The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return

by Michael Anton

Yet as much as blue America hates red, I don’t think they want to let their errant cousins go. They’d much rather tax, lecture, chastise, punish, and humiliate them. Also, blues intuitively fear that they can’t run this thing on their own, that the blue metros are not quite as self-sufficiently independent of the red prairies as their boasting would have one think. On some level, leftism knows that it is parasitic on conservatism—just as vice is parasitic on virtue, incompetence on competence, consumers on producers, and disorder on order—which makes separation frightening to many leftist elites. Perhaps the deepest reason, though, that blue America won’t want to let red go is that the blues are hell-bent on punishing the reds. To the left, letting red America, or any part of it, go without forcing it to answer for its “crimes” would be fundamentally unjust. A bill is due, which must be repaid. Punishment is deserved and must be administered. Which, in practical terms, means redistributing remaining red wealth to blue constituencies.