“If something can’t go on, it won’t,” goes the paraphrase of economist Herb Stein. Speaking of which, we often hear about America’s below-replacement-level birth rate. What we don’t hear much about, however, is which Americans aren’t reproducing. And if you guessed that the biggest offenders are our land’s liberals, go to the head of the class.
In fact, the most ardent Republicans apparently have a fertility rate at or above replacement level (2.1 children per woman).
The staunchest Democrats’ rate is down in the demographic-death-spiral range of 1.2.
(The abortion mentality will do that.)
This isn’t the only reason why the liberal-state model would be collapsing. But it is collapsing, says history professor Victor Davis Hanson. In fact, while the mainstream media and Democratic Party are apoplectic over the Trumpian counter-revolution, Hanson states, “they are missing some of the most revolutionary and insidious changes in American society of the last century.”
Two Americas
It was a generation ago that Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards gave his famous (and infamous) “two Americas” speech. “One America that does the work, another America that reaps the reward,” SFGate reported him as saying in 2004. “One favored, the other forgotten. … One privileged, the other burdened.” He was right, too; only, the two Americas aren’t what Edwards claimed they were.
Rather, they are blue and red states. And the America that does the work and is forgotten and burdened is increasingly fleeing to the latter. States such as New York, California, Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are losing residents. And these transplants find their redder pastures in places such as the Carolinas, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas.
And this, along with the cratering Democratic birth rates, are two phenomena that, Hanson says, are flying “under the radar.” They reflect a culture of death, literally, socially, and economically. As to this, Hanson writes today at American Greatness that the Democratic Party
is now a pyramidal coalition of the very wealthy and professional classes comprising the capstone, resting atop a vast, expanding bottom of the subsidized and working poor, strapped pensioners and retirees, angry indebted students, 30s-something urban wannabees, impoverished immigrants — including perhaps 30 million here illegally — and, increasingly, trapped residents of a dystopian big-city America.
The collapse of the blue-state/blue-city model and those who work within and promote it reflects the radical environmentalism of the college-educated, as well as an array of high taxes, high crime, endless government regulations, housing shortages, massive homelessness, illegal immigration, critical-legal-theory prosecutors, ethnic and racial chauvinism, defund-the-police city councils, and, most importantly, chronic budget deficits and vast, unfunded pension liabilities and obligations.
Will the Last Producer Leaving the Blue States — Turn Out the Lights
The bottom line is that population is declining in liberal states but rising in traditionalist ones. Consequently, red states are poised to gain 10 to 12 House seats during the next decade. A corresponding number of extra Electoral College votes will be theirs, too.
This, mind you, is one reason the Democrats have flooded the U.S. with illegals in recent years and have attracted them to blue states with the sanctuary-city carrot. Our census, taken every 10 years, counts all “persons” living in an area — not just citizens. So, yes, illegal aliens’ presence will get you more representation and electoral votes and hence more power.
Yet President Donald Trump’s reelection has scuttled this scheme, at least for now. And Hanson points out that the blue-state exodus phenomenon snowballs, too. As liberal states’ tax bases shrink, the burden on the remaining producers increases. This encourages even more of them to leave.
California, There I Go….
Hanson essentially says that the poster boy for this phenomenon is what he once called our “first Third World state.” As he writes:
We also may be witnessing soon the de facto implosion of a once affluent California — its growing poverty already visible in its decaying roads and infrastructure, dangerous and substandard public schools, soaring property crime, overcrowded, dysfunctional, and dangerous health care system, ethnic fragmentation, and the general bankruptcy and medievalism of San Francisco and Los Angeles.
… In California, 50 percent of all births are now paid for by Medi-Cal, which serves 40 percent of the state. And yet the health welfare system is flat broke, nearing $7 billion in the red. California has the highest taxes in the nation at 13.3 percent (plus an additional millionaire’s tax). Its sales and gas taxes are also among the nation’s steepest, while utilities charge the highest gas and electricity rates in the continental U.S.
Other Golden State realities are staggering, too. For example:
- Its top one percent of earners pays well more than 50 percent of the tax burden, according to Hanson.
- Greentopian folly makes power costs high. The result? Almost a quarter of Californians simply don’t pay their utility bills. Nonetheless, they’re generally not disconnected — they’re subsidized by the producers.
- This asymmetry is also reflected in California having a surfeit of laws and lawlessness. For instance, while the wealthy are subject to burdensome building codes, those restrictions are not enforced on others (e.g., the immigrant population). In fact, when Hanson asked a building inspector why he wasn’t entering a compound with trailers and obviously substandard wiring, the man replied, “I’m not crazy, sir.”
- Because of the high taxes and cost of doing business, California is estimated to have one of America’s largest underground economies. It’s open and obvious, too, says Hanson.
Blue-America Blues
There’s much more in the professor’s article, too. In summary, though, California is paralyzed by leftist regulations and dogma. The restrictions prevent the state from building new power plants, improving other infrastructure sufficiently, or creating necessary housing. And, says Hanson, talking about the real cause of the problems — such as a half-century’s massive influx of poor immigrants — is political suicide. So instead, politicians blame “systemic racism” and “privilege” and claim DEI-like solutions will save the day.
The bottom line is that in California, the law isn’t actually for the little people — or the big people. It’s for the middle people. And they’re saying goodbye.
And as Hanson sums up about the blue-state blues:
The old traditional impoverished South is becoming the engine of American prosperity. The Northern Midwest, the Northeast, and the West Coast — for a century the font of American dynamism — have become stagnant and inert, and are shrinking.
Do note, however, that blue-state residents sometimes take liberal ideology and voting habits with them to their new locales. (This explains North Carolina’s support for Barack Obama in 2008.) Moreover, Hanson didn’t address our moral decay, which, if unremedied, will ensure continued American decline.
Nonetheless, recent trends have been that red states have been moving farther right and blue states left. And what of managing the latter’s deterioration, as, one could say, no state is an island? Well, a quotation from English polymath Herbert Spencer is relevant here.
“The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly,” he noted, “is to fill the world with fools.”
As left-wing states falter, they’ll want federal bailouts. They should get nothing, however, because it would be just like feeding a junkie’s drug addiction. Let them hit rock bottom, and then maybe, just perhaps, they’ll start birthing babies instead of infantility.
