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How blue states can save themselves from America’s slide into idiocracy [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-09-08
With the federal government not just abdicating its public health responsibilities but actively working to harm Americans, blue states are stepping in to safeguard their own.
California, Oregon, and Washington have banded together to preserve access to life-saving vaccines.
“California Governor Gavin Newsom, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, and Washington Governor Bob Ferguson announced they will launch a new West Coast Health Alliance to ensure residents remain protected by science, not politics,” the states announced in a joint press release. “The alliance represents a unified regional response to the Trump Administration’s destruction of the U.S. CDC’s credibility and scientific integrity.”
And over on the other coast, blue states are doing the same thing. All of New England—excluding New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—met in Rhode Island to discuss coordinating vaccine recommendations.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is joined by Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren during a press conference about the impacts of the Trump administration.
The only two solid blue states missing, for the moment, are Colorado and Illinois.
I’ve always thought it made sense for a blue state compact to arise as a counterweight to the barriers erected in Washington, where even the unelected and unaccountable Supreme Court stands ready to stymie any hint of progress.
By itself, California is the world’s fourth largest economy, trailing only the United States, China, and Germany. So why couldn’t it—along with the rest of a blue state compact—have its own universal health care system, coordinated climate action, clean energy grids, stronger gun safety standards, joint infrastructure projects, worker protections, science-based education standards, and guaranteed abortion access?
The reason much of this could not be easily implemented, of course, is that the money needed is paid to the federal government. And red America does not survive without that revenue from blue states subsidizing their low-tax, low-effort, ignorance-embracing lifestyle.
Who do you think will pick up the tab for Florida’s inevitable health care crisis as it ditches all vaccine mandates in schools? For all their braying about “heartland values,” they sure aren’t giving up that sweet, sweet blue-state cash.
But the work around vaccines and public health advocacy is a great first step. And if this sounds like groundwork toward a potential future secession, that’s not the worst thing. There is too much ingrained ignorance around the role of blue states in keeping this country running.
There’s a fiction that cities and immigrants are leeches on federal coffers, when in fact they’re the very economic engines that power this country’s greatness.
Liberals never had a problem subsidizing rural America and less productive states, but that free ride needs to come to an end. In the words of Vice President JD Vance, “Have you said ‘thank you’ once?”
Quite the opposite.
Conservatives demonize blue states and cities, and it’s time to end that. That’s why it’s been so refreshing seeing Newsom strongly defend blue America from that skewed conventional wisdom.
“Nine out of the ten dependent states—welfare states—are Trump states. The donor states disproportionately are the blue states,” Newsom said on Shawn Ryan’s manosphere podcast. “Seventy-one percent of the country’s GDP comes from blue counties—these same cracked-up counties with all these crazy liberals.”
This has to be repeated over and over again until it finally seeps into the mind of the body politic. A blue state compact—coordinating science- and reality-based policy around critical public health and other issues—would be a start to countering the nation’s slide into idiocracy.
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