VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The deep midterms

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There are two ways of looking at the midterms, now less than three weeks away.

One is as a simple referendum on the issues and politicians of the day. The other involves a far deeper conflict of visions (as Thomas Sowell puts it): socialism versus capitalism, intrusive versus limited government, and the destruction of time-honored institutions and traditions versus their preservation and renewal.

Rarely in American history have the two parties been so far apart, or the choice between them so stark. In brief, Islamist-sympathizing socialism is on the ballot against free-market capitalism and American exceptionalism.

The new Islamist-allied socialist Democratic Party is confident, largely because the party holding the White House has increased its share of House seats in a midterm election only three times since 1900. Each of those exceptions arose under unusual circumstances.

In 1934, FDR was still riding the wave of his New Deal promises to end the Depression.

In 1998, Bill Clinton enjoyed backlash support after the Republicans’ unpopular impeachment inquiry, at a time when the economy was robust, and the budget was finally being balanced.

In 2002, George W. Bush had united the nation after 9/11 and had not yet begun what proved to be an unpopular Iraq War.

In other words, the party in the White House has gained House seats in only about 10% of the 31 midterms over the past 126 years. Pundits also point to Trump’s approval rating, now below 40% in most polls, and the persistently high price of regular gasoline ($4.33). Uncertainty over the 33-week Iran war, they argue, makes it difficult for Trump to preserve his majorities in either the House or the Senate.

Those are the issues ostensibly at stake. But the choice goes much further than that: voters face a “deep” midterm election that will help determine the very future existence of the nation.

The new Democratic agenda is not about lowering gas prices. Americans are being asked to hand Congress to what has become the most radical major party in U.S. history, as socialists and neo-communists believe they can finally win statewide races across the country. What would that entail?

Lawfare

The Democrats have not outlined any agenda other than “Trump! Trump! And more Trump!”

If they win the House, Democrats plan to spend the next two years impeaching, investigating, and hounding Trump, his administration, and his family. Their aim is to block new Republican legislation and paralyze the remainder of his presidency.

The Iran War

The Left condemns the effort to denuclearize Iran as a lost war, even though the United States has nearly destroyed the Iranian theocratic apparatus along with much of the country’s nuclear, military, industrial, and economic infrastructure — at a relatively low cost in blood and treasure by historical standards.

An enfeebled Iran, stripped of its military and economic dominance and facing an uncertain future, would no longer be able to blackmail or threaten Europe and North America as a nuclear-armed theocracy. Its terrorist clients would also lose funding, weapons, and leadership, with profound consequences for the Middle East.

When the war ends–as it soon will — and gas prices return to previous levels, policies already in place, including tax cuts, deregulation, foreign investment, energy development, and advances in AI, should help fuel an economic boom.

But the Democrats’ plan is simply to withdraw from Iran, count on the goodwill of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to guarantee free passage in the Strait of Hormuz, allow Iran to resume full oil production, and accept the Iranian regime’s word that it will no longer threaten the Gulf states or Israel and cease its decades-long support for the terrorist proxies–Hezbollah, Hamas, and, more recently, the Houthis.

Energy

The party that has repeatedly blocked federal oil and gas leases, canceled the construction or reconstruction of dozens of pipelines, and spent billions of dollars to subsidize unreliable, costly, and inefficient solar and wind power is now promising to lower the price of fossil fuels? Who really believes that?

Instead, the Left has vowed to end the production of natural gas, diesel, and gasoline as quickly as possible. Voters need only look at the once robust British and German economies, now struggling after years of restrictions on oil and natural gas exploration and development, as well as Germany’s elimination of nuclear power.

We should recall Obama’s energy secretary Steven Chu. He infamously let slip that his goal was to keep American energy prices at European levels. In the UK and Germany, gasoline is currently around $9 a gallon–a great thing for Democratic Socialists who see high fuel prices as the best way to cool the planet and remain in power.

Gasoline in the United States now averages only $4.33 despite Iranian oil being off the market, attacks in the Gulf, and Iran’s attempted blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. The reason is that Democrats were prevented from blocking new fossil fuel leases, pipelines, refineries, and fracking between 2017 and 2021 and again from 2025 onward.

Immigration

Almost none of the current Democratic candidates — at least until the eve of the 2024 election–criticized the Biden administration’s destruction of the southern border, much less the open-armed embrace with which it welcomed some 10-12 million illegal aliens, including 500,000 criminals.

The Left wants to dismantle border enforcement and the wall and to ensure that the current near-zero level of illegal immigration expands to the Biden administration’s peak of 10,000-plus illegal entries per day. Voters may be disturbed by ICE detentions, but they should remember a high-profile ICE presence was only necessary because the border was effectively eliminated by Biden.

By contrast, it is almost impossible now to find Biden’s millions of illegal aliens who were deliberately dispersed by the Left throughout the country–and particularly into Democratic sanctuary-city states. The Left will never close the border. Nor will it ever allow immigration to become entirely legal, meritocratic, diverse, and manageable, because to do so would cut off the Left’s supply of future constituents.

Fraud

Some estimates put aggregate current federal-program fraud at nearly $500 billion annually.

There is also widespread welfare and social services fraud concentrated in blue states like California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York.

In these states, welfare and social services are generous and, by design, subject to little scrutiny. Fraud is treated as a minor problem in what Democrats regard as a successful effort to attract voters with federal and state dollars. Few major Democratic officeholders sincerely denounce such fraud, since doing so could cost them votes.

DEI

The idea that race, outward appearance, gender, and sexual preference are essential rather than incidental to one’s identity is a central doctrine of the contemporary Left.

Should the Left regain power, expect de facto nullification of the bans against racial tribalism found in federal law and Supreme Court rulings. Race-based hiring, admissions, dorms, and graduations would return and proliferate.

The demands for reparations would likely regain traction, as they already are doing in California, a state with no history of slavery and 27 percent of the resident population born outside the United States.

The Left believes that people who were never slaves are owed billions of dollars by a government already $40 trillion in debt–and that people who never owned slaves must atone for an institution abolished 161 years ago. Slaveowners accounted for about 1.4% of the nation, almost all in the South. That some 700,000 Americans died in a civil war that ended slavery seems to be of absolutely zero importance to the Left.

Islamism

Only a quarter-century after 9/11, Islamism is somehow on the ballot. After October 7, the Democratic Party embraced the philo-Islamist/socialist view that sees radical Islam as not so radical after all. For them, theocratic Islamism is a legitimate and indeed preferable alternative to democratic Israel and increasingly a legitimate alternative to Western values and laws.

There is not a single truly democratic state in the Islamic Middle East, where women, gays, and non-Muslims are de facto second-class citizens. And yet we are told by many on the new Left that there is no real difference between Iran and Israel and that the terrorist organization Hamas is Israel’s innocent victim.

The apparently new leftist-Islamist alliance is actually not so new. We see its dividends now in a burning Paris. Decades earlier, that political partnership destroyed the Shah’s regime and ushered in nearly 50 years of Iranian theocratic tyranny.

Opposition to radical Islam and illegal immigration, along with justifiable anger toward a class of elites who seem openly to hate Western civilization, explains why reform and remigration parties are gaining traction all over Europe. Indeed, in the continent’s eleventh hour, Europeans are starting to fight open borders, unassimilated immigration from the Middle East, radical green ideologies, and disarmament. Why would we vote into power what the Europeans are now desperately trying to eject from office?

We already know what will happen when the new Democrats take power. After all, they are only promising to do to America what socialists have already done to now-floundering Europe, Canada, and California.

Before the election, voters should also ask themselves why more than two million Americans each year are fleeing the blue-state socialist model.

The answer? On taxes, regulations, cost of living, housing affordability, crime, and state budgets, red and purple states consistently outperform blue states. Americans already vote with their feet; they should remember those differences when they cast their ballots.

Finally, voters should also ask themselves why the current crop of Islamist-adjacent socialists always needs to cleanse their social media accounts. Why must they retract their prior bombast? Why do they attack questioners rather than answer questions about their past?

Why do we all know that what they say and do after being elected will be exactly what they said and did before they ran for office?

By contrast, are conservatives, Republicans, or independents serially trashing the United States in the manner of Democratic Socialists like Hasan Piker, who said that the United States is worse than al-Qaeda?

Is there a Republican counterpart to James Talarico, who scrambles to retract remarks describing capitalism as an “oppressive system” that needs to be “dismantled” or suggesting that “white skin” confers immunity to the “virus of racism”?

Or is there anyone among the conservatives remotely resembling Representative Ilhan Omar, who declared that America is “one of the worst countries”? Or like Darializa Avila Chevalier, who called the United States “a f—ing disgrace”?

Are they demonizing the majority of the American people in the manner of Zohran Mamdani’s housing czar, Cea Weaver, who declared that homeownership is “a weapon of white supremacy”? Or like Melat Kiros, who argues that “We were never really going to be able to tackle white supremacy in the way that we need to without reparations”?

Could anyone imagine Republican or conservative candidates apologizing for terrorism in the manner of marquee Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who responded to a cowardly Islamist attack on a synagogue with “Hurt people do hurt people”?

In short, treat this midterm election as the deep choice that it is.

– Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.

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