Victor Davis Hanson: True Democratic Socialists Can’t Run on Their Real Platform

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. 

I’d like to talk about the current rise of the Democratic Socialists of America and the idea of socialism itself. 

Socialism innately is antithetical to human nature. Most people want to keep the profits of their own labor, and they don’t think the government, especially an unelected bureaucracy, can manage an economy, a supply-and-demand economy better than average people can. 

In other words, in the United States, 360 million people, all operating on agendas that they think are best for themselves and indirectly for their country, are smarter than a few experts in a central bureau, like the Soviet Union, issuing commands. And we know that’s true because socialism has never worked. 

There are now socialist governments in Europe. The EU has 100 million people more than the United States. Their GDP is $10 trillion less. China was socialist. It still has command-socialist elements in its economy. They have four times the population. Their GDP is $10 trillion less than ours. 

In other words, an American capitalist economy, even with its socialist fringes, one American produces more than four of his Chinese counterparts, 30% more in goods and services. 

So the socialists know that, so they can’t run on what they want to do. That is, take over utilities, command the economy, open the border, and pretty much do what the Democrats already wanted to do, which, and to be frank, the Democrats are socialists prior to the Democratic socialists absorbing the Democratic Party. 

Pack the court, end the filibuster, bring in new states, destroy the Electoral College, defund the police, recognize BLM and Antifa, etc. That was the Democratic Party, and the Socialist Party agreed with all of that and joined them. 

So socialists know that that’s not popular. They’re not going to run on it. They may carve out districts in Boulder, in the Upper West Side, in parts of Chicago, in California, and where they’re completely blue socialists, carved-out left-wing districts, and socialists may be honest. 

But in purple districts, in statewide races, they can’t say who they are. 

So if Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democratic nominee, has said on record that he follows Sharia law, or that fireworks or football or traditional American pastimes like Thanksgiving are silly, or that he wants to take over the healthcare system and abolish private health insurance, or he wants to tax the rich to distribute, or he wants basically open borders, he’s not going to tell you that. 

You know what he’s going to do? He’s going to put a cowboy hat on, and he’s going to talk about sports and that he was a high school athlete, and he’s a good old boy from Michigan. 

If you’re Mr. [James] Talarico in Texas, he’s not going to tell you he believes there’s a multigendered Jesus, or that God has no gender, or that meat-eating is terrible and you should have vegetarian diets only, or that you should abolish private healthcare and nationalize the medical industry. He’s not going to say any of that to Texas. 

You know what he’s going to do? He’s going to walk around in a rented truck and a cowboy hat and talk about how great Texas beef is. 

Up to a point. Up to a point. 

When he gets elected, as we see with Mr. [Zohran] Mamdani, did Mr. Mamdani in New York ever tell us that he was going to confiscate private apartments he felt were unfair to renters? Did he ever say he was going to make multiple food markets and say that there would be no ID to use them? 

Because when he initially said you had to have an ID to come in there, then he was contradicting himself because he felt like he was ICE. You have to have an ID to show you’re a legal citizen. Well, he was, requiring IDs to go into a socialist—Not now. 

So what he said in the campaign and what he’s actually doing are two different things. 

If you elect a Talarico or a [Troy] Jackson in Maine or an El-Sayed in Michigan, you’re going to get something completely different from what they campaigned on. You’re going to get a socialist radical agenda, much of what you’ve already seen under the Biden administration. 

You’re going to get an attempt to open the border, mass amnesties for illegal immigrants, systematized national healthcare directed from a bureaucracy, a subsidized energy sector, a war on fossil fuels, an isolationist policy aligning with countries like Spain, Cuba, Nicaragua, not the revolution that’s happening in Latin America now, where country after country is rejecting communism and socialism, embracing Americanism and free markets, and the Western Hemisphere is becoming basically a pro-American continent. 

You’re not going to see any of that. 

One final warning. Socialists have a mean streak. They don’t like us. They think that we’re parochial and we’re uneducated and we’re nationalistic, and they’re utopian globalist philosophers. So they try to needle us, needle us. 

That’s why El-Sayed said he wanted to get rid of, he thought that fireworks were silly. We’re silly. Thanksgiving, silly. Football, silly. 

That’s why Talarico thinks these people think God or Jesus are male. They’re silly. There are multiple genders. And these guys that sit down with that big steak, that just doesn’t make sense. 

I’ll end on this anecdote. There was a 9/11 commemorative group, and they were signing a declaration commemorating 9/11 as the anniversary is upon us. 

Mamdani has been criticized, criticized that he has brought Islamists into the government and antisemites. And he’s saying that he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, and he has, in the past, talked about defunding the police. He’s in a veritable war with the NYPD in New York. 

OK, so what does he do when he signs this? He takes the ceremonial pen. Who would you give it to on a commemoration of 9/11? 

I think you would say, “Well, the firefighters were heroic.” And then somebody would say, “Well, I think the NYPD was too.” 

OK. “How about the Red Cross?” Yes. 

“So I’m going to give this to the NYPD, the pen to the …” 

No. No, no, no, no, no. 

He’s going to give it to his Islamist, legal counsel, who defended a lot of Islamist terrorists including the brother-in-law of one of the hijacker suicide bombers that helped kill 3,000 Americans. 

But he’s not going to… He’s not stupid enough. He’s not going to have him sit next to him, as you would think, to receive the commemorative pen that he signed this document, this commemoration document. 

You know what he does instead? He turns to the only Jewish major commissioner that he has, Ms. Jessica Tisch, the commissioner of the NYPD, and she’s Jewish, and she’s NYPD, and he says, “Would you hand this to Mr. Ramzi Kassem?” 

Think about that imagery. What do socialists do? He’s basically needling her and us, and saying, “I’m going to have as my little servant somebody from the NYPD and somebody who’s Jewish to hand the pen over to someone who hates the NYPD, hates the United States, and is antisemitic.” 

And that’s what he did. They will continue to do that for one reason. They do not like the United States at its creation. They did not like America as it matured, and they despise it now at its fruition. 

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