.
Yeah, I think what you're talking about also is an evolutionary process that everybody goes through it.
They like the agenda and then they start to be bothered by the tweets.
And then as they get, they see the agenda being more successful and the tweets getting more outrageous, they tend to be more concentrating on the achievements and less on the tweets.
I've had this experience where my wife has said, I like everything he's doing if he wouldn't tweet.
And then I, to play a trick on her, I'd say, yeah, that low energy Jeb.
And she would burst out laughing.
And I said, you're not supposed to laugh.
That's a personal attack.
And what I'm getting at, he had a unique ability to fixate and sometimes in a cruel fashion on people's shortcomings, but that became evolutionary.
People started to contextualize the bad side and say that he's like chemotherapy.
It kind of makes you sick, but it's a strong medicine to deal with a cancer.
And we had a big cancer in this country of this progressive Combination of media, big tech, administrative state, and we didn't know any other methods to deal with it.
So we brought in Donald Trump and we said, go to it.
And he got a lot of people sick in the process of the medicine, but I think more than not, thought that he was making real progress in addressing this cancer, and is.
It's a dilemma that we all have.
We don't know quite.
Some days, you know, I'll get up and I'll say, oh my gosh, he took on that guy.
It was totally extraneous.
Or why did he go and make fun of a minor Hollywood celebrity?
And then I find myself laughing about it.
And I, and then at the same time, he's got a historic, you know, agreement with, with United Arab immigrants.
And so that's just the way it is.
And I think we're getting used to it, but it's very different.
So let's talk for a second about the nature of this election when it comes to demographics.
So there was an assumption that I think really began to take hold in 2012 rather than 2008.
I think that if the country does end up coming apart over the long haul and our optimism is unjustified, I think that people are going to look back to the election of 2012 as a seminal moment.
Um, mainly because it was the moment when Barack Obama shifted pretty openly from the candidate who was going to unify Americans into a candidate who openly wished to divide Americans by class and by racial group and by sexual preference, uh, and then to cobble together a coalition.
And it was going to be this coalition of the ascendant over, over the rest of this, uh, over the rest of America.
And Democrats seem to wed themselves to this argument, this sort of demographics as destiny argument that as America became plurality minority that America would turn more blue in the process.
What Trump did, and it's fairly incredible considering that the lead attack on Trump was that he was a vicious, horrible white supremacist and racist, is he won a historic number of Latino votes.
He won a historic number of black votes.
He seems to be realigning a lot of the demographics in the United States.
It's particularly true in Florida.
It was certainly true in Texas, the most Hispanic district in America, 96% Hispanic district in Texas went 52-47 for Biden, which is astonishingly high performance for a Republican in a district like that.
55% of Cuban-Americans voted for Trump in this last election cycle in Florida by the exit polls.
He outperformed.
And you can see Democrats starting to panic over all of this.
Why is it that you think that Trump, maybe the most I don't want to be too tripartite, but I think there were three reasons.
The first is he substituted class for race, and that's a fluid concept.
And he basically really worked hard at lowering minority unemployment.
I don't want to be too tripartite, but I think there were three reasons.
The first is he substituted class for race, and that's a fluid concept.
And he basically really worked hard at lowering minority unemployment.
As one guy said to me, I was on a roof, a Mexican-American guy said, I was on a roof hammering and for the first time in my life, two people came by and yelled at me, get down on the roof, I'll pay you $2 more an hour.
And I said, so what?
He said, nobody's ever bid on my labor before.
I had to go bid.
So he gave people dignity by class considerations.
And it basically was very threatening.
It basically said, if you were a poor Mexican-American guy or a poor white guy in Tulare, Or a poor black guy, I'm going to worry about you and I'm not going to be offended or I'm not going to be apologetic to Oprah or LeBron James.
Because all of these wealthy elites of any color are on that side of the class divide and I'm with you on the other.
And the second, that took a lot of authenticity.
You can't, can you imagine Donald Trump said, I'm so tired, like Hillary, he'd never do it, or I'm going to put you all in chains.
He never modulates his accent.
I talked to a guy, he came during the first campaign to talk to a bunch of wealthy farmers.
I saw one of them.
I said, what was he like?
Did he have the caterpillar hat on?
The, you know, the blue Levi's?
No, no, he had The whole thing.
He had the orange skin.
He had this tie.
He had the suit.
It was 107 degrees.
He had his black wingtips.
And he is what he is.
I said, did he change his accent?
Straw in the mouth?
No, no, no.
Queen's accent or whatever it is.
They didn't know.
And so people feel that he's authentic and that helps.
So he's not a billion anymore.
He's authentic.
And he actually seems at ease with with middle class people.
As one guy told me, you know, Trump is not averse to getting in the ring with anybody because he's actually been in a ring.
He's been in a wrestling ring when, you know, his entrepreneur days and world wrestling and all that stuff.
So that's the second thing that he's he's authentic and he substituted class.
And then he hit on something that was very rare.
And I think this is something that these people have no idea.
He got on the idea that these very wealthy, upscale, progressive liberals The university professor, the Hollywood entertainer, the media anchor person.
People don't like them.
They don't like their comportment.
They don't like their accent.
They don't like their condescending manner.
And Trump made fun of them.
And that really resonated with minorities who don't like them either, but they felt that they were indebted to them or they had to, in a quid pro quo fashion, vote for them.
But when you talk to people and they see Trump, I think Jason Woodlock said on national TV a lot of black young men like Trump because he doesn't care and he has a certain image.
I guess it was a much machismo image.
That's not so much my point.
My point is that that nasal sounding pajama boy life of Julia elite Trump doesn't like.
And he attacks them.
He makes fun of them.
And a lot of minority people say, you know what?
I don't want to be told what to do by those guys anymore.
They're just antithetical to my religion.
They're antithetical to my family.
They're antithetical to what I do in my own life.
And they've never overhauled a car.
They've never been in a bad situation.
They don't know how people live.
And I'm going to listen to those guys?
And he hit on that.
And they thought it would be impossible because they kept saying he's a billionaire.
It wasn't a matter of money.
It was a matter of attitude and authenticity.
To dig in on that a little bit, one of the things that is so astonishing here is that the conventional wisdom, and that's really what Trump's career has been about, is blowing up conventional wisdom in a variety of ways.
Many good, some bad, but when it comes to the conventional wisdom, the conventional wisdom in the Republican Party after 2012, when there was real underperformance of Latino voters, is that Republicans needed to make extraordinary concessions on illegal immigration in order to win the Hispanic and Latino vote and start making inroads.
The evidence simply was not there for that, considering that Republicans in Texas are not exactly open borders fanatics, and yet they were winning an outsized share of the Hispanic and Latino vote in Texas.
And the Hispanic-Latino vote in Florida was cutting much heavier toward Republicans than it was in California.
And in California, California Republicans have tended to be Much softer on illegal immigration than maybe some of their compatriots in other states.
And yet, after 2012, there was this report that came out.
It basically suggested if you want to make inroads with Latino Americans, then the best way to do that is to make concessions on immigration.
Here comes Trump, and he says, I'm going to build a wall.
There are a lot of criminals crossing the border.
I'm going to deport people who are criminals, and then I'm going to deport a bunch of people who are here illegally, and I'm going to set up new immigration standards.
And then he ends up winning.
More of the Latino vote by leaps and bounds than Mitt Romney ever did.
And it's not particularly close.
So why do you think that is?
Does that just speak to a fundamental disconnect in the psyche of most human beings between policy and attitude?
And his attitude just mattered more?
Or is it that maybe everybody is sort of getting the conventional wisdom wrong?
And it turns out a lot of Latino Americans don't particularly like illegal immigration, just like a lot of black Americans don't like rioting and looting.
I think it's the latter.
I think a lot in the Republican Party We're very insular.
They're in an echo chamber.
When they talk about Hispanics, it was, you know, Yolanda who does my does my hair and I give her my extra clothes, or it was Jose who cuts my grass and I talk to him, and they don't get out and put their kids in the same school with them, live side by side with them, talk to them every day.
And when you do that, you hear a whole different world.
Last week, a woman, I saw her on the street.
I used to know her pretty well, Mexican-American.
I said, what's going on?
She said, oh, I just got back from Mexico to see my dad's house.
I went down to Oaxaca.
There were other people in it.
They just took it over.
We couldn't do anything, but she goes, that's Mexicans for you.
That's Mexico.
And then she said, and then I got pulled over twice because they called me a gringa because my Spanish is pretty rusty and they detected an American accent.
They called her basically what we'd call a gringo.
And so she said, I was so happy to get back here.
I just saw another guy at the lumberyard this morning and he said, this is the funniest he said, Victor, what the hell has happened?
This isn't Mexico.
What are we doing?
I came up here to get away from this stuff.
This election, it's like Mexico.
And I said, I know it is.
And so my point is that All of these minorities are just people, and they're no better or no worse than white people.
They're just people.
And when you either have this condescending attitude, or you have this elitist idea that you think that you know exactly what they want, rather than, would I want my kid in a school Where they had to get rid of the AP classes because no one spoke English because they all came in from Mexico.
We had English as second.
Would I want my kid in a school where M13 or Norteños or Sereno gangs were beating people up if their Spanish had a detectable American accent in it?
Would I want to live in a neighborhood when they shoot people and then the guy gets out with no bail and he comes back and he tries to shoot me because I was the guy that called the police?
And these are all things that happen every day.
And so when they see Trump, and you're right, close the border.
And when he added, you know, we'll do something with our DACA people.
And things that drive the left really crazy about Trump when he says, I love the Mexican people.
I love Mexican people.
Or he'll say, our farmers.
Or I got it.
We got to help our vets.
That first person plural possessive, our.
Our DACA kids, they think, nobody goes.
Yeah, they do, because he shows that he has an empathy, and he likes to be with people.
So, Republican Party, they kept saying that the limousine liberals were condescending, but boy, a Mitt Romney candidate, that was not gonna happen.
And I'm not taking anything away from Mitt Romney, but you can see he almost won.
And he almost won because a lot of deplorables said, you know what, I can't take Obama, and I'll vote for this guy.
Not enough of them, but there's an opportunity here to recalibrate not only race in America, but the entire Republican Party is the party of the middle class, of minorities, fighting against a party of the very wealthy and the very poor.
And that's what the Democratic Party is.
Very wealthy, very poor.
Speaking of the sort of institutional problems, you mentioned that the Democratic Party is the party of the very wealthy and the very poor, which is obviously true.
There's a great stratification.
You've got the Hollywood celebrities living in Elysium, and then you have people who are impoverished living in inner cities and being told that the only way forward is to vote for Democrats and that everybody who doesn't do that is a sellout or a racist.
The institutional advantage that Democrats have in so many of the arenas of information is pretty extraordinary.
You've written extensively about bias on college campuses and the destruction of the universities.
We've obviously seen the destruction of our media in real time.
It's always been a biased place, but in this last several years, they've basically become an open wing of the Democratic Party.
What can conservatives do to fight back against the institutional takeover of so many key industries in the United States.
Corporate America now seems to be completely infested with left-wing ideology and not just left-wing ideology, far-left ideology, the anti-racist nonsense of Ibram X. Kendi.
During Black Lives Matter riots, you have Amazon.com promoting black squares and you have various corporations telling their employees how to vote.
How do conservatives fight back against all of that?
Well, take the universities, because I think you're right.
You know, when you have 50 million people being indoctrinated with these studies courses, you got to address that.
And you have to start with the idea that they don't believe if it paid better, they'd be fascist.
In other words, they're in it for their for the money and the lucre and the lifestyle.
And so how do you address that?
And one thing I would do immediately would I would remove the government's moral hazard on student loans.
I would just say to the universities, if you have a certain level of endowment money per student, then you're going to guarantee your own student loans, and we're not going to get into it.
And you would see a cost cutting, you wouldn't have any more diversity equity inclusions of ours.
And then I would say to them, I don't know what you're teaching, but you do still require most of you, the ACT or the SAT, But let's have a nationals exit exam, just like you do a bar exam.
Before you can become a lawyer.
Just say, if you go on a B.A., you don't have to do it, but the government won't certify.
We'll say, we can certify a B.A.
if you score 550 in the SAT.
When you leave college.
Not when you enter.
Because they seem to think that test scores are really important.
Because they don't trust high schools.
But you should trust them.
And we should say to them, we don't trust you anymore than you trust high schools.
And therefore, just like you demand a test before you enter, we're going to demand a test before we certify.
The state should say to the graduates, because a lot of the indoctrination comes from the School of Education, let's be honest, that's where it is, at K through 12.
And if you just said to the average student, Makes no sense that you can go to a JC or community college with a master's and teach, but you can't teach in a public school unless you have a credential.
So we should say you have a choice.
When you graduate, go a year and get your teaching credential or get your teaching credential by just getting a master's degree.
In history or biology and either one and I think you would see mass flight from the School of Education.
There's a couple I would get rid of a lot of this soapbox stuff is because we have tenure and I think if you had five year contracts where you told the faculty member.
We want you to do the following amounts of scholarship.
We want this type of teaching load, this type of response.
They wouldn't be so off-topic, and they'd be a lot more accountable.
They need some moral risk and hazard in their lives.
They have none under tenure.
So we can do stuff like that.
And one thing I've always thought, and it's kind of a crazy idea, is that All of these billionaires in the country are all adding to these huge endowments, but if there are still conservative billionaires, why don't they Go to Larry on in Hillsdale and say something like, your plan works.
Let's get a huge, let's get a Hillsdale in California.
Let's get here.
Let's get a graduate program.
Why don't we have a brand name like Harvard or Stanford?
Because I used to think that you could influence Stanford or Harvard.
You can't.
They're too deeply entrenched.
And so I'd like to see a lot of conservatives divert Money that they otherwise give in philanthropic purposes to higher education with strings attached.
I think that we could do that in a focused manner rather than sort of ad hoc the way we're doing.
But you got to address the universities because that's where, if these Antifa kids, when you've got $80,000 in debt, And they have these worthless degrees, environmental studies.
I always look at who's arrested to the degree they'll tell you.
And they're mostly people within college or BA, the white Antifa kids, the nasal twanging kids.
And then you start to think about them and they've got $80,000 in debt.
They can't get married.
They can't have children.
They don't buy a house.
And then they blame all of their angst on the system. And those are the most dangerous people. If you look at Bolsheviks or Jacobins or Maoists or 60s radicals, it's always the people who have been superficially educated and think they're intellectuals.
They went to college and therefore they're entitled to a certain level of income and lifestyle given their genius.
And then when the society doesn't appreciate it, they become on the West Bank.
We know they become a lot of them become suicide bombers.
And that's what Antifa are metaphorically.
They're just people who feel that society didn't recognize her genius, that the locus classicus was AOC.
All of her, what, honors degrees, and she was so educated, she ended up a barista, and serving drinks or coffee, and then she ran for all, and all of that anger at the system, that they didn't appreciate how brilliant she was, and she kept saying to us, I'm an honors student, I'm an international relations major, and she couldn't even identify anything on the map of the Middle East, so.
If we could emphasize that reform, and especially the debt, and then at the same time the government should say, we're not going to subsidize loans for higher education, but we might want to consider trade school.
Because we need a lot more skilled tile setters, mechanics, plumbers, electricians.
And I think that would change the entire calculus of this youth problem we're having.
Well, this is one of the other areas where I've actually suggested that people who run businesses in conservative America do like we have.
At Daily Wire, my business partner Jeremy Boring is not a college graduate, and so we don't actually have a requirement for a college degree to work in any area of the business.
You actually just have to show us that you're competent at what you're doing.
The truth is that people tend to use college degrees, in my mind, more, unless you're a math or science major, or an engineering major, they tend to use it more as a sorting mechanism.
If you went to a good school, then this is just a signifier that you have a high IQ, and therefore, perhaps, you're going to be a better employee.
Well, why don't we just cut out the middleman, create some other sorting mechanism, some sort of brief educational test or program, and then just hire people direct out of high school to get into an industry and apprentice.
I mean, that's how it used to be before the rise of this idea every single human had to go to college.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I had a friend once who ran a big company and I said, you're always making fun of the Ivy League, so why do you hire these Ivy League graduates?
And he said, I have no confidence that they're educated.
I can educate them in my business philosophy.
I just feel that the Ivy League did the sorting process for me.
They let in an elite and they're not all legacy or they're not all affirmative action.
A lot of them, I just asked them, did your parents give money to the university?
Do you have anybody in your family went there?
you have any affirmative action con, and if they say no to all of that, I want them, because I feel they have natural talent, and I can retrain them or make them unthink what they learned in the university.
So I did ask earlier about the media, and I wanna come back to that, because in this last election cycle, and in virtually every election cycle in my lifetime, the media have been worth anywhere from five to 15 points for Democrats.
There's no question that the media malpractice over the last several years was worth double-digit support for Democrats in this national election.
I think that was most obvious, actually, with regard to the coverage of COVID, which is utterly dishonest, the suggestion that President Trump was responsible single-handedly for the death of 200,000 Americans, despite the fact that we have seen spikes literally everywhere across Western Europe.
And it turns out that Trump actually is not the president of Belgium.
The media are a deep institutional problem.
And I was wondering if you had thoughts on how conservatives ought to approach that problem going forward.
Well, in some ways, it's hard to deal.
I mean, we're the networks are losing audience, even cable news.
So we're talking about platforms for podcasts, what we're doing now and access to it.
And I'm a free markets guy, but when I see Twitter selectively censor people, even the President of the United States, my God, and I see Facebook de-platform people, or I see, if I want to look up Hunter Biden, and I look up the first 20 searches, they're usually about Republican hoax about the Biden family until I get to the third page of searches before it's something real.
And you know they're misogynistic.
We know that they have done that.
What they have done is they've said to Republicans, you guys love the robber barons of the 19th century.
You thought they were, you loved Edison.
You love the Wright brothers.
That's who we are.
We're free market guys.
And we start up, we're making the United States a lot of money.
Don't regulate us.
Then they turn right around to the left and say, I know you think that we're greedy and we don't follow any rules, but we give it all to you.
We warp everything we can.
Anytime an Obama administration official retired, they went right to Apple or Google.
And so they play both sides.
I think we need to look at them because they're a public utility.
They use the airwaves.
And they have a monopoly.
They're vertically integrated.
They bought up all their competitors.
And we don't have a lot of searches.
I think Google does about 90% of the searches.
Facebook's about 55% of global social media.
Twitter's got about an 85% control of that little niche market.
So yeah, I think that we need to say to them, we're going to start to either you change or we're going to have one of our regulators or we'll have some type of FCC look at you.
And I think that'll scare the hell out of them.
And especially antitrust laws, because anytime, I know being at Stanford and talking to people in Silicon Valley and former students will come.
Anytime a guy has a great idea, you talk to him and you, what do you want to do with this idea?
I'm going to have an app.
And then what I'm going to do?
Oh, Google or Facebook's going to buy me out for $50 million.
That's their goal.
And that's what happens.
So they need to be, they've earned government attention.
And I think that would do, that would help Enormously.
And I don't know how you deal with what you're talking about with ABC.
I would cut funding for PBS and NPR because they're not disinterested.
They're completely biased.
I would just cut it and say, you know, we wish you well.
We're not going to fund you anymore.
Or maybe we're going to fund, you know, Downington Abbey or something, but no more NewsHour, no more editorialization.
So there are things that we can do.
The tragedy of this is that when you've talked to people, and you have too from the administration, after the sorting out process of two or three years, they will tell you, We should have been, why we hired Scarrett, you know, the Mooch or Omarosa or whatever she is, or why did we not clean out the anonymouses or the so-called whistleblower?
And they started to get acculturated.
And now they have pretty good agendas that where the levers of power of the left are, and they're targeting them.
And I think had he won in four years, they were really going to go after, they're starting to right now.
But I think they would have been four more years, both abroad and here, and they would have radically changed this country.
So let's talk about the fact that you are still residing in California.
So I recently left California.
I spent my entire life up till now in California.
Now, of course, I'm in a better place.
I'm in Florida.
And I say it's in a better place because the governance in Florida is not garbage.
California, even in my lifetime, morphed pretty dramatically in terms of its governance.
I'm just old enough to remember when California could elect An actual Republican governor, not Arnold Schwarzenegger, but governors before that.
But California has turned completely blue, top to bottom.
I've watched the area where I lived, LA County, turn from what used to be a fairly clean, at least half-decently run city, into essentially a hellhole where crime runs rampant and where homelessness is a massive problem and where I can't let my kids out my front door without having to worry about people Sleeping on the porch or leaving open needles out there.
You're still in California.
So you've written entire books about about California and its downfall.
What exactly has happened there?
And is California at some point savable or is it basically salt the earth and wait for everybody to abandon the place before reoccupying?
The pathology can be diagnosed very simply, and that is, at a magic point, about 30 years ago, people said, given the almost near-record property tax, even after Prop 13, because, as you know, the assessments went so high with home prices because of regulations, but they basically said, given what I pay in property tax, gas taxes, sales tax, and income tax, and given what I get in return,
Forbes rated our infrastructure and highways, I think, 49th in the country, 46th in the country in school test scores.
I'm leaving.
And so that whole middle entrepreneurial class, I think there's been about 8 million who have left.
We had about 11 million, 12 million people over the last 30 years come in from Mexico and Central America, and many of them under illegal auspices.
But 27% of Californians were not born in the United States that reside here.
We, the hosts, failed them.
We should have said, you're coming here because you reject your homeland and that paradigm, and you want to be assimilated and integrated and intermarried, and we're here to help you.
Instead, we said, we're going to put you on the democratic gravy train, and you need to emphasize your ethnic pedigree.
I mean that literally.
I went to school with guys named Johnny Garcia, and all of a sudden, you'd see them, and then all of a sudden, you know, it was, Juan Garcia with an accent.
They recalibrated or they retribalized after going through the integration process of the early 60s and 70s for careerist purposes.
So we had the immigration problem and we had very poor people.
We should remember that this Diaspora was not from northern Mexico, as had happened in the 40s and 50s, Laredo, Guadalajara, or Sonora.
This was from Oaxaca State, and most of the people were indigenous.
They came sometimes without very good Spanish, sometimes with illiteracy, without an eighth grade education, illegally, and they had far more challenges, and they had been subject of enormous racial discrimination in Mexico by other Mexicans.
And so, I remember I got in a big argument with a professor from Mexico City once, and she got so mad, she said, screw you, you don't know what we did to you.
We just sent all of our Oaxacans.
I'm glad they're gone, and I hope you can deal with them in a very racist fashion.
But what I'm getting at is that we should have said, this diaspora is getting the poorest of the poor in the world, and we've really got to work on integration and assimilation.
Instead, we just accentuated the worst of what the host could do.
And then finally, We have $4 trillion of market capitalization in Silicon Valley.
And when you look at the endowments of Caltech, Stanford, UC Berkeley, USC, UCLA, they're enormous.
And what I'm getting at is Globalization just poured into the coastal strip and that created an elite class that was never subject to the consequences of their own ideology.
So you see these guys in Woodside or Powwow or Atherton and they'll say, I don't know why those farmers down there need water.
We don't need those five million acres.
And you say, well, Your Hetch Hetchy water is coming from Yosemite that we blew up in 1912.
We blew up something that John Muir said was better than Yosemite Valley to bring you water.
And they said, well, don't we pump it?
I said, no, you get it from the California Water Project or Hetch Hetchy.
Or they'll say, can you believe Trump is building a wall?
Then you look at their home and they'll say, you've got a huge wall around your home.
Or they'll say, we really need to get that kilowatt price higher so we don't have a big carbon.
And then you say, yeah, but we don't even have air conditioner heating on the Stanford campus because it's 75 year round.
Go down to Fresno where when it gets 110 in August, all these poor Mexican immigrants are in Walmart to get the free air conditioning.
So we created a cast and there's been some really good stuff written about them.
Joel Cotkin's written brilliantly about them.
Fred Siegel has written about it.
They brought up that—I think it's an 18th century word called the clerisy.
The idea of an intellectual elite that has enough money to disengage from the tawdry business of commerce.
So you add those three together, mass flight of the Reagan, Pete Wilson, Dick Mason middle class, replaced by poor indigenous immigrants that are not told to assimilate, and then ruled by this keep, this medieval keep on the coast, and you've got the ingredients for what you described in Los Angeles.
Needles, homelessness, crime, terrible schools, and then Malibu, you know, or Bel Air with gated estates.
So, in a second, Professor Hanson, I want to ask you a couple of final questions.
I want to ask you, number one, you mentioned earlier that there were some Republicans you see as possible successors to Donald Trump.
I want to ask you who those people are.
Also, you happen to be one of the world's great classical historians.
I want to ask you, what period of history most resembles America today?
Is it Roman history?
Is it Greek history?
Is it old-time American history?
If you'd like to hear Victor Davis Hanson's answers, however, you have to be a Daily Wire member.
Head on over to dailywire.com, click join at the top of the page.
You can hear the rest of our conversation there.
Well, Professor Victor Davis Hanson, thank you so much for your time and really appreciate having you on the Sunday Special.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
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