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.
Twelve years ago, the spousal unit and I decided we’d had enough of the Peoples’ Republic of Vermont and plotted our escape. After numerous plots involving three tunnels, two pair of wire cutters and a glider, we made our departure from Bernie-land to the Free State of South Carolina. Like you, we had hoped that local citizens would recognize the economic and social ruin being waged by the Progressive legislature, but the tide has been far too slow. Back in the ’80s, an economist predicted that by 2030 the only people left in Vermont would be trust-fund babies and the… Read more »
New England is an almost monolithic entity that preserves the worst political and social traits of the original settlers. They have a habit of group think that is well-nigh unbreakable. They’ll circle the wagons and follow their “thought leaders” right off the cliff.
My BIL is Massachusetts born and raised with a MIT Masters Degree. He and my sister in law left the Annapolis area about a year ago area to live in the Charleston area. They love it.
I’m from Georgia (far north Atlanta metro burbs) and currently live on the Florida Panhandle and would consider a need to live in the US NE as close to a prison sentence.
Tom, prison sentence is very close to the experience. They tax diesel and heating oil to ridiculous levels and then are forced to use diesel fueled electrical generation when inevitably their windmills and solar arrays don’t produce enough juice to keep the lights on. And then they’re shocked when their electric bills double and triple. Morons.
If Michigan is your example, it will take a very long time for the other states to come to the same conclusions. My parents fled Detroit in the 70’s. I left MI in the 90s. It has been 50 years since the great White Flight from Detroit. If other states follow the same pattern, we won’t see sanity hit NY and CA until 2080.
That sounds about right. Completely destroying areas of the most productive and affluent country ever produced should take a lot of time. My greatest hope is that the red areas figure out some strategies to avoid following the blue areas down the drain into barbarism. I’ve completely written off the northeast as unsalvageable. We’ll have to see about other areas.
One thing to remember is a historical perspective. In the 40’s and 50’s New England was Republican, somewhere in the late 50’s to early 60’s a swing happened. Part of it I think was due to a shift in economy; much of manufacturing got up and left mostly for the South. Also, colleges shifted from very conservative to very liberal as the 60’s and 70’s went on. The Universitys are a source of much of our growth through the 60’s as tech started to replace manufacturing. The general character of the Old Line New Englander was fiscally conservative and relatively… Read more »