The blues state confederacy

 Victor Davis Hanson:

...

But there is a growing red state/blue state divide—encompassing an economic, cultural, social, and political totality. The public seems to sense that the blue-state model is the more hysterically neo-Confederate, and the red state the calmer and more Union-like. The former appears more unsustainable and intolerant, the latter is increasingly more livable and welcoming.

The people themselves are voting with their U-Hauls. After the Civil War and during the early 20th century, Americans left the South in droves to the wide-open new West and industrialized North. Now again they are packing up—but this time to get away from the bastions of old Union liberality. People are fleeing the bright lights and supposed cultural dynamism of old New York and Chicago and “enlightened” newer cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco.

What once crippled the antebellum and postbellum Old South were obsessions with race that infected every aspect of life. Like the Soviet commissariat, such one-drop fixations ultimately stagnated social life and eroded economic efficacy.
...

But ask yourself—which cities today are most likely associated with lawless district attorneys who, as bosses tribal, ignore statutes and who indict or exempt criminals on personal and ideological whims? Where are crime rates most spiraling? Where is the greatest racial unrest? And where are the most homeless?

In contrast, where are taxes generally lower, but infrastructure as good as elsewhere or better? Why else would the middle classes, liberal and conservative alike, be migrating to Texas, Florida, or Tennessee and not to California, Illinois, and New York? A century ago, Americans associated the former with racial fixations, anti-enlightenment censorship, nullification, greater religious intolerance, and economic stagnation—and the latter with opportunity, live-and-let-live personal freedom, and efforts to render race incidental rather than essential to who we are.

The best example of the great reversal is the stark contrast between the Bay Area of California and Austin or Dallas. A near-majority of Bay Area residents expresses a desire to leave the state.

California’s public agencies and universities are obsessed with race and invest hundreds of millions of dollars establishing and defending de facto racial quotas in hiring and admissions, suing in courts to punish allegedly prejudicial victimizers and to reward prejudiced victims, and to squash free speech under the false charge of “hate speech.” It is a given in blue states that few in government question expensive efforts to address “climate change” or critical race theory, just as no one in the 19th-century South ever doubted the sustainability of one-crop Cotton, creationism, or the peculiar institution of slavery.

Silicon Valley emulates the power of old King Cotton—a monopoly that owns state government, one that destroys competition, censors, and smears its critics, and pours its money into elections not just to choose obsequious candidates, but to alter the very systems of balloting to ensure proper results. Like the “good ol’ boy” Old South, California is a one-party, boss-man state. Democrats, in Southern fashion, control all statewide offices, supermajorities in both houses of the legislature, and 75 percent of the congressional delegation.

Just as a few families and members of the plantation class ran a Louisiana or North Carolina plantation, so, too, California’s Bay Area bosses are mostly controlled by the regime of the Pelosis, Feinsteins, Newsoms, and Silicon Valley liberals, many of whom went into government rich, and got richer the longer they stayed.

Our current servile classes often live in cars and trailers parked on the streets outside the campuses of Stanford University, Google, and Facebook. A time traveler from the South of 1955 might dub their trailers “shanties”—given the absence of indoor plumbing, running water, or usable toilet facilities. There is little new housing construction, given that the entrenched one percent resist affordable home construction, as well as more investments in freeways, power plants, and oil and gas production. Few under 40 can afford even a modest home. Houses are mostly either inherited or the exclusive domain of the tidewater tech class. Just as the South once fought “internal improvements” and the genteel cotton baron resisted new development, so too the coastal affluent freeze their lifestyles and class privileges in amber, as they fight new industry and development that would elevate hoi polloi.
...

There is more.

I sense a crumbling of civilization in the blue states and especially in California and other West Coast states.   The Soros-backed prosecutors are refusing to prosecute criminals and turning them loose while the homeless also multiply and dump feces on the streets along with used drug needles.  This refusal to prosecute has led to looting gangs engaged in organized theft of goods at high-end stores.