Historian Victor Davis Hanson described why he feels his home state of California is America’s first “Third World state” during a Monday night appearance on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
Hanson’s comments came after the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, said that national Republicans will go “into the waste bin of history, the way Republicans of the ’90s [in California] have gone.”
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Responding to host Tucker Carlson’s question about why he considers California a “Third World state,” Hanson pointed to “symptoms” we typically “associate with failed states” such as high taxes, poor schools, a super-rich class, and a significant percentage of its people below the poverty line.
“We have the most billionaires of any state in nation and then we have the largest underclass,” he said, blaming in part the overturning of the “very popular” Proposition 187, which would have denied non-emergency healthcare to illegal immigrants.
“That was unfortunately part of a perfect storm,” said Hanson, describing the millions of people who chose to move elsewhere over the next two decades.
Hanson then described the growth of “a very small but influential and wealthy manorial class” in Silicon Valley.
“We’ve created a very a wealthy class that doesn’t mind high taxes because it has ways it can navigate around that and poor social circumstances,” he said. “And the people in between are sort of like peasants outside a medieval keep that can’t survive, and so they drift off. We are left with a sort of romanticized indigent class and the royal elite that doesn’t care about the vanishing middle class at all.”
If we look at Gavin Newsom or Dianne Feinstein or the former Senator Boxer and Nancy Pelosi, or Mark Zuckerberg or the architects of this system, they are all multi-millionaires. In some cases they are multi-billionaires. They feel good about being virtuous in the abstract. Meanwhile, on the ground level, we’re sort of like Constantinople or Justinian in the 6th century A.D.
Hanson juxtaposed the current high-speed rail controversy in the state with the influx of diseases and “140,000 people living on the streets.”
“Sort of like Road Warrior in the pre-modern world, where we dream of a post-modern high-speed rail system that will never be built,” said Hanson.
“It is a lot like ‘Road Warrior,’” said Tucker. “Funny you said that.”
From Daily Caller
