In some ways it’s a familiar story, but for some reason an article titled, “Left-Wing Billionaire Tom Steyer is Back to Buy Another New Hampshire Election f.  or Democrats,” struck me differently:

Since 2014, Billionaire Tom Steyer has dumped buckets of money into the Granite State to buy elections. In 2018 Tom Steyer’s money turned out the illegal college vote for Democrats, and it worked. Democrats won. Well, guess what? He’s back for 2020.

Because it makes a convenient bogeyman, some folks in Rhode Island, and even at the local level, say conservatives in the state have some similar arrangement,  That’s nonsense.  Although a local advocate on some issue or other may find sympathetic support from outside the state, no evil billionaire cares enough about Rhode Island to invest in a sustained effort to flip it from Blue to Red.

But New Hampshire represents something different.  It’s the “Live Free or Die” state — in some ways a last redoubt in New England.  Perhaps that’s what draws Steyer’s eye.

That possibility gives his efforts something of an evangelical feel.  For the most part, conservatives want a place they can call home.  If some New Englad state were the last to be progressive during a massive conservative resurgence, we wouldn’t set our sights on crushing that last haven, I don’t think.

We’d draw contrasts and make arguments, but I don’t think many conservatives would set their mind to eradicating ideas we disagree with by political means.  That’s a very different mindset than ours, and at this point in history, it belongs firmly on the Left.

One can see its reflection all over the place.  It’s in cancel culture.  It’s in identity politics.  It’s in the notion that conservative speech is violence while progressive violence is speech.  It’s coded in the basic difference of philosophy.  Conservatives want to harness natural processes that maintain free-will amidst social cooperation, while progressives want to declare the answer and enforce conformity for our own good.

With that objective, leaving people an escape is intolerable, because overcoming the natural desire to live free of progressive rules requires that no other option seems possible.