America's largest cities, such as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, have been beset by a crime wave. Over the weekend, hundreds of teenagers and young adults descended into downtown Chicago, destroying cars and brawling in the streets, and shootings were reported.
Victor Davis Hanson, a Hoover Institution senior fellow, told Newsmax on Monday deterrence is the best tool to stop such violence from happening. Democrats running the nation's largest cities instead tend to use liberal policies such as no bail and reduced charges in dealing with criminals. He said if five or six people that were arrested in Chicago ended up in jail, charged with felony assault or felony theft, and given long prison terms, the frequency of such violence would be curtailed.
"I think if you did that frequently enough, it would stop, just as it stopped prior to all of this," he told "Carl Higbie FRONTLINE." "We know the answer, but I guess we know the medicine for the ailment [but] we feel the medicine's worse than the disease."
Hanson said the U.S. is being hurt by liberals who flee Democrat-run cities that are in decay to red states, and then vote for the same policies that caused those cities to fail. He said in Democrat-run cities, there is no responsible adult in the room, so the ideas of liberals are taken to the logical extreme, which is why liberals leave to seek "a red-state parent to keep everything running so then they can experiment with these ideas that they have room to work with, they have a margin of error."
"But in the blue cities, they are on a razor's edge, they understand that, and that's why they leave because they don't want to be subject to the consequences of their own ideology," he said.
All of this is contributing to America's decline, Hanson said, not just domestically but globally, too.
"You can really see this not so much in our strong friends like the British or our enemies like the Chinese, although they're not scared of us, but look at neutrals and people who are pro-American," he said. "The Saudis ignore anything we tell them about oil pumping or supply. They have a nonaggression pact with our archenemy, the Iranians. The Indians and the Japanese have decided [to] just forget about the sanctions with Russia, we're going to buy all the oil from Russia that we want. The Egyptians are selling [rockets] to Russia, and they're a big recipient of U.S. aid.
"… And they think, 'You know what? We don't like the Chinese, but maybe they're the rising sun and the Americans are the setting sun, and we have to make the necessary adjustments.'"
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