Identity politics and the left’s desire to eliminate the middle class so that more Americans are reliant on the government have created a crisis that is worth fixing, said political commentator and New York Times bestselling author Victor Davis Hanson said on Fox News’s “The Ben Domenech Podcast” on Monday.
“I think we have to just assume that government — and that’s not just our elected officials but mostly the 2 million federal employees that are combining in their own offices, legislative, executive, and judicial power — that they want people to be dependent upon them because then they will support the expansion of that class and the greater remuneration and pensioning and power and influence and reputation of that class,” Hanson said.
One example, Hanson argued, is that of military leaders who are more focused on profiting off of defense contracting and infiltrating their ranks with identity politics than on their service members dying in places such as Afghanistan.
“I think things are gonna change because I think in a year or two, there’s going to be a radical change in the government — legislative branch first and executive likely — and these generals are going to be shocked when they see that they don’t have a constituency anymore and the left never liked them and never supported them. They just found that they were useful idiots for a while. I think what they’ve done to traditional America is shocking.”
Hanson also offered commentary on each political party’s relationship to the government and voters.
“I think it’s been very strange in my lifetime that this Republican Party, of which I’ve never been a member (I’m an independent), all of a sudden is a populist upper-middle class, middle-middle class, and lower-middle class party. It’s inclusive. It’s Trump racial considerations with common class affinities and its opponents are these very, very wealthy people by zip code or congressional district or whatever metric we use, and very, very poor people, and this is in the middle.”
He added that Never Trump Republicans’ obsession with opposing the former president is doing more harm to the GOP than good.
“I think their problem is this: that once you have this personal fixation on Trump and once his policies have brought prosperity and security to America and to the United States in general whether at home and abroad … then you’ve got to explain, that’s very difficult to do, why you reject policies that you had told people were essential your whole life and suddenly they’re not essential, they’re toxic because somebody’s fingerprints are on them. I think they weren’t able to do that successfully and they’re not now. … This NeverTrump megaphone in the journals and a lot of the think tanks was not very successful politically.”
“I liked a lot of the Never Trumpers so I just wish that they could, for a moment, step out of their orbit and see that they’re hurting themselves,” Hanson said.
The new Democrat party, on the other hand, Hanson said, seems to require hypocrisy and a platform built on race quotas to function.
“Obama kind of popularized diversity where it’s not just you have to show that your group has had historical oppression but you’re just nonwhite. … So they looked at that and they said you know, in particular states, this is a winning combination and we’re going to fixate on race because it’s immutable, it never changed,” Hanson said. “It’s an emulation of this new Democratic party of John Kerry saying ‘to fight climate change, I gotta fly in a private jet.’ Well now it’s ‘to fight racism, I just have to be a billionaire.’ And so it’s a complete erasure of class consideration, especially since race and class are no longer remotely synonymous.”
Hanson, as he writes in his book “The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America,” said this attitude is “really racist” and reduces people to one label.
“It’s telling people who were Punjabi who are very successful, they’re telling Arab Americans or telling anybody, you know, Southeast Asians: you have one common affinity and that is you are nonwhite,” Hanson said. “You are oppressed and we’re gonna represent you regardless of what your income, regardless of whether you can ever document that you yourself have been oppressed because of all these little adjectives. … The noun has lost its currency so it’s not just spaces, it’s safe spaces. It’s not just racism, it’s systemic racism. It’s not just aggressions, it’s microaggressions. In other words, you can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t hear it, but we as our expert analysis can tell you that it’s there, and therefore anything that doesn’t happen well in your life is due to somebody else being racist or sexist or transphobic and we’re here to give you reparatory compensation through affirmative action or diversity inclusion.”
“The general public is just scared of it,” Hanson added, noting that many people will adjust their agenda to meet the Democrats’ demands so that they don’t risk getting canceled.
