Thanks to the DC-Richmond Leftist Corridor the Virginia We Knew Is Gone
The Old Dominion is Long Gone: It will live on in memory
The Old Dominion is Long Gone: It will live on in memory
Nothing makes me angrier than hearing my mother weep, especially when it’s about politics. “My Virginia is gone.” Few transformations have been as swift, as consequential, and as emblematic of broader national trends as the metamorphosis of Virginia from a sturdy redoubt of Southern conservatism into a reliable bastion of Democratic blue. Once the cradle of gentlemen presidents, Virginia now votes like Massachusetts without the obnoxious accent. The causes are not mysterious, nor are they particularly complex. Two forces, intertwined yet distinct, have engineered this shift. It is a story seen in other capitols: demographic revolution wrought by mass immigration and the metastatic growth of the federal leviathan. It has turned Northern Virginia into a vast suburb of Washington, D.C., populated by government workers whose livelihoods depend on the perpetual expansion of the state. Together, these have remade the Old Dominion in the image of progressive governance.
The numbers are undeniable, for politics, like physics, yields to quantification. In 1980, Virginia’s population stood at 5.3 mil; by 2020, it had swollen to 8.6 mil, a 62 percent increase. Native-born Americans accounted for only a fraction of that growth. The foreign-born population exploded from under 5% in 1990 to nearly 12% today, with the Washington metropolitan area (Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William, and Arlington counties) hosting the lion’s share. These are not the Scotch-Irish settlers of the Shenandoah Valley or the English cavaliers of the Tidewater. Drive through the parking lots of NoVa apartment complexes. They are predominantly from Latin America, Asia, and the…