f you’re old enough, you’ll recall the 1961 Berlin crisis. I recall it subsequently, when schools taught real history. That crisis happened during the Cold War’s peak years. In brief, Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev wanted the U.S. out of West Berlin. There were multiple reasons, but, chiefly, access to West Berlin allowed East Germans to escape communist rule.
According to the National Archives, by 1961, as many as four million Germans had escaped East Germany using West Berlin. With tensions rising, and the hemorrhaging increasing, Khrushchev ordered the Soviets’ East German puppet government to string barbed wire and erect concrete barricades around West Berlin to stop the outflow. That was the beginning of the Berlin Wall, which stood as a testament to communism’s failure until 1989.
What does that have to do with America today? The point is that people vote with their feet when conditions become unacceptable. That’s no less true here. Since the nation’s inception -- in fact, long before the founding -- people came to the continent to escape troubles and moved west in search of better lives. East Germans fled primarily because of politics -- albeit, of a brutal, totalitarian stripe.
Annually and increasingly, tens of thousands of people are leaving blue states because of politics. High taxes and red tape, inflated costs, unchecked crime, failing schools, and unashamed race bias -- directed at whites -- are pushing people out. Soft political tyranny and cultural decay are drivers. Human nature is universal. People will endure until they cannot.
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