To the Left, the ‘Blue State Model’ Is About Much More Than Economics

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

 

It’s too nascent to call it a paradigm shift, but the intellectual trends on the elite center-left that Jim chronicled this morning are certainly gratifying. If the New York Times opinion pages and longtime CNN analyst Fareed Zakaria have summoned the courage to identify the crippling failures of governance attributable to the “blue state model,” you can bet they’re speaking for many more who have reached the same conclusion but lack the courage to give voice to it.

 

The audience that would benefit most from this challenge to their ideological preconceptions and policy preferences is, however, unlikely to encounter these arguments. They’re too busy arguing with one another over the relative virtue of letting homeless people defecate in the subways.

 

Dismiss it as an “extremely online” conversation if you like, but the veil that separates our shared reality from the internet’s bedlam is thinner these days. There is something revealing about a discourse in which anything short of toleration for the incontinent unhoused is tantamount to fascism. Ideology is the wrong word for it. Pathology might be more on the nose. But those who are willing to concede that they regard crime as “morally uninteresting” and “excuse” those who commit “theft, violence, etc.” deserve some grudging respect for having the gumption to be as antisocial as they want to be.

 

Moreover, the radical outlook these activists espouse does not depart wildly from the logic that is routinely expressed by the Democratic Party’s leading lights.

 

As I wrote a little over a year ago: “Democratic elected officials at the highest levels of local, state, and federal government excel when they are tasked only with waxing grandiloquent about the metaphysical ills that plague American society. That is their core competency.” It should not surprise anyone that this dynamic has given way to maladministration. Often, the banal demands associated with properly governing a municipality conflict with the priorities of a philosopher who has set out to balance history’s karmic scales.

 

The impetus for that piece was the comprehensive failures at every level of government that produced last January’s historically destructive wildfires in California. Indeed, the same impediments that contributed to that conflagration are now at work thwarting reconstruction. But you don’t need to dive deep into the archives for evidence of progressivism’s myopia. It is apparent in the way the Democratic Party as an institution responded to Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard forces to Washington, D.C., to combat rampant crime by demanding statehood for the district and agonizing over the fate that was about to befall its “homeless encampments.” It’s apparent in New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s refusal to encroach on the right of the homeless to roust them even amid a life-threatening cold snap — a position he only revised 19 fatalities later.

 

For the activist class and, perhaps, the institutional stewards beholden to them, quality of life is a concern exclusive to the contemptibly bourgeois. The far left does not understand why its preservation is vital, and they regard those who do as slaves to the pernicious influence of capital. That brings us back to Jim’s item: A certain sort of progressive activist seems to neither understand nor care to understand how money is made.

 

America’s cuddliest socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders, recently provided us with a glimpse at the abject ignorance of which progressives seem so protective:

 

 

Why does America have so many successful businesses? Sanders does not seem to know. He knows American entrepreneurs and industrialists are “smart” and have been “incentivized” by . . . something. But he could not or would not articulate a theory that explains American productivity. Maybe he doesn’t have one. That would not be surprising given the time the senator devotes to grasping onto the latest populist fad so long as that fad frustrates anyone in America who sets out to build, create, develop, cultivate, and deploy.

 

Mamdani’s acolytes and supporters are illustrative of the progressive contempt for the conditions that lead to material prosperity. He appoints officials who cannot conceive of an environment typified by development. In their minds, property is finite and its owners and developers are exploitative. Therefore, the country would be better off if private property were illegal. And if the productive residents of locales such as California and NYC tire of their persecution and seek friendlier climes, their progressive overlords are hard at work thinking up ways in which those refugees can be soaked from afar. With a little more time and industry, the progressive left may invent the Berlin Wall.

 

All of this seems like more cognitive work than is called for. It’s certainly more taxing than returning to the tried-and-true formulas that transform municipalities into desirable destinations to put down roots, raise families, and create profitable enterprises. For a certain sort of activist, though, that would be to abandon the whole suite of progressive shibboleths.

 

If they turn their backs on the public-sector unions, they’ve abandoned organized labor for the rapacious managerial class. If they police quality-of-life crimes, they’re conceding that quality-of-life crimes are a choice rather than the mechanical byproduct of societal inequities, the victims of which sometimes engage in what the statutes brand “crimes” but only out of pure necessity. If they pursue the kind of favorable tax climate that prevails in the states that are draining the coasts of their tax base, they’ve surrendered to the facts of capitalist life that they’ve spent their whole adult lives rebelling against.

 

The debate over the “blue state model,” feces and all, is not a debate over public policy but the very political identities of the model’s believers. Thus, the model will persist, even as an objective failure.