Red state dilemma: stand up to incoming progressive residents or flee?

No one can dispute how politically different Red states are from Blue states in our super-polarized country. When a large group of ideologically motivated people (usually leftists) move into a state, county, or neighborhood, things invariably change. The question for conservatives, who are usually the ones whose nice communities are changed for the worse, is whether they should flee or fight.

The once-conservative People’s Republic of Colorado perfectly proves how an influx of leftists changes an area. Most recently, Colorado decided to remove Donald Trump from the ballot.

Last week, the Supreme Court carefully considered the pros and cons of removing Trump from the ballot. It’s likely they’ll side with Trump. But this all could have been avoided had Colorado’s population centers not been populated by political fanatics who feel that common sense and fairness should be replaced with pure partisanship. (In Colorado, as in many newly Blue states, rural areas remain conservative while the cities have shifted their political positions.)

Staying with Colorado for a moment, the voters in two principal zip codes decide life for everyone else in the state: Denver, with 198,928 registered Democrats, 45,493 Republicans, and 191,316 unaffiliated (but leaning Democrat) voters, and Boulder, with 93,721 Democrats, 26,789 Republicans, and 97,014 unaffiliated (but leaning Democrat) voters. It’s no wonder that city councils and county governments can and are dictating what is or isn’t acceptable behavior at the ballot boxes and in the courts.

Image: A progressive’s home by Dan Keck. Public domain.

These big city zealots have consistently forced business owners to subordinate their religious beliefs if they are to stay in business. Home-grown Coloradans like cake-makers and website designers were persecuted by Colorado’s courts for daring to defend their beliefs and for standing up to the new wave of Progressives who now represent that state’s political majority.

As the recent effort to remove Trump from the Colorado ballot shows, though, this tyranny of the majority doesn’t stop with persecuting Colorado’s own citizens. Had they been successful, they would have erased any possibility that disaffected Democrats and independents might turn away from Biden and, instead, joined with conservatives to cast their vote for Trump.

Colorado is emblematic of the new Left’s strategy to win nationally by winning locally, by any means possible. The state is also working hard to change the culture by remaking it as a Leftist utopia (some would say dystopia) where only one opinion is acceptable. It is on a crusade to create a uni-culture based on wokeness and political correctness, and woe betide anyone who gets in the way of that crusade.

Colorado is not alone. If you’re a conservative or Republican and want to make your voice heard, you’re finding your choices about where to live are shrinking with each passing year. We all know the big states to avoid, like California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Hawaii, but progressives aren’t stopping there. Instead, they’re fleeing the Blue states they’ve made uninhabitable with drugs, crime, and high taxes, and are now seeking to do to existing Red states what they successfully did to Colorado.

Once Democrats make these moves, they instantly burrow into the infrastructure to up-end the beneficial status quo that has provided their new destination with the safety, sound administration, and fairness that attracted them in the first place!

American conservatives are systematically being squeezed out of good neighborhoods by expat Democrats who are Hell-bent on remaking their new homes into carbon copies of the ones they fled, complete with all the DEI, CRT, wokeness, and political correctness they left behind! It sounds crazy that some people would willfully befoul their own nest, despite the obvious danger to their well-being, but there it is.

What is worse is that they are forcing conservatives to choose between staying put and fighting or packing up and leaving for new zip codes where they will not be subject to the incremental drip, drip, drip of cultural and social decay—all the while knowing that the progressives will soon follow them to their new homes.

While we Americans have always been on the move, our movements in the past were largely economically motivated. In contrast, today, a fair number of those moves are being made to preserve and safeguard our core values. What should worry all of us is that despite the immense size of our country, conservatives are running out of space to practice what they preach.

Stephan Helgesen is a retired career U.S. diplomat who lived and worked in 30 countries for 25 years during the Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, and G.W. Bush Administrations. He is the author of fourteen books, six of which are on American politics and has written over 1,300 articles on politics, economics and social trends. He operates a political news story aggregator website: www.projectpushback.com. He can be reached at: [email protected]