Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
Sami Winc: So Victor, the Left. Let’s talk about them. I know that you’re currently working on an article about the Left as middle class and representative of the middle class, or maybe not. And so I’ll go with that first, and then maybe we can look at some of the communist socialist questions with the Left.
Victor Davis Hanson: I think I’m going to title it “The Left-Wing Search for the Aborigine White Working-Class Male.” And just to preface it, as the Democratic Party in the post-JFK period went left, left, left, it started to lose the white working class.
For example, in 2024, those who were white, male or female, but did not have a college education were still 40% of the electorate. And they were overrepresented because they registered and voted with greater frequency than other groups. Of that group, [Donald] Trump won 66%. And what that means to the Democratic Party, and this has been going on, is they have no margin of error when they lose that great of a demographic.
So they have to pander, pander, pander to DEI. So the black, black, black, black, black, BLM, BLM, da, da, da, da, La Raza, La Raza, La Raza, open borders, open borders. And then that only further… that 66% used to be 52, 58. Each election it goes up. So they’re in a doom loop. So they’ve decided that they’ve got to come up with a Bill Clinton solution.
And that is, how do you win back 50%? They can’t. They’ll never get over 50%. And they’re losing them because of their agenda. They won’t change. We love illegal immigrants. We want open borders. We’re going to have a new demographic, a new Democratic majority. Demography is destiny. No cash bail. Trans, trans, trans, trans everywhere.
You know, abortion to the moment of birth. Green New Deal, Green New Deal, war on fossil fuels. All of those are 30-70 issues. So they don’t want to change the issues. They just won’t do it. And they know they have to. So they came up with another solution. It’s an old solution. Let’s find working white-class male candidates.
But there are none, really, that are genuine, that want that agenda or want to hang out with them. Remember, these people… they talk about oligarchs and billionaires. This is the party of oligarchs and billionaires. I’m talking about their donor class.
Who are their donor class that funds all this left-wing activity? It’s Melinda Gates, the bitter divorced wife who’s worth $100 billion. It’s Mackenzie… is that her name? Bezos, who was divorced, also embittered. She’s got $75 or $80 billion, and she’s a big left-wing donor.
And then there was Jeffrey Epstein. He was a big donor. There was, of course, Bill Gates. There were the Soros manifestations, all of their secret little funds. There was this nut in China, Neville Singham. There was our friend, my neighbor for a while at campus, [Samuel] Bankman-Fried. He was a big donor, the biggest in the midterms a few years ago. And then there’s Laurene Jobs, another widow.
And the money is all predictable. Either they inherited it from their husband in a divorce, or he died. That’s Laurene Jobs, or the divorces of the former Mrs. Gates and the former Mrs. Bezos. So they didn’t create the money themselves.
And when you look at Singham, or you look at Epstein or Bankman-Fried or Reid Hoffman, it’s not like they’re building rockets or Teslas, or they’re bringing products to your doorstep like Amazon. They’re all into finance, crypto, investment. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s a different type of wealth than farming, mining, construction, or invention.
So they’re a very wealthy party. And these new socialists that have joined it are very wealthy. Andrew Stiles, who’s a very effective writer for The Free Beacon, has a whole story today. He calls them “trust fund socialists.” He looks at all of them.
It’s [Zohran] Mamdani, who’s very wealthy. He has an estate. His family has an estate on Lake Victoria where he was married, with highly reinforced security, a two-acre estate, that settler-colonial family.
Sami Winc: Yeah. Do you think that’s where he’s going to abscond to as soon as he’s done every communist thing he can?
Victor Davis Hanson: His Indian Uganda community, as I keep saying, is 1% that controls 60% of the wealth, and no one says a word.
And then, when you look at Graham Platner, he went to prep school, Hotchkiss, subsidized by his parents.
And then you look at [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], upper-upper middle class, keeps talking about “eat the rich” and all this stuff.
So the socialist candidates, they’re either in graduate school or law school, or they got subsidies, or they’re recent immigrants that were subsidized. But they’re all well off. And the donors are the billionaire class.
And so they have a problem. The white working class looks at these people and says, “You’re wealthy. Mamdani, you sound like a spoiled brat. Platner, we don’t buy your shtick.”
So what the Left is doing is… and this is how they got in trouble. They had Morris Katz and this other guy that were their finders of fake middle-class candidates.
And that guy goes, “And then we looked at Platner, and he was the thing.”
Did you vet him?
Well, kind of.
I mean, they were incompetent. It’s not like they have James Carville or Mark Penn or Doug Schoen, the old guys that won the elections. These people are… or Mark Halperin. Those type of guys are experts. They’re professionals.
I don’t agree with Carville, but I give him his due. He’s smart. And so, I like Mark Penn. I like Mark Halperin. I like Doug Schoen. They’re all professionals.
But that’s not who they’re listening to. They’re listening to these little nepo babies, and they know nothing.
So now their solution is, well, if we’re all wealthy, and the wealthy class funds us, and we like wealthy socialists, and we never said a word about [Nancy] Pelosi cashing in, then we need fake working-class people because there are none that are genuine.
And then they think, well, you know, when we went Left, we couldn’t nominate a Democratic candidate from the North because they lost. So we had LBJ, a Southerner. He won.
And then we went to [Hubert] Humphrey. He was a northern liberal. He lost.
So then we thought, well, that was an outlier. We’ll get [George] McGovern, a North Dakota northern liberal. And he lost in ’72.
So then they said, we’re not going to do this anymore. We’ve got to go back to LBJ. “Hi, I’m Jimmy Carter.” So that worked.
And then he lost the second time to [Ronald] Reagan.
And then they said, well, he lost. We’re going to go to [Walter]Mondale. And he lost in ’84.
So then they said, well, we’ve got to have a… and they put in Mike Dukakis. And he lost.
And then guys like Schoen and Penn and all those guys said, “I told you. You can’t double down on left-wing extremism from a bunch of northern do-gooders. You need southern boys to do your bidding.”
And so they got Bill Clinton. And he won twice, with the help of Ross Perot, who took away a lot of the vote from George Bush and Bob Dole.
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