Why is New York so liberal now?

[Iokhm]

It was very conservative back from like 2009-2016 and I know its pride month but when I first moved from South Carolina 13 years ago I felt not much social difference between the deep south and NY and now cannabis is legal, it has become pro abortion, and very lgbt oriented. There is nothing wrong with it but its a big change and will probably happen to the deep south too.

[normalice]

Living in such close proximity of other people, especially such a diverse population, will force people to trust each other to some extent and by far the number one draw of conservativism is it helps people feel safe when they don't trust others. This is why rural areas have trouble maintaining any sort of liberal population, because when people are so far apart they don't really develop much of a need to trust strangers. Even enlightened rural dwellers who agree with the liberal principles of civility and democracy, in theory, may still balk at the idea of putting quite the amoint of trust into strangers that city dwellers do, if they were ever in a position where they had to. You kind to have to be raised in it to adapt reliably.

But conservativism is self defeating in this way as it's principle of allowing rich people to have all the money and resources means poor people will be forced to huddle ever closer to survive. And when that happens the fear-based misinformation that is the bait to the conservative switch inevitably falls a bit flat as people learn they dont actually need to fear each other. This is largely why the modern right tries to keep people focused on national politics when 99% of the laws and policies that govern a person are municipal or state laws - focusing on national politics allows them to continue to hang the fear on abstract strangers thousands of miles away but claim the scary brown foreigners are actually at your doorstep. New York is unique as it is the largest city and conservatives thus use it as the symbol of all the brown people that want to laze about on the tax money of hard working white men. Of course if you actually live in New York you know that is very much the opposite of the situation so the fear based misinformation falls flat. And once people start questioning one right wing narrative it rapidly becomes evident that all the conservative narratives are of a piece and few of them make any sense outside the context of each other. Then all you have to do is notice that the person who told you to be afraid has million dollar sky scrapers with their name bolted to the front and it becomes clear the whole thing was a scam.

So its not necissarily that they are liberal so much as "not conservative." Cooperating with other members of the species for mutual survival is the default, not some new trend. The distrust of people thousands of miles away is the thing that is new to our species. The concept of money is perhaps less new but still new, geologically. It isn't really liberal to ignore conservative fear mongering. Nor is it liberal to insist rich people stop taking all our stuff. Its just that people who have made a collective effort to stop rich people from taking allmoir stuff are called liberals by those rich people, because they have trained those who buy the fear message into thinking that "liberal" is the name of the enemy who must be driven away from the piles of rich people's money. All that nonsense about CRT or women's sports and whayever other culture grievances are just the bait. It has nothing to do with stopping rich people from having all the money. Its just a way to get us to fight over semantics while rich people continue to have all the money. And it's not even sensible to say we should just stop then because new things would come up - the rich are very good at this.

[MountAverage]

People in big cities tend to be more open-minded and progressive on average.

[Anonymous]

I guess I always I always thought of New York as a liberal state, weren't they the first state to offer legal abortions?

[Anonymous]

29% of New York's population are immigrants. That's a big factor. And NO! 80% of them are still legal immigrants lol.

[ManHater]

You have to suck your first dick to show you are accepting.

[Anonymous]

Because there's more immigration than ever so they're trying to accomodate them.

[Avicenna]

New York has never been conservative

[exitseven]

New york has been liberal since the 60's.

[Anonymous]

The deep south? Ha, not.

[Iokhm]

Yes, New York was similar to Southern Florida (where I am from) politically in the early 2000s, kind of like a purple state that was very type A. Nowadays it is just as liberal as The Bay Area, and LA.