Who wanted to come to California? The drive into the state over the crumbling freeways was tough enough but once you got there, there was nothing for you. There were no jobs, and the land use rules limited housing so there was hardly any to be had without paying a king’s ransom. But even if you managed to earn a king’s ransom, it was taken from you by some of the highest taxes in the country.
California became a state with a huge number of welfare recipients, a few megamillionaires, and a dwindling middle class. That was a recipe for disaster.
If you were young and wanted to succeed, you had to go someplace like Texas. Low taxes, a reasonable standard of living, fewer plaintiff lawyers. Sure, for a while California dominated a few industries, but emerging technology meant industries like high tech and entertainment could function seamlessly anywhere. Is it any wonder these businesses went where they treated business well—the conservative states?
Hollywood became less a center of production than the place movie stars came back to after shooting their projects elsewhere so the paparazzi could find them and give them free publicity.
Now, a lot of people in this country weren’t very bright—look at how they voted. However, few were insane. Some people voted for Democrats in the blue states because they actually thought that liberal governance worked. But many were also willing to change their minds when they compared disasters like Obamacare at the federal level and the blue state bankruptcies with good, solid governance in red states like Utah and Texas. The liberal partisans were actually a fairly small group, a hard core of maybe 20 percent of the population. The rest of the people who voted for liberals were the ones the liberals could only fool some of the time.
Sure, the blue states resisted change. They had to—for many liberals, government paid the bills. In California, they had to see the Four Horsemen of the Liberal Apocalypse galloping down Sunset Boulevard to reform.
Now, in the meantime, those banjo-strumming barbarians in the Lone Star State were raking in the cash. People weren’t blind. They picked up on things like success—especially when they saw their tax money siphoned away to provide babysitting services for the illegitimate children of struggling performance artists. Seriously, that happened. And conservatives in California made a huge deal about it when they were fighting to turn the Golden State red again.
Providing a virtuous example to contrast with the cautionary example of the blue states was just one key function of the conservative states. Another was to be the vaunted laboratories of democracy we heard so much about in high school government courses. Bobby Jindal and other governors were out there cooking up all sorts of ideas—like eliminating the income tax—that were blueprints for success elsewhere. And successes in the red states made reform at the federal level easier—there was a track record of success our candidates could point to.
There was another benefit—the farm team. The GOP was plagued with far too many candidates who couldn’t seem to generate the intellectual wattage of a pile of used car batteries. Those geniuses were a real problem. The states offered a great training ground for new talent—and a way to separate the quality wheat from the chaff.
Then there was the matter of the power to make law at the state level. This was huge. Remember, we were in a cultural struggle, and much of it took place at the local level. We conservatives started with some of the obvious stuff. The basis of a conservative society is marriage and family. The feds wanted to tear those institutions apart—they’re a huge enemy to those who want to remake mankind. So we doubled down on supporting them at the state level.
The liberals wanted single-parent families. Back from the Marxist/Frankfurt School days, the left had an ideological predisposition to hate traditional families—they saw them as vehicles of resistance to state power. They also rightly saw them as institutions that reinforced conservative values. Poll after poll showed that Democrats had huge support from single mothers, for example, while marriage and family correlated with the GOP. Liberals wanted to take the place of fathers and husbands. We had to reverse that.
We reformed taxes and other benefits to favor married couples starting in the states. Later, we would bring these reforms to the federal level. We wanted the default condition for adults to be half of a married couple. The default was on the way to being hungover man-children who spent their days playing Call of Duty video games and watching Internet porn. Conservatives increased the tax deductions for married couples, eliminated marriage penalties, and actually set a marriage advantage. Then they added tax credits for kids.
This sounds kind of harsh to those singles, but why should immaturity be subsidized? We wanted young people to move on from adolescence, not have the people who did grow up bankroll those who wouldn’t. It was and is the families who make the country run, not the players and bimbos who enjoyed the benefits of a stable society they undercut. Plus, since singles tended to vote for Democrats, conservatives felt that when it comes to choosing who gets screwed, choose the other side.
It was called hardball. The conservatives learned that lesson well after having the Obama administration jam liberalism down its throat on straight party line votes. They learned to reward their friends and punish their enemies. A lot of liberals very sadly reaped what they had sown once Carrie Marlowe was elected.
And the states were a great place to pursue our struggle against various institutions that had joined up with liberals to shaft our society. Universities were a very inviting target. Many depended on state governments, and it never occurred to them that those conservative state governments might not feel like continuing to subsidize the liberal tumors in their midst. They had to adapt, meaning turn rightward or starve. They chose not to starve.
Trial lawyers were another funding source for the left. The red states found that tort reform was not only good policy but a great way to starve the plaintiffs’ bar. When that big trial lawyer had a cash crunch and had to choose between another diamond for Mrs. Third Wife and sending a check to the Democratic National Committee, guess who got paid?
And the red state governments targeted the unions, those evergreen funders of liberal pathologies. Michigan and Indiana became right-to-work states early on. Others followed. This dried up Democratic funding in the red states but also had the effect of making unionization less competitive in the blue states. After all, when their businesses couldn’t compete, the unions would go under. And every time a union shop closed its doors, the Democrats got weaker and the conservatives got stronger.
Oh, and the red state bans on public employee unions were a huge victory. Banning them cut costs, improved the schools, and crippled the Democrats. It was political advantage overlapping good policy. The federal government followed suit—President Marlowe signed the law ending the right of federal employees to unionize.
They also wisely locked in their success with improvements to election security. The liberals used to scream bloody murder about voter ID, as if millions of voters couldn’t come up with identification. It was a scam—they needed, desperately, the ability to cheat. Voter ID helped stop that. So did tougher penalties for voter fraud, with an increased focus on the inner city elections where most election fraud happened.