Mikio Sugeno and Alex Fang // Nikkei Asia
Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution
Q: You have called the Biden presidency “the most radical first three months of a presidency since 1933, the most divisive and certainly the most dangerous.” Can you elaborate?
A: Biden’s policies of de facto open borders, blanket amnesties, cancellations of pipelines and fossil fuel leases, planned radical increases in corporate, income, and capital gains taxes, identity politics and Green New Deal rhetoric, along with his appointments and resets in the Middle East, are the most left-wing agendas since [Franklin D. Roosevelt]. Their common denominators are utopian globalism, redistributionism, criticism of America’s founding, traditions, history, and values, and identity-politics tribalism.
The world looks to the U.S. to be overtly supportive of its friends and rock-solidly unfriendly to its enemies. The Biden administration instead is interested in pan-global climate change, identity politics and world governance in a way far beyond even the [European Union], and this could be quite dangerous to [Asia], where nations like China, North Korea and Russia have no such naive assumptions and constantly remind their proximate neighbors that the U.S. is in decline economically, torn apart culturally and can’t be counted upon.
Q: Biden pledged in his inaugural speech to unite the country and to heal the division. Do you believe he can do it? If not, is there someone in either party who can unite the country?
A: The better question is whether he wished to unite anyone rather than simply profess ecumenicalism.
Nothing in Biden’s past senatorial record, his rhetoric or his conduct gives any evidence of such outreach. His first 100 days are truer to his character: those who want voter IDs as required in most states are “Jim Crow” racists; those who after being vaccinated doubt the need for masks outdoors are “Neanderthals”; those who want legal and measured immigration are “nativists.”
Read the full interview here
