Being a Republican in New England is an awful fate. Well, no, a Republican in New England is typically just a Democrat who doesn’t like high taxes. He doesn’t have a problem with the social justice or the anti-white racism, just the loss of savings. But for someone like me who is genuinely conservative, it’s horrific. In every law and policy, you see misery and stupidity and what seems like the absolute worst governance imaginable.
Now, some of my fellow New England conservatives (of various stripes) are always hoping against hope that their neighbors will come to their senses and vote in a Mitt Romney or some other squishy “conservative” and fix the taxes, stop wasting money on welfare and get crime under control. They say things like, “If we can just boost turnout of Republicans and Independents, we can fix these problems and show the Democrat voters that we’re the sensible choice for fair governance.
But these are just pipe dreams. Sure, if the state after a decade or two of Democrat control has managed to empty the treasury and destroyed the credit rating of their specific New England state government, then surely, they will elect a Republican governor to restore fiscal sanity and prevent complete exsanguination. But if the Republicans could read even the smallest lesson from history, they would see that this is just an emergency tactic. Sort of like a rupture disk that prevents a catastrophic failure but is never meant to permanently regulate the system. As soon as the emergency is over the powers that be will set to work pushing the system to the breaking point again.
Now, my opinion about these things doesn’t make me a very popular figure around Republican party circles. What they want to hear is that things can be fixed and we’ll all live happily ever after. Which reads like a fairy tale to me. But the thing that gives me any hope at all is actually Michigan. There is a blue state that seems to be slowly slipping back into purple and maybe red status before our eyes. And maybe this is an evolution that worked its way through the death of one of the greatest American cities; Detroit. Detroit and by extension Michigan was a union heavy population. All the heavy industry, especially the auto industry played into the blue state model. But over the course of decades these industries have been victimized by the rust belt decline in middle America and with Detroit’s shrinking population we seem to have reached the point where Republicans (at least MAGA Republicans) have a chance to get elected even to the US Senate.
And maybe that’s the only way blue states can be flipped. They have to rot away to such an extent that the progressives leave out of desperation and all that remains are poor people who can’t escape. Something equivalent may be happening in California. But I think it will be decades before New England will reach anything like what California is experiencing. More promising in the Northeast is New York City and State. Here we see a case so extreme that even short-term changes may be enough to catastrophically destabilize the whole system.
But here in New England we’ll muddle along with just regular old progressive absurdity. We’ll leave true insanity to the experts in Gotham and Los Angeles.