Victor Davis Hanson: The Ungrateful Urban Class Turning Into the New Democrat Socialist Party

**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.

**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:18)
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 percent who are not white who are oppressed, and they have legitimate claims for repertory treatment from the 70 percent who are oppressors-victimizers.
They want the Green New Deal. They want to end the 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 anti-Semitism that they share. They can't seem to erase their social media accounts quickly enough to disguise their past anti-Semitic 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 symptomology. And that tells us who these patients are. Who are they? Who makes up the Democratic Socialist of America? It's roughly three groups.
Number one, it's their 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 or 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 percent 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 about they want to destroy the very system that they fled to 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, 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 probation and 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 on the 30 percent of victimized and they want more affirmative action, more repertory 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.