Posted by
Bill Crawford on Wednesday, December 03, 2008 7:31:55 PM
I spent the better part of a week on Long Island for Thanksgiving and had my eyes opened in a big way.
As of fifteen years ago, the last of the defense contractors and all their Republican employees were still there, and so were two of the most efficient Republican machines in the country. One of those machines (Suffolk County) died a grisly and quick death from some pretty ugly and overt corruption problems. The other (Nassau) died slowly from having little to live off of besides patronage and suppression of property tax increases to allow voters to live with their age and sloth.
All the while, the working population was becoming more dominated by immigrants and professionals who tended to vote Democrat.
New York state used to be divided into the City and Long Island/upstate. Now upstate is a separate entity, a junior partner to the Island and the City, more monolithic than ever. This is why the area I grew up in that once had a Senator from each party and a clear majority of Republican Congressman now has Clinton, Schumer and only one GOP Congressman left (Peter King)- in a CD gerrymandered into a safe zone after 2000.
In the process of observing the state of things there over last week, I took in the local media, some casual bar conversations, interactions with people I used to work with and some interesting interactions with family who ran the gamut from politically casual to the burning committed.
I came to realize that things that were considered open questions ten years ago were now often taken as a given by people at all levels, which is something I had attributed to New York City for years, but not Long Island.
This has been building for years there and may well be temporarily crazier because of the Obama windstorm that passed through this year. The problem is, it is an insular area. In North Carolina, even the leftist hotbeds will only have to drive a few miles to find pockets of people who don't seem to have the Obama bling about them.
My opinions have not changed markedly since I grew to most of my conclusions in early adulthood. The world of New York changed around me for the last decade I lived there. I went from being a curiousity in my family to a pariah, and now many things I still think are considered unreasonable a priori, and the attendant rationales are not something I would be even given a chance to expound on.
I have learned my lesson, though. Political conversation is not something I am welcome to the table there with, and knowing this in advance will probably keep me out of trouble. My relatives will undoubtedly get some relief out of this.
This is not a big deal, and it shouldn't have been a surprise. I like to think I keep up with things, but some things always manage to get under the radar.
Long Island is now a couple of boroughs of New York City. It has been twenty years in the making, and it will probably get worse before it gets better.