Thoughts on the abysmal failure of “liberal” social nostrums, and their particularly devastating effects on the urban black community, from Walter Russell Mead. The problem is that they’ll probably take their voting patterns with them to the new locales, ruining them as well.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Jim Crow roots of the Davis-Bacon Act.
When I was a kid the big message about race was that just because people don’t look like us, doesn’t mean they aren’t like us where it counts.
The message changed at some point, but sounds like they had it right the first time.
Why should anyone be surprised when many blacks make rational economic decisions to improve the lives of themselves and their children?
The problem is that they’ll probably take their voting patterns with them to the new locales, ruining them as well.
This is rapidly becoming a very serious problem, and it has nothing to do with race. People of all races are fleeing states and cities ruined by liberal policies, and they are altering the political environments of the places where they settle by persisting in their liberal voting patterns.
Likewise, immigrants from the Third World flee places that are dysfunctional hellholes ruled by socialism or corrupt oligarchies and bring their habits with them. (See this post by Victor Davis Hanson.)
Leftist economic and social policies are a metastasizing cancer.
It’s entirely possible that this will lead to a cultural shift. According to the cited article, the ones fleeing are the educated people who bothered to better themselves.
If I had any skills, I would get the hell out of some project ghetto myself. It’s possible that this will act as a filter, and the ones moving will push back against leftism.
But then again, I’ve noticed no trend linking individual rationality with any sort of political rationality. People do tend to be politically insane.