California, I’m fine.

Somebody check my brain.

California’s all right.

Somebody check my brain.

— Alice in Chains, “Check My Brain”

Twenty years ago, journalist and historian Thomas Frank published a sneering critique of red-state residents in a book that spent 18 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. In 2004, Frank’s needling of cultural and religious conservatives in “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” won him accolades from all the right names with all the right pedigrees.

The smart set among magazine and newspaper editors, columnists, historians, and journalists offered glowing praise in the work’s opening pages. The late Molly Ivins perhaps best captured the book’s spirit when she assured readers, “I promise, ya’ll, this is the only way to understand why so many Americans have decided to vote against their own economic and political interests.”

Just two decades later, the book’s thesis can be applied to several blue states whose residents continue to vote for candidates and policies that have made their states punishing places to live, work, operate a business and raise a family for middle-class Americans. Many states governed by Democrats are witnessing an exodus of people escaping to red states with a friendlier business climate, lower cost of living, no state income tax, considerably lower crime rates and fewer restrictions on personal freedoms.

People follow work, and with nearly 70 companies leaving California between 2020 and this year, thousands of employees relocated for work to more business-friendly climates, predominantly Texas.

Census data from 2023 reflected most of the “leftugees” moving from the Northeast and the West Coast to the South. Texas and Florida have become home to most, together with North Carolina and Georgia, taking in 93 percent of the net growth in 2022 and 67 percent in 2023.

California, Illinois, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and New York were the big losers in 2023, but the trend began in 2020 as draconian and needlessly extended COVID lockdowns frustrated residents whose lives and livelihoods were disrupted as economic woes devastated millions of households.

Toss in the irrational “defund the police” response to the George Floyd protests that same year with the resulting spike in crime, and the conditions were ripe for misery. The consequences have been exploding crime rates, rampant homelessness, mountains of garbage and human waste on the streets, and a general chaos that reinforces residents’ suspicion that the people they elected are partisan activists who value their hard-left credibility more than the people they allegedly represent.

The bifurcation of economic classes that occurs when those with the means to move out and leave behind those who can’t creates a bright dividing line that shouldn’t be ignored, yet it has been years, and still, blue state governors, mayors, and city councils seem blind to the plight of their constituencies. California is a one-party state, but there are effectively two classes: the super-wealthy and the people who cut their grass and cook their meals.

Economist and demographer Joel Kotkin’s “The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class” was published in 2020, yet it could serve as a retrospective study of what results when clueless elites in metropolitan cities rule rather than serve. These elites, what Kotkin calls “the clerisy,” benefit from the tighter concentration of wealth and the increased stratification of society, all to the detriment of the middle class, which Kotkin calls “the yeomanry.”

Though the breadth of his lens is much wider than our self-inflicted blue state woes, the book is a compelling read for anyone feeling more like a serf than a citizen of late.

The solution seems obvious. Residents in blue states should reconsider how they vote.

The darkest blue states have lost billions of dollars in revenue. New York lost $20 billion in 2020 and $25 billion in 2021. In addition to similar financial forfeitures, California is projected to lose four seats in the House of Representatives by 2030.

The Biden administration’s response has been to hold the gate wide open at the southern border and usher in millions of illegal aliens, many of whom will replace residents who fled their blue-state fiefdoms.

Washington oligarchs’ refusal to police the border is an undeniable signal that their lust for power far exceeds any will to serve their constituents, for as long as they have any.