Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
Who are these Democratic Socialists of America that are so frequently mentioned in the news? Are they traditional European socialists? Are they anarchists? Are they communists? I think they don’t mind if you label them any of those three rubrics.
But let’s go through a diagnosis, a methodology, a therapy, prognosis, as if we’re doctors looking at a malady or a disease.
So, first of all, what are their symptoms?
Well, their symptoms are they have an agenda that’s way out of the norm. And what is that agenda?
Well, one, they want open borders, amnesty for illegal immigration, and the conflation of citizenship and mere residency.
They want vastly higher taxes, including on unrealized profits and net worth, which is new. They want much more entitlements. They want a resurrection of DEI, and they believe in the Marxist binary that the country has no middle. It’s basically 30% who are not white who are oppressed, and they have legitimate claims for reparatory treatment from the 70 percent who are oppressors-victimizers.
They want the Green New Deal. They want an end to fossil fuels. They want to have a socialist economy. They want to appropriate, in some cases, private property, utilities, airlines they’ve mentioned, private wealth.
They have a foreign policy that would disconnect us from probably Europe, unless Europe is completely communist or socialist.
But they especially are angry at Israel. They want no relationship whatsoever with Israel, and that is a thinly cloaked symptom of a deep antisemitism that they share. They can’t seem to erase their social media accounts quickly enough to disguise their past antisemitic remarks.
They have an anti-white theme that you see as well.
So, they want to align us with what I would call nations from the former Third World. That’s their symptomatology, and that tells us who these patients are.
Who are they? Who makes up the Democratic Socialists of America?
It’s roughly three groups.
No. 1, they’re urban people. They’re all urban people, whether it’s Denver or whether it’s Houston or Austin or Knoxville or New York or LA or San Francisco or Boston.
They’re urban creatures. They’re consumers. They’re not producers of things. They don’t know where their water, their food, or their fuel comes from.
And many of them, one-third of their support, I would imagine, are upscale white elites who went to college.
Most of them are degreed. About 60% or 70% of them are degreed, but they’re degreed in the social sciences for the most part: psychology, sociology, community studies, public policy.
And then they either have majors or minors as well in ethnic studies, peace studies, leisure studies, environmental studies.
These are not marketable degrees. So, they have large student debt. Their degrees show that they’re not educated, they’re not analytical, they’re not empirical, and they’re not applicable to the job market, and they live in very expensive urban environments.
And that means they cannot afford rent or to buy a home, much less. They can’t get married, they can’t have children, and they’re angry that the world didn’t appreciate their genius and didn’t work out.
There’s a second group.
These are immigrants, first and second generation, from what we used to call the former Third World, from Africa, the Western Hemisphere, the Caribbean, Asia, etc.
And they tend to come from failed states, mostly because, ironically, of communism or socialism.
Places like Haiti, places like Somalia, places like the Middle East, Palestine, places like Peru or Venezuela or Colombia or Mexico.
And they come up here.
Originally, their parents came to get out of those systems, and that’s the irony of it. They want to destroy the very system that they fled and reenact the system that they left behind that made them so impoverished and unsafe.
But they come up here and they are told by the universities and the media and the popular culture the United States was bad. It’s got worse, and now it’s terrible.
And they feel that, career-wise and culturally, it makes sense to join the Left because they don’t have a lot of money initially, and they’re going to get a lot of entitlements, and they’re going to get a lot of support from left-wing entitlement vested interests.
There’s a third group.
And that’s the DEI people.
These are people who identify that they’re in the 30% of victimized, and they want more affirmative action, more reparatory treatment.
All of them, again, are urban.
All of them are angry at the Democratic Party because they feel they lost power for the Left. They lost power in the White House, the Congress, the Supreme Court, and they blame them for allowing Donald Trump to take power away from them.
Their methodology is not to run in purple or red states for the most part, and not to run, for the most part, statewide Senate races.
They select blue cities and blue local elections, and they count on an off-year 7% to 10% or 15% support of the total residents or registered voters.
They feel they’re better organized, they’re better funded, and they’re more coherent than traditional Democrats, and they can win if the Democrats take them for granted, and they have in these primaries.
If they stay in their confines, in their neighborhoods that are, as I mentioned, these three constituencies, I don’t think that James Talarico will win in Texas.
I don’t think Graham Platner, I’m speaking today on Tuesday, I don’t think he will survive over the weekend.
And I do not think Mr. [Abdul] El-Sayed in Michigan can win.
So, they haven’t proven yet that they can win a statewide race, even in a purple state, much less a red state.
Let me just finish by offering a prognosis.
Traditionally, America had no stomach for communism, Marxism, statism.
Eugene Debs, the socialist of the ’20s and ’30s and at the turn of the century, he lost five consecutive races.
The American Communist Party, the American Socialist Party, were defunct.
They believe they can reenact socialism-communism because immigration has now brought in 53 million people who were foreign-born, 16% of the population.
And they say that, with mail-in voting, no voter ID, same-day registration and voting, they can reach their constituencies, legal or illegal perhaps.
And then especially they have confidence that 50 years of K-12 and higher education has indoctrinated two or three generations more toward the socialist or communist point of view.
So, they think, well, in the past, our message never resonated, but we’re different.
The good news is if they try a third-party candidacy, it never works.
Not Pat Buchanan on the right, Ross Perot on the right, not Ralph Nader on the left, none of these, Dennis Kucinich, none of that works.
So, there’s no third party that they can have an avenue.
Anytime either party has nominated a presidential candidate or senators—take, for example, Barry Goldwater in 1964 or George McGovern in 1972—who were felt to be by the independent middle-class voter on the extreme, they not only lost, they destroyed their party in the process.
And that’s good news.
The bad news is if they’re not exposed—that is, their agenda is not exposed—and people are not informed who funds them, and we don’t understand how they operate, they could surprise us and they’re gaining more momentum.
They have the media and the popular culture on their side.
And if you look at other contemporary Leftist movements, they are much better organized and more coherent than “the squad” or the Congressional Black Caucus or La Raza Caucus, any of those extreme groups.
They know when to be violent and when not to be violent much better than BLM or Antifa.
And they’re much more organized and serious than third-party candidates on the Left like Ralph Nader in the past.
So, the key is not to take them for granted, but also not to be unduly afraid of them.
We still have no tradition of accepting socialists and communists, and I don’t think that’s changed, no matter what their grand dreams are that it has.
So, the point is, talk about it, expose who they are, talk about their agendas, talk about their radicalism, and then get out to vote and raise money against them and they will not be a serious or existential threat.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
AUTHOR
Victor Davis Hanson is a Daily Signal senior contributor, hosting a podcast, producing video commentaries, and writing a weekly column. He is the author of “The Counterrevolution The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement.” Follow on X VDHanson.
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