Late last year, New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz announced that she and her family were moving to Florida. I’ve known Karol for years. She loves New York and constantly sang its praises. But it wasn’t so much a voluntary departure. In a sense, the state compelled her family to move.
It was the pandemic that did it.
“It wasn’t that we suddenly realized Florida was sunny or had no state income tax. It isn’t because, as the Onion joked years ago, that as New Yorkers we woke up one day and realized it’s a horrible place to live. Not because of New York’s increasingly leftist politics, though obviously, that didn’t help,” she wrote. “It was because they took away school during the pandemic and not enough of my fellow New Yorkers cared. I kept looking around at a civilization that does not value education. Or worse, values it for their own kids, in the form of private pods or putting them into open private schools, but won’t fight for their less fortunate neighbors to have the same.”
She noted that when schools finally reopened, things didn’t get better. “There was no discussion about the broken system that had kept them closed. The very same people stuck kids in masks indefinitely, even outdoors.” The worst part, she said, was that her fellow New Yorkers accepted this. Being conservative in New York was always difficult, but that wasn’t enough for her to uproot her family and leave the city she loved.
It’s happening everywhere. And the mainstream media has taken notice. Last week, NPR published a piece acknowledging that Americans are fleeing to places where the political views match their own. They’re calling it “The Big Sort.”
“America is growing more geographically polarized,” NPR observed. “Red ZIP codes are getting redder and blue ZIP codes are becoming bluer. People appear to be sorting.”
One family profiled left California after the state’s COVID restrictions forced the wife to close down her photography studio. Another family left Puerto Rico for Texas after the government there was going to force her teenage daughter, who has Type 1 diabetes, to get vaccinated against COVID.
“She’s not had to wear a mask,” the girl’s mom says. “She doesn’t have to get vaccinated. She’s thriving on the tennis team, making straight A’s. I love the freedom of [vaccine] choice in Texas.”
But it’s not just conservatives looking for freedom who are migrating. NPR also profiled a family that left the conservative state Indiana for the liberal Austin, Texas. “We felt very out of place and very uncomfortable at times,” the liberal stay-at-home mom told NPR. “We were looking at blue cities because we wanted to be with our own people.” She also lamented being surrounded by Trump supporters. “We as Democrats felt very out of place. If people in public were talking about politics it was always a Trump view. We heard ‘Those damn liberals’ a lot.”
One curiosity I found in the NPR piece was that while the conservative migrators did so because they wanted more freedom than the liberal bastions they came from were giving them, the liberal migrators seemed to be more motivated by their desire for political homogeny. While the liberal woman who left Indiana for Austin did find more masking in the liberal city, she also gushed over the left-wing indoctrination her daughter is now getting in her new school. She bragged that her daughter is taking a social justice class and recently was given an assignment to pick an issue to protest, like ocean pollution, women’s rights, or LGBTQ rights.
This starkly contrasts Karol’s decision to leave the city she loved for Florida. She wasn’t fleeing for conservative politics: that clearly didn’t matter enough before. It was largely to give her kids the opportunity for education unencumbered by useless COVID restrictions—which, as we know, have contributed to educational and developmental delays.
“We can’t stay somewhere that treats children as an afterthought. We can’t stay somewhere that doesn’t fight for their own kids and the kids of their neighbors. We can’t wait for kids to get their childhood back and just hope for the best.”
It seems that in the end, conservatives are fleeing for opportunity and freedom, while liberals are fleeing because they just want to be around like-minded people. While this political migration is, unfortunately, causing more polarization, at least conservatives are motivated by more noble reasons.
