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Nicholas's avatar

Would absolutely read a slow boring series on how to Yglesify every state in the union

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JCW's avatar

I grew up in Texas during the bipartisan years, and the descent of the state's political leadership into a bunch of cookie-cutter Fox News Republicans makes me really sad. It's also kind of emblematic of the intellectual rot in the GOP. It also weakens both the state and that party. Here's a few scattershot thoughts:

1) Recall that George W. was successor (as governor) to a Democrat, Ann Richards. He had to work with a Democratically controlled legislature. All of that was because the replacement of the Dixiecrats with Republicans and the general Southern shift of the GOP was still in-progress; it took longer in Texas because that state has different dynamics than the pure Old South. As a result, you had period of genuine bipartisan governance in Texas. My hope is that the gradual blue shift of the state might deliver another such period.

2) The bipartisan period owed a lot to the fact that Texas used to have a much stronger libertarian streak in its politics. The government just did less stuff. That could be for ill--hello, pollution--but it could also be for good, in the sense that the current GOP mania for highly intrusive government, i.e. the anti-CRT, anti-mask kind of BS, was checked. As part of both the libertarian and bipartisan stuff, Texas politics had a strong "good governance" streak. Again, this was often in the service of preventing the government from doing stuff, and the state has usually lagged on services. But it also led to things like a solid rainy day fund and a preference for competence over partisan performance in politicians.

3) Under appreciated: the emphasis on low state government control left a lot of space for individual Texas cities and counties to be their own thing. This could be really, really bad: Dallas was essentially a Klan stronghold for big parts of the 20th C.; small Texas towns could be scary racist and corrupt. I once delivered a lawsuit against the sheriff in a small county where we had family (I was a courier and file clerk as my undergrad side job). My dad told me not to mention our name unless asked directly, and that if a cop car tried to pull me over in the county, I should not stop until I got to a public parking lot across the county line. And he was right. Before I could deliver the papers, I had to get them notarized in the county clerk's office. By the time I drove over to the sheriff's office, all the deputies were hanging out in the lobby. The clerk had called ahead. Happily, they just wanted to gawk.

BUT...the lack of central control also left tons of space for liberal places to do their own thing, too. This is how Austin became "Austin." Less well-known, Houston had a surprisingly liberal / cosmopolitan streak, in part because the oil and shipping industries demanded a certain level of it--if you wanted that sweet, sweet Saudi crude, you couldn't ask a sheik to come in the back door and use the crappy water fountain. (One customer at my law firm was literally the Sheik of Qatar, who, hilariously, owned some condos in Houston because that's a good way to park money out of country.) Houston passed ordinances protecting employment for gay people in the '80s, UNDER REAGAN. It wasn't a liberal place, precisely, but it was also not what you think of as a conservative paradise.

4) To see the changes of the 21st C., consider the progression of governors:

George W. Bush was a fairly bipartisan and benign governor. Texas was relatively open and welcoming to immigrants. The state was focused on education. The Bush crew's approach to that problem, including an emphasis on standardized testing, has not aged well, but it was a genuine attempt at improvement, and at the time it was believed to be delivering results. Again: they were likely "wrong," but not in a way that was obvious at the time, and the effort of folks like Karen Hughes was pretty clearly genuine. Bush goes to the Presidency on a campaign of "compassionate conservatism." He spearheads a global AIDS initiative, PEPFAR. I'm a global health person. I think Iraq and Afghanistan ended up being stupid disasters. But PEPFAR has saved, no hyperbole here, millions of people's lives in the developing world, and it is very idiosyncratically a Bush program. It would probably not have happened otherwise.

(Also, no one cares about it because of all the other disasters, which: fair. They were disasters. And a lot of the Bushies, starting with Cheney, were straight-up villains and clowns.)

Bush is replaced by Rick Perry. Perry is more GOP-ish. He is also demonstrably more corrupt; despite never having held a job other than as a politician and coming from poverty, he eventually leaves office as a millionaire thanks to his side hustle as a land speculator that just "happens" to deliver absurdly lucrative profits on deals cut in the Austin area. He oversees a GOP-controlled legislature best remembered for the antics of Tom DeLay, who makes a play to do an off-year gerrymander of the state to buttress GOP power in Congress. DeLay eventually goes to jail. BUT...Perry does remain open to immigration. He initially continues on the some of the "compassionate conservative" stuff. This eventually blows his chance at becoming the GOP presidential nominee (it hurt that he was kind of dumb--"oops"--but his immigration openness had already killed his chances at that point).

Perry is replaced by Greg Abbott. You know Greg Abbott from Fox News. The legislature is busy passaging messaging bills. The state power grid has collapsed multiple times. Abbott called on the legislature to pass messaging bills. Abbott's AG (elected separately, but still), is under Federal investigation, and he's only the tip of the corruption iceberg. That's okay, though, because the legislature is going to do some anti-abortion stuff. Abbott is going to build the wall. HE'S GOING TO FUND IT WITH THAT RAINY DAY FUND I MENTIONED. Also, the state now has incredibly high Covid numbers, and the health system is beyond capacity and edging towards collapse. Abbott's response: special legislative session to do some voter restrictions. Oh, and executive orders against mask mandates that even the state's GOP-controlled Supreme Court can't get totally behind.

Basically, the party has descended into a corrupt clown show. It's really depressing. It's one of the major reasons why I have never, not even once, thought that it would be good to move back to Texas. I love my old state, but at this point seeing what is going on there just makes me sad. (And it's hard for me not to assume that, despite its many natural advantages, enough corruption is eventually going to kill the golden goose.)

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