Mayor James Michael Curley, dressed in his raccoon coat, receives flowers from Mrs. Betty Cherry during South Boston’s traditional Evacuation Day parade on March 17, 1947. Mayor Curley’s wife, Gertrude, is sitting to his left in a smart green hat with a pink ribbon, and Edward J. “Knocko” McCormack is in front in his Yankee Division uniform. The parade originally commemorated the day the British left Boston on March 17, 1776; now it also honors St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland.
Steve Malanga of the Manhattan Institute and City Journal:
The Dead-End Left
The arc of Young’s mayoral reign—a rapidly deteriorating city combined with ongoing political success—is a strange phenomenon that economists Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer dubbed the Curley Effect, after the early-twentieth-century Boston mayor James Michael Curley. Curley won the mayor’s office in 1913 through “incendiary rhetoric” and “aggressive redistribution” that shifted resources from WASP communities to his political allies in Irish neighborhoods. Tightening his hold on the mayor’s office, he remained in power for more than four decades. As with Young years later, Curley’s political fortunes benefited because those most likely to vote against him had left the city.
The Curley Effect has typically applied in cities, where politics is often called “tribal” because of strong ethnic or racial ties. Today, however, a new tribal politics—an ideological kind—is influencing state fortunes. Many now say that they wish to socialize with, marry, and live near only people with similar political opinions, and these commitments are shaping state migration patterns post-pandemic. Surveys show conservative voters in blue states dissatisfied with their current environments and likely to move, and progressives in the same places intending to stay.
and this,
America’s political landscape has since experienced enormous disruption, driven by, among other forces, the rise of social media, the decline of nonpartisan news, and extreme differences on Covid policies. A new political sectarianism has resulted, with people holding political and policy views as if they were uncompromisable religious beliefs. This tribalism has taken hold even as old barriers dividing people by race, ethnicity, and religion come down. A Pew poll several years ago found that marriages between people of different religions or races were getting more common, but that marrying someone with the “wrong” politics was increasingly out of the question.
plus this,
The migration is changing America’s political balance. Blue states are getting more Democratic, even as the party moves further left. As outmigration has intensified in California, the share of Democratic voters has gone from 43 percent in 2004 to 47 percent in 2022, with Republican numbers dropping from 34 percent to 24 percent over the same period. While the percentage of independents has held relatively constant, polls show that these voters tend to be younger and lean more left—47 percent identify with Democrats and just 26 percent with Republicans.
In New York, the party registration gap has widened. Since 2016, Democrats have enrolled five times as many new voters as the GOP and now make up half of registered voters, compared with 22 percent for Republicans. Twenty years ago, the difference was one-third smaller. New York independents have also grown in number, to Republicans’ detriment. In New Jersey, a state with a strong independent tradition, Democratic registrations rose from 23 percent of voters in 2004 to 39 percent today, a 16-percentage-point gain. Republicans, at just 23 percent of the electorate, find themselves far behind.
America will look very different as our children and grandchildren age. The centers of power will shift to Texas, Florida and Georgia from New York City, Boston and the Northeast.
Will California look like a third world ghetto with fortified islands of fabulous wealth like Silicon Valley and Beverly Hills ? Will San Francisco become another Detroit ?
RTWDT.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.