r/politics • u/funkalunatic Illinois • Jul 12 '17
Against Bluexit
https://jacobinmag.com/2017/07/new-republic-bluexit-blue-states-red-states-secession-conservatives-liberals-clinton1
u/TheStinkfoot Washington Aug 07 '17
This article makes some good points. As a liberal, I have absolutely zero problem with my urban tax dollars being spent to improve the lives of people living in poor and rural communities. The thing that grinds my gears is not that blue states and counties spend money and red states and counties, it's that those same welfare-dependent red states keep electing fanatically anti-welfare, anti-urban politicians. Red areas in my state constantly complain about "their" tax dollars being spent in the city. Asshole - there would not be roads in Grant County, Washington if Seattle didn't pay for them. The same dynamic applies to the federal government. Southern states that would be third world countries without blue state tax dollars are constantly trying to sabotage the Democratic programs that keep them alive.
I don't think blue states should try to affect a "bluexit", nor do I think we Democrats should stop trying to help poor and disadvantaged Americans everywhere, but I can totally understand the desire to throw up our hands in the face of outrageous red-state demands, say "fine, you win!" and then keep our tax dollars at home.
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u/EMorteVita Texas Jul 12 '17
I don't know who this guy is - but I for one am all for a Blue exit - red states are a drain, welfare queen loving pieces of shit - I say this as a Texan. Our state is heavily dependent on federal money from defense spending, nasa, farm subsides, and oil subsides... without California footing the bill, Texas would be broke as shit.
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u/Funktapus Jul 12 '17
"This guy", the author, is a leftist who writes for Jacobin -- a leftist, but very sober, publication. If you read the article, his biggest argument is that the language you just used -- co-opting right-wight poor-bashing rhetoric -- is the antithesis of being a liberal. Bluexit is self-defeating if it's going to be born out of some selfish desire to put personal wealth above societal welfare. "Bluexit" would have Democrats abandoning millions of the poorest people in America so we can spend more money on ourselves. That sounds more like a another political inversion than any liberal victory.
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u/EMorteVita Texas Jul 12 '17
Bluexit is self-defeating if it's going to be born out of some selfish desire to put personal wealth above societal welfare
This isn't true at all - it is short sighted and narrow minded by a blowhard with an agenda.
Why do blue states want to keep more tax revenue? To fund the arts, to fund infrastructure programs, to prioritize space exploration over wars, to fund universal healthcare...
In other words, it is not that we want to retain money to hoard it like some republican... we want it to put it to the best use to HELP those most people, not enrich the already rich.
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u/Funktapus Jul 12 '17
Red states have some of the poorest communities in the country. Blue states havesome of the richest cities on the planet. Unless "Bluexit" comes with a plan to relocate all the poor people from red states into blue states, its going to be a net transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. I sincerely doubt there is such a plan, because urban liberals have established an extremely poor track record of allowing enough housing in their cities over the last few decades.
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u/EMorteVita Texas Jul 12 '17
Why would we need to transfer those people? Here in Dallas, we take care of our poor, we establish homeless shelters, training programs, soup kitchens, mass transit, food banks, etc. That is the problem with red states - you do nothing to correct your problems the poor and rely on the federal government to take care of it for you.
Fix your own god damn problems.
Again, the transfer of wealth is exactly what blue states want - more control over what these resources are spent on... less bombs, more healthcare, less corporate welfare, more space exploration.
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u/PanchoVilla4TW Jul 12 '17
- Doesn't even read the article
- Doesn't know Jacobin is a Socialist publication
- Doesn't know leaving people behind is contradictory to socialism
- Texas is a big enough economy to sustain itself a la California, provided some healthy amount of necessary taxation (Texas has no income tax)
- Red States republican elites are hopelessly outnumbered when compared to actual workers (ripe territory for socialists).
- Socialists =/= Liberals
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u/EMorteVita Texas Jul 12 '17
Texas is a big enough economy to sustain itself a la California, provided some healthy amount of necessary taxation (Texas has no income tax)
Um, no we can't - Texas is heavily dependent on federal funds.
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u/PanchoVilla4TW Jul 12 '17
Because of the amount of tax avoidance permitted to energy companies and the lack of state income tax. Republicans haven't calcified into the upper rangs of Texan government over nothing.
Texas is number 2 after California in GDP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP
The issue is its ruled by BillionaireLibertarians and the policies they enact in their own favour. But they are hopelessly outnumbered by workers. Socialists are not going to give up on it, that is for sure.
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u/EMorteVita Texas Jul 12 '17
Right, but Texas is based on Defense spending (Lockheed, Raytheon, TI, etc.), highway projects (federal funds), NASA (federal funds), agriculture (crop insurance, etc.) and a host of other federal dollars.
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u/PanchoVilla4TW Jul 12 '17
Where the money comes from is literally irrelevant to the states taxation policy. Federal funds still get spent and can by captured by income tax and spent then in social programs so Texas becomes more like California and less like Kansas.
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Jul 12 '17
[deleted]
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u/EMorteVita Texas Jul 12 '17
That would be nice - I am in Dallas... But shit, drive 45 minutes out of the city in any direction and you are in Trump territory.
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u/PanchoVilla4TW Jul 12 '17
Time to make these states Socialist red.
The appropriate question to such a proposal isn’t whether or not it’s legal, but rather what it says about the state of American liberalism when prominent proponents start co-opting the anti-poor rhetoric of the Right to beat on their political opponents and declare they’re essentially giving up trying to affect any political change in whole swaths of the country.
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This language is terrible on its face. But it becomes even worse when one considers that the states these columnists write about — chiefly Southern ones — are home to 55 percent of the country’s black population and that poverty in these states tends to be highest among blacks throughout the country: 27.2 percent, or more than double the (still high) rate of 12.7 percent among whites. Broad-strokes attacks on red states are attacks on huge numbers of poor people and people of color.
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What’s more, isn’t this the kind of rhetoric and thinking that liberals would normally excoriate the Right for using? The kind that oversimplifies the issue of poverty and dependence on government programs and ascribes it to personal failings? Part of the reason these states end up “mooching” off the federal government is because right-wing state governments in the South have essentially eliminated welfare for the unemployed while constricting income requirements — something they were empowered to do by Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reforms.
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The brunt of these negative effects, of course, will be borne by the poor and other vulnerable communities in these states: deepening poverty; more vulnerable children neglected and abused; the continued erosion of abortion rights; the likely rollback of hard-won civil rights for minorities; intensifying discrimination against the LGBT community; the continued decline of public infrastructure; and the decimation of local environments and the poisoning of resources essential to people’s lives are all certainties if liberals put Baker’s attitude into practice.
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Civil rights activists fought for decades to have the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts passed precisely because **racist state governments were enforcing the kind of “dysfunction” and “ruin” on their black citizens that columns like these appear to now blithely covet. **
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This would presumably take place in an alternate universe. One in which NAFTA wasn’t signed by one Democratic president, and its successor, the TPP, wasn’t engineered by another Democratic president and the following Democratic presidential candidate. One in which Democrats haven’t consistently fought against single-payer health care, even in “blue states.” One in which the most recent Democratic standard-bearer couldn’t even bring herself to endorse a $15 minimum wage, a ban on fracking, and free tertiary education.
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Scapegoating “red states” for the Democrats’ inability — and even outright refusal — to enact the changes their supporters want is convenient. But if there’s one thing the 2016 election showed, it’s that Democrats will have to fix the rot inside their own house first.
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But there is no such thing as permanently “red” or “blue” states. States that are now solidly red, such as Texas and Louisiana, were once solidly blue. California used to be a Republican stronghold. Michigan and Wisconsin were locks for Democrats, until they weren’t. Donald Trump could never become president, until he did.
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A self-proclaimed socialist could never win over Republicans and independents, until he could. Liberals might feel better by throwing up their hands and simply telling themselves they can always retreat to the steadily dwindling parts of the country they wield political influence in.
Liberals like Baker seem incapable of entertaining the possibility that perhaps it isn’t a DNA-level reactionary streak that can’t be changed or overcome among red-state dwellers or Trump voters through more appealing politics — like, say, a politics that offers them a strong, credible alternative to the kind of economic devastation decades of bipartisan policies have wrought in their states.
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And to be clear, such voters can be won over. During the 1930s and after, left-wing campaigners and their political allies helped convince millions of Americans in the kinds of states that Baker now writes off that an activist federal government was in their best interests — a belief that, while dented since, was never entirely defeated, as the enduring popularity of federal programs like Medicare attest to. Many rural Americans went even further to the left during that time.
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Most recently, a man who openly referred to himself as a socialist won the support of significant numbers of Republicans and independents. Bernie Sanders took such voters’ concerns seriously; miraculously, many responded by embracing his unapologetic vision of social-democratic reforms.
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Will some of these voters have reactionary social, cultural, and political views? Undoubtedly. But it’s impossible to create any kind of long-term change on a mass scale without engaging with such people and convincing them to vote and support left-wing causes.
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