Victor Davis Hanson: Socialism Is Targeting the Foundations That Made America Great

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to The Daily Signal Podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:18)
Hey, folks, you know that males have inherent athletic advantages over females, and no one should be punished for recognizing that truth. And guess what? The US Supreme Court knows it too. Just days ago, the court ruled that under both the US Constitution and under federal law, states are free to protect female athletes. That means girls can compete on a level playing field in 27 states. Now, we must fight to ensure the remaining 23 states stand up for safety and fairness too. That's really important for girls like Kaylee Keeler, a high school wrestler in Washington state who was sexually assaulted by a male during the middle of a competition.
No female should have to experience what she did. Sign Alliance Defending Freedom's petition to protect female sports now.
Visit joinadf.com/hanson or text Hanson, H-A-N-S-O-N-2-83848 to add your name to their declaration and side with truth and fairness. That's joinadf.com/hanson or text Hanson to 83848

**Victor Davis Hanson** (1:33)
Well, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. One question that came up constantly during this 250th anniversary 4th of July celebration was whether we were going to make it another 250 years, 500 years. We could be longer than the Roman Republic, longer than the Roman Empire.
And to answer that question, you have to know what allowed us to get this far. And for those who don't like us, what they would like to do to stop us. And it turns out that the reasons that we survived 250 years and the reasons that we might survive another 250 years are precisely the areas where our critics would wish us to fail or who are actively trying to see that we fail. Take the first one, our Constitution.
What's brilliant about the American Constitution is its federalism. It outlines all the duties and prerogatives of the federal government. And then it says anything that is not relegated to the federal government is up to the states. And that's the majority of human experiences. It doesn't mean the states can fight one another or pass laws against one another or pass laws against the federal government. The federal government has ultimate authority, but this federalism means that if California wants to tax 13.3 percent, Florida wants to tax percent, then maybe 300,000 people a year will go to Florida and still enjoy the American experience and vice versa. You can go to any state in the country, and what it really means is you're having 50 separate experiments. You're all united by the federal government and the checks and balances of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but you have 50 different interpretations of them based on local and regional concerns, and that gives Americans a lot of choice, and that means when you're disaffected and you're angry at your lot in life, you have 49 other choices, and it's been a wonderful way of easing tensions. The second is that we have been the beneficiary of legal immigration. We take more immigrants in any place in the world, and people have remarked that as we speak, the people who created Google, for example, or Elon Musk were all legal immigrants, and they came to the United States because this is the only place in the world where you would have a free market economy, a protection of private wealth, and encouragement of the population to be successful and to take risk.
And it's impossible to envision a Silicon Valley in the Muslim Middle East. It just wouldn't happen. Wouldn't happen. You couldn't have a Harvard or Yale or Princeton in today's China. They wouldn't allow free speech. You wouldn't have most of our American institutions in any other place. And that means we get all of these legal immigrants and they enrich our country if they come in diverse fashion in numbers that can be assimilated legally with some knowledge of our country and preferably with English language fluency. The other third reason is we were very lucky naturally. Once the United States, whether you like it or not, embraced manifest destiny and decided we were not going to be a continent of warring states as was Europe, 30 or 40 individual nations, but one uniform state in North America, then it was richly endowed for all of us. We had mining, we had gold, we had silver, we had iron ores, we had almost, we even have rare earth minerals we have not fully tapped. We have oil, we have coal, we have hydroelectric.
We have the richest energy nation in the world. We're pumping more oil and gas than any other country in the history of the universe. We have plentiful timber, we have plentiful farmland. We're the largest farming producing country by the value of our exports and our domestic produce in the world. We have two huge coastlines, not to count the Gulf of America. In other words, we're protected from the insanity that goes on in Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. And we always have been. So the sheer size of the American continent, its role in American history is a frontier.