What a Relief!

I told you so. Back in 2020, when the world turned upside down and a large swath of the American people began to embrace dictatorship — on the heels of, or fueled by, Trump derangement syndrome — I said that there would eventually be nowhere left to run. I was told I was catastrophizing — that the country was bigger than California, that the federal structure would hold, that there would always be a border to cross and a state that would take me in. That day arrived yesterday. And my first feeling, when the returns came in, was not grief and it was not rage. It was relief.

I am genuinely relieved that I will no longer have to answer the incessant questions from out-of-staters who bombarded me with beseeching requests to move somewhere else, usually a so-called red state. “Why aren’t you moving?” “Why haven’t you moved to Florida?” “Why haven’t you moved to Texas?” — always asked with the impatience of people who had already made their own escape and needed me to ratify it. I never had a short answer. The long answer was that I did not think those states would hold. They did not. Texas now has a communist attorney general, a communist governor, and a communist senator. Give it a few years and Texas will have an income tax on top of the property taxes we already pay, just like California, and the weather will still be miserable.

It may sound simplistic to say, “Well, I’d rather live someplace where I can go outside three hundred sixty-five days a year and feel comfortable,” but it does matter, especially once the other variables collapse to zero. The entire argument for leaving was a trade: Surrender the climate, the ocean, and the light; purchase political sanity and economic relief. If the political benefit evaporates and the economic benefit follows it — and it will, because a government’s fiscal appetite expands to meet the ideology of the people who elect it — then what did the refugee buy? He bought humidity and a legislature that will be indistinguishable from Sacramento within a decade. I stayed because I did the arithmetic, and the premium was not real.