Exemplars? California, New York, and Illinois

“Three states form the base of Democratic political power in the United States: California, New York and Illinois. All three states are locked in an accelerating economic, demographic and social decline; all three hope that they can stave off looming disaster at home by exporting the policies that have ruined them to the rest of the country.”

Mead reports on News From Obama’s Home State about good intentions and bad governance.

“Illinois politicians, including the present President of the United States, have wrecked one of the country’s potentially most prosperous and dynamic states, condemned millions of poor children to substandard education, failed to maintain vital infrastructure, choked business development and growth through unsustainable tax and regulatory policies”

“We have “peace movements” incapable of advancing the cause of peace; environmentalists whose political ineptitude damages the causes they most hope to serve; and we have a form of blue state liberalism that blights the lives of exactly the people it wants to help most.”
…
“where liberals in America have the freest hand—in states like New York, California and Illinois—we see incontrovertible evidence that the policies they choose don’t have the consequences they predict.”

There is a taint in the essay based on the straw man – “Doubts about his opponents (and many of these are well justified) and the lingering nostalgia many Americans still feel for the values and institutions of the liberal past.” There is a call for all sides to get together to find solutions but the proclivity towards the idea that only one side has ‘proper’ motives. Despite these three examples where “Cynical and short sighted interests wrap themselves in the increasingly tattered mantles of sacred ideas,” there is no indication that maybe those ideas need to be examined and that there are better paths to desired outcomes.

Some can see the failure of their approach yet they only take that as a need to dig in and try harder. Who was it that said something about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?