by WorldTribune Staff, June 18, 2019
High taxes, poor schools, a super-rich class, and a significant percentage of citizens below the poverty line. These are the “symptoms” we “associate with failed states,” historian Victor Davis Hanson said.
California currently has all of these “symptoms” and thus has become America’s first “third world state,” Hanson said during a June 17 appearance on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight.
Hanson, a California resident, said “We have the most billionaires of any state in the nation and then we have the largest underclass.”
Hanson blamed California’s descent into third world status in part on the overturning of the “very popular” Proposition 187, which passed in 1994 and 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 leave California over the two decades since Proposition 187 was overturned.
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.”
Hanson continued: “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.
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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