Accelerating the great sorting

America has a serious problem. Healthy political bodies must share a common moral and cultural foundation if they are to work for the good of their nation. This does not mean everyone has to think in lockstep, but there must be at least some shared tradition, some basic moral language with which the population can frame their understanding of political issues.

This becomes especially true if the state expands its reach by assuming duties that once belonged to other social spheres like those of the family, local community, or church. When the state is deciding whether parents should maintain custody of their children, whether individuals can be forced to receive experimental medical treatments, and what will be taught to every young mind in America, conflicts about what constitutes the good become existential.

Originally, a system based on federalism was supposed to mitigate this problem by restricting the centralization of government and keeping most political power at the state level, where differences in regional culture could be expressed through local laws tailored to the traditions and dispositions of individual communities. In 2023, however, a vast amount of power has been shifted to the national government bureaucracy and local community has been shattered, making it incredibly difficult for regional unity to form in opposition to the toxic dictates of Washington, D.C. If states are to defend themselves from the hedonistic and destructive monoculture of Washington, then communities with shared values must once again concentrate themselves in specific geographic regions. America must engage in the great sorting.

Economic opportunity is an amazing thing, but it has the nasty habit of fracturing communities. Young people who want to accumulate wealth and prestige leave their communities and move to university towns to acquire the credentials necessary to hold high-status positions. Some recent graduates return home, but most move to metropolitan areas where high-status employment opportunities will be more plentiful. With the ease of communication and travel, few people feel it necessary to live in close proximity with family members who are only a text or plane flight away.

Corporate culture is highly competitive, and climbing the ladder means being willing to constantly move from one part of the nation to another while chasing the next promotion, which completely removes any chance that a young person will set down roots and form a connection to a specific community. As a result, those who would otherwise have become promising up-and-coming leaders in their communities tend to abandon the values of their home cultures and adopt a homogeneous metropolitan progressivism in blue cities dotted across the country.

This is why no red state is truly red. Even if the majority of citizens are conservative, the cities that serve as their economic and cultural centers are thoroughly blue, and those progressive enclaves have an outsized impact capable of derailing the moral consensus of the state. America is divided by zip code, not by state lines, which means that it is incredibly difficult to create the unified cultural and political will necessary to protect the population from the oppressive reach of Washington.

Until recently, most individuals were happy to trade community for prosperity, assuming that enough disposable income could always shield their families from the social consequences, but recent events have dismantled that illusion. The pandemic lockdowns, and the biomedical tyranny that followed, suddenly made it very clear that local and state governments could mean the difference between life and death. That high-status corporate career in New York may have looked nice, but if your grandparents died while locked in a nursing home and you lost your job because you refused to take an experimental vaccine, then your ability to attend a trendy brunch on Sunday morning seems less important. It suddenly became inescapably obvious to millions of blue-state residents who were not bought into the progressive religion that they were at the complete mercy of fanatics with whom they shared no common values.

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