American Refugees: The Untold Story of the Mass Exodus from Blue States to Red States
By Roger L. Simon
(Encounter Books, 224 pages, $30)

Among the holdings in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art are two paintings by the short-lived Italian Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) entitled “Those Who Stay” and “Those Who Go.” I wasn’t aware of these two works until my friend Brendan, who was strongly moved by them, drew my attention to them many years ago. I hadn’t thought about the Boccioni paintings in a long time (and neither, apparently, have the powers that be at MOMA, where both items are now, according to the museum’s website, in storage), but I was reminded of them while reading Roger L. Simon’s wise, witty, and winning new book American Refugees: The Untold Story of the Mass Exodus from Blue States to Red States.

I should refer to him as Simon, but that feels a bit odd to me, because I’ve known him, at least from a distance, for a couple of decades or so. As founder of the trailblazing website Pajamas Media, later PJ Media, he published a lot of my work and even sent me to Denmark to report, for the now defunct PJTV, on the ridiculous 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit. Before that, he wrote a dozen-odd popular crime novels, including The Big Fix, and several screenplays, including the Oscar-nominated script for Enemies, A Love Story (1989) — which, long before I ever had anything to do with him, I reviewed enthusiastically in (where else?) The American Spectator (“hugely entertaining, richly human … a beautifully shaped film with a rare sense of story, character, and place”). (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: All Hail Cate Blanchett)

The nature of Internet-era relationships (both personal and professional) being what it is, I have yet to meet Roger in person, but it didn’t take long for me to feel that I knew him pretty well. Like me, he’s originally from New York; until moving to Nashville in 2018 he’d spent his adult life as a member of the film community in Los Angeles, a milieu with which I was pretty familiar at a certain point in my life. Prior to 9/11 he’d been, by his own account, a standard-issue L.A. liberal, a type I know intimately; in the years after that unpleasant little Twin Towers incident in 2001 shook up his political thinking and turned him into a conservative pundit, he found not only his friends in Tinseltown but his career as a top-flight film writer evaporating, a phenomenon I can relate to as someone whose editors at the New York Times and Washington Post, among other places, lost my phone number after I wrote a book critical of Islam.

People still talk about the Blacklist as if it was the worst thing that ever happened in the history of American politics, but, hell, the Hollywood Ten actually were card-carrying Communists — mindless tools of Stalin, willing instruments of the Kremlin — and as far as I’m concerned they deserved a lot worse than they got. Far more deplorable than the relatively brief canceling of rich real-life Reds like Dalton Trumbo has been the gradual, now decades-long excommunication of people like Roger Simon from the heights of Hollywood glory simply for being politically to the right of Cher, Bette Midler, and Rob Reiner.

But I digress. I began with Boccioni’s paintings “Those Who Stay” and “Those Who Go.” American Refugees is, in large part, about how Roger, his wife, and their daughter — after being frozen out of a community that had shunned them, Amish-style, for dissenting from the Democratic Party line — transplanted themselves from California to Tennessee. But it’s also, more broadly, about the nationwide phenomenon of which they’re a part — the emigration during the last few years of millions of conservative-minded Americans from increasingly woke blue states, mostly California and New York, to red states, mostly Florida and Texas.

Myself, I’m a born-and-bred New Yorker who left the city in 1998 — long before the current exodus — but even when I was living there, a surprising percentage of the conversations among my friends and acquaintances were about how determined they were to get the hell out, abandon the rat race, the filth, the crime, and the high taxes for some saner, healthier clime. As it happened, I did leave, eventually. Others never did. In many cases, it was obvious that they’d never leave, no matter how much they talked about it — they were just blowing off steam. In his book, Roger ponders the phenomenon of “those who move and those who don’t and what it means beyond the political.” In L.A., it appears, he knew a good many folks who talked a lot about clearing out but who, you somehow could tell, never would. But then there are the refugees. “Refugees,” Roger writes, “are different kinds of people. To them, the ability to ‘move on’ is part of their DNA. They are people for whom looking for new horizons is a natural, almost instinctive, part of life.” (READ MORE: Bradley Cooper Is Leonard Bernstein — And I Am Marie of Romania)

Until I decamped all those years ago, I never thought of myself as a refugee by nature. But I was wrong, I guess. I did leave. And Roger did, too. And the book that resulted, American Refugees, is in equal parts delightful and distressing. Delightful, because Roger is by nature immune to pretense and abounding in humor, even when discussing topics that at first glance don’t seem particularly rib-tickling. He’s done a lot of hard thinking about his move to Nashville and has a lot to say about it, but he wears his learning lightly and doesn’t pose as an expert in anything whatsoever; on the contrary, his book is framed as a tale of a naif’s exploration and discovery — the story of a man who’s in his seventies but still unsure about a lot of things, still intensely curious, still eager to learn about and adapt to (and, in his own modest way, to try to push for small positive changes in) a new culture, and still ready to make new friends and play an active social and political role on what, until very recently, was, to him, utterly alien terrain. And he’s a man, may I add, who before he moved to Music City thought it was close enough to Knoxville that he’d be able to jump in his car and be having lunch with his UT law professor friend Glenn (“Instapundit”) Reynolds a half hour or so later. Alas, no.

American Refugees is also a love song to the South. I like that. I grew up in New York City but spent summers in my mother’s home state of South Carolina — summers that I remember as idyllic. For my friends and neighbors in New York, back in those days, South Carolina might just as well have been South Sudan. Nobody from the North ever went to South Carolina, except perhaps to drive through it on the way to Miami. They’d never heard of Myrtle Beach, let alone what is now known as North Myrtle Beach, where we always spent two or three weeks in a dirt-cheap shack on the shore — a stretch of strand that absolutely everybody’s heard of nowadays.

Yes, in those days there was terrible racism in the South. New Yorkers routinely cited it as a reason why they would never set foot in a Southern state. But there was racism in New York, too — it just took a different form. And the Southern version was, in some ways, at least more honest and more human. Few of the white people in my New York social circle even knew a black person; by contrast, all the white Southerners of my acquaintance knew as many blacks as they did whites. Yes, there was a cruel and unjust hierarchy, but there was also a good deal of respect and even love across the color line. Which may help explain why, in the years just before the pandemic and the BLM and Antifa riots and so on, there seemed to be a good deal more genuine racial harmony in the South than in the North. Even now, my impression is that Critical Race Theory and the toxic “anti-racism” movement have made far fewer inroads below the Mason-Dixon line than above it.

Which is at least part of the reason why Americans who a few years ago would have described themselves as old-school liberals — and who never would have conceived of moving to the former land of Jim Crow — are resettling there. “The South, and red states generally,” Roger writes, “had become the place to be for patriots.” Not that the refugees are all finding paradise, or anything close to it. Roger, after a few years in Nashville, is frustrated with Tennessee politics just as he was with California politics. A Republican-run state, he’s discovered, can be just as maddening as one that’s run by Democrats — even moreso, perhaps, because these people are, after all, supposed to be on your side. But it’s never that simple. It’s about donor money and influence and longstanding networks of good ol’ boys and inertia and stagnation, plus a big dose of old-fashioned corruption. (READ MORE: Imperfect Criticism, Great TV: Remembering Siskel & Ebert)

In the third decade of the 21st century, in red and blue states alike, Roger finds himself frustrated by “the docility, the mass sheepishness, of the public” in the face of a level of government tyranny that feels unprecedented in America — not to mention downright horrifying. He shares with us something that he was told at a Passover celebration just last year: according to a renowned Talmudic scholar of the Middle Ages, “only twenty percent of the Jews agreed to take the risk of following Moses out of Egypt during the Exodus. The rest — the vast majority — preferred to remain as slaves to Pharoah.” Is this true? Who knows? The question is: in a time when so many of our fellow Americans seem shockingly indifferent to the radical transformation of our country — inclined to look away or keep their heads down in the face of even the most appalling violations of fundamental American principles — is it depressing or comforting to know that most of the members of our species may always have been this feckless?

Still and all, there are big pluses to living in a red state rather than L.A. Visiting Texas, Roger reflects that in Southern California, the freeways “only looked perfect around Disneyland,” whereas in Texas “they were immaculate practically everywhere. How could that possibly be when Texas had no state income tax? Who was paying for the roads?” There are even deeper rewards. When, after his big move, Roger had a serious medical issue, one after another of his new friends in Tennessee “told me and my wife that they would pray for me.” This didn’t happen back in Malibu. It brought tears to his eyes. In L.A. he’d been a thoroughly secular Jew surrounded by secular Jews, but felt increasingly alienated; in Nashville, outnumbered by evangelical Protestants — the very fact of whose faith, one can imagine, must, for him, have been a bit daunting at first — what Roger experienced was not alienation but a strange and unaccustomed attraction to the numinous. His account of this development is by far the most moving part of the book.

Of course, Roger’s first years in Tennessee were disturbing ones for America. The Democrats engineered the Russia hoax, carried out two bogus impeachments, and stole the 2020 election. The FBI raided Mar-a-Lago while deep-sixing the Hunter Biden laptop. And a relatively minor episode at the Capitol was officially labeled — absurdly, despicably, treasonously — as an insurrection of historic proportions, with hundreds of peaceful, patriotic citizens being treated as enemies of the state. Even as these dire developments were unfolding, Roger was attending Republican groups in Tennessee whose members, to his frustration, were content to persist with business as usual, the elegant GOP club ladies “peck[ing] daintily at their catered salads” every week or so while state politicians favored them with a half hour of banal boilerplate that had nothing to do with the crisis facing our country. Roger and his wife, the writer Sheryl Longin, didn’t turn Tennessee politics leftward, as so many locals feared that the “refugees” might do; but they did, by his own admission, inject an element of urgency — he calls it “benign assertiveness”; I wonder if it might be fairly described as a rather pungent taste of L.A. manners and mores — into the Volunteer State’s sleepy, staid, stuffy, and perhaps overly genteel political institutions. But what else to do when you discover that the red state you’ve moved to is in danger of transforming itself — not because of mischievous newcomers, but because of cynical old uniparty hands — into a simulacrum of the blue state from which you fled?