My wife and I live very comfortably in a deeply blue area of a deeply blue state. For my entire life, I've lived in states that were somewhere between 'pretty blue' to 'crazy blue', and I've also always lived in/around cities whose politics skewed to the left of the state as a whole. And I find this a fairly comfortable place to be - while I'm not what most people around me would describe as politically 'progressive', my differences with Democratic Party policies and priorities tend to be rooted in technocratic rather than ethical objections. I might not like a policy because it's inefficient or counterproductive, but rarely do I find the basic policy itself actually unethical, so I'm happy to kibitz from the sidelines and live with it. In fact, for the last 2.5 years I've been quite happy to live in a place that took public health reasonably seriously and had the expertise on hand to make sure reasonable decisions and policies were put in place.

My wife's family lives in Texas. My in-laws have frequently made semi-serious suggestions that we should consider moving to be closer to them - our cost of living would dramatically decrease, we'd have family nearby to help out with childcare/etc., and the community they live in is very friendly and welcoming. Makes sense, right? Now, for years our response has been essentially rooted in our careers - despite what my in-laws might argue (and various articles they send us from time to time), the career opportunities available to me and my wife in our current locale dwarf those available in theirs, most particularly because of the highly specialized skills we have chosen to develop.

But in recent years, my response has also included a concern about the ethics of living in a state like Texas. Long before the current abortion challenges, there have been other state laws/policies that were extremely concerning - their treatment of migrants, several policies targeting LGBT folks (especially children), voting restrictions, gun laws, educational policy (and funding), restrictions on the right to protest, restrictions on common sense public health measures, etc. Many of these policies/laws are ones that I object to not only on technocratic grounds, but also ethical or moral ones - where I think the policy is not just wrongheaded, but actively wrong in its conception, goals, and execution. My father in law broadly shares many of these concerns, but argues that most of them wouldn't affect us directly - after all, we're reasonably well off, and could seek abortion care (in the unlikely event we needed one) out of state. We would live in a community where public carry of firearms is infrequent, where migrants are a fringe problem, where most of the kids go to private schools so don't need to worry about the public schools. And while he's broadly right, I am unmoved by this argument because policies that only affect others to their detriment can still be wrong, and why would I want to be a part of such a polity that supports such policies?

In fact, there are large portions of the United States that I would have to think carefully about before seriously considering moving there, despite the fact that they might be good fits for my family in other ways. Maybe this isn't so unusual, after all, given all that we've heard about the Big Sort in recent decades. But it started me thinking: People vote with their feet, right? And if lots of other like-minded people either refrain from moving to or actively leave states that are embracing these sorts of policies, aren't we making the situation worse?

We know that many political institutions in the US are minoritarian by design - notably the Senate and Electoral College. Higher degrees of political segregation - especially when coupled with a rural/urban divide - drives state-level polarization that further strengthens minoritarian positions (which currently favor the Republican Party). So, the real question here worth discussing is whether there is an ethical position to take that would embrace moving to a state that currently elects politicians who push for unethical policies in the hopes of reducing polarization and improving overall demographic imbalance? My knee jerk reaction is to say 'hell, no!' but I suspect that is part of why we got into this mess in the first place. Thoughts?