And Your Point Is...What?

This makes me confused. Me need explain. According to the good folks at The American Prospect Online (scroll down), working off of a column in the NY Times (the Gray Meat of reporting, lately), the major Democratic cities are losing population to "red-state exurbs." The tone, though not the statement, oddly, is that this is bad. See, NYC and Chicago are shrinking, as is DC, and the people leaving are going to the suburbs or worse, the Sun Belt (gasp!).

What's the problem? I don't get it. There are two assumptions, I guess, at work here and neither makes much sense. One is that cities somehow make people Democrats. That is asinine. I think Democrats tend to gravitate to urban areas because they do not fear bustle and difference. The city itself is not formative. Second is the idea that moving to the countryside can make a person into a Republican. Again, wrong. We're all capitalists, and most of us want a big house and a lawn tractor and some fat-ass Dockers khakis. That is our culture, not our politics, and we need not conflate the two in this case.

So what's the big deal? Liberals are moving out of the city--great! Infiltrate those "red states" and kick ass! Look at southern cities and urban counties: they all vote Democrat. Given the ridiculous margins by which Democrats carry New York, Illinois, and California, it only makes sense to spread out the base and take over borderline southern and western states. I mean, goddamn, you have like sixty Republicans controlling the entire state of Wyoming. I know nobody normal wants to live there, but if sixty-one Democrats took one for the team, it could help.