A friend of the blog, from (this is an important to the story) Saint Paul, emails:
A couple who currently rents on my block are looking to move. Not that unusual. Renting isn’t typically a long term goal of professionals. They want to move out of the neighborhood versus buying in the neighborhood. Again, not unusual. People move up, have their dream home preferences.
They are like typical woke liberals with their various signs about being welcoming, #resist, etc. They proudly voted for rent control. They proudly give money, food to the homeless and believe the homeless belong on our lawns. We don’t agree on everything politics, but they are neighborly, so I shrug off the differences.
Until I had an interesting conversation. They are looking for elsewhere because it is too chaotic here. There are too many renters and more are moving in. There is too much change. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to get better.
OK. But, do they see how their votes made this happen? Of course not.
I know I may be accused of being too optimistic here. But, maybe when people who voted for this move away, we’ll have more power to vote for things that will actually improve things again.
As we’ve seen on policy after policy after policy, the left seems to think:
- There is no such thing as unintended consequences
- They’ll affect other people if they happen.
Many of them moved to Edina, Roseville and Bloomington about the time they had the epiphany – utterly unrelated to the inevitable effects of their policies, naturally – described above.
Weird.
Yea, I guess they found that those burbs are controlled by the same party as St. Paul.
Sadly, they keep voting for the same failed policies wherever they move. And then they wonder why things are going downhill in their new location.
We are seeing it in the southwest suburbs- Minnetonka and Eden Prairie are slowly sinking because of woke voters. DEI initiatives, ranked choice voting , large tax and staff increases, unwavering support for the SW light rail boondoggle, etc. Hopkins High School is out of control and the obvious disciplinary solutions are ignored because of pigmentation issues. Sad…
Hat tip to Erich Segal: Woke means never having to say you’re sorry.
MBerg wrote:
Many of them moved to Edina, Roseville and Bloomington about the time they had the epiphany – utterly unrelated to the inevitable effects of their policies, naturally – described above.
I hear that a lot of Californians are moving to red states because the voters of California have made California unlivable. There is some hope that they will see how pleasant their new surroundings are, and they will adopt a new attitude and take up at least some of the political culture of their new state.
I don’t think so. People look for affirmation from their peers, not strangers. If their peers are woke liberals, they will move from Cali to Florida and seek the affirmation of woke liberals in Florida. There will be no epiphany. The bad drives out the good.
I am willing to be proven wrong.
MP.
I have friends that live in Texas. One reports that there have been 3 California refugee families that have moved into houses around him. He has spoken to all of them, expressing his sincere hope that they left the same political party that chased them out of Cali. He’s convinced that they get it.
I think the task here is to penetrate the “spheres of influence” that each side of the fence has. If you like Fox, you will already generally be sympathetic to the notion that limiting the income of landlords is going to reduce the availability of affordable housing. For those who are in the CNN orbit, you’re going to have to ask them the hypothetical–“you’re moving to Edina, why not keep the house here and rent it out?”, to which they could say “well, we rent here”, or they could say “well, I don’t want to mess with the hassle for very little money”.
If the latter, you can then respond “that’s rent control in action, my friend.” It has to hit home in a way that Fox News and the like do not for them.
Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, has been talking about this problem for years. He proposes a waiting period before interstate transplants can begin voting, time for them to get used to how things are done in their new home and more importantly, WHY they’re done that way. It’s the modern application of Chesterton’s Fence. https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
A friend has a winter home in a senior citizens community on the Texas border. There are no Texans there – it’s all snowbirds. And they brought their Northern attitudes with them, as shown by the county-by-county electoral map. Bright red Texas has a string of blue counties along the border where the snowbirds live and vote for the same idiots as they did ‘back home.’
https://www.lubbockonline.com/story/news/2020/11/07/no-blue-wave-here-lubbock-south-plains-stay-very-red/6176286002/
What is the point of an epiphany?
So you can tell your new neighbors that both you and they were wrong?
Oh, that will fly.
CAs I have met who moved to TX (not Austin) are mostly conservatives who have had enough. This means CA is doomed because percentage-wise, their demoncRat base is actually becoming larger. Ditto for MN. Escape while you can.