Michael Nigro/Sipa USA via AP Images
A man carries a “God Bless Texas” flag durng the “Take Our Border Back” convoy rally, February 1, 2024, in Dripping Springs, Texas.
I made a friend a few years back, a young journalist at a newspaper in a smaller Texas city, bored with his work and seeking out conversation on the kind of things I write about. As time went on, however, he just wanted to talk about escape. “A local city I cover, as a matter of habit, appeals every single public records request,” went a typical plaint. “In a state that hasn’t completely lost its mind, maybe the solution is to reach out to the AG’s office. Except in Texas, you’re trying to get an indicted man who might have helped with January 6 to act on behalf of the public.”
At the end of that year, he approached me on the horns of a dilemma: take a job offer as a beat reporter at a daily in a big Texas city, or quit journalism and find some job at a do-gooder nonprofit. The guy’s dog was named “Molly Ivins.” I told him I didn’t think he had much choice. Alas, he took this graybeard’s advice. Things since have been hardly more rewarding.
One day: “Working on a deep dive into how the state of Texas fails to protect intellectually disabled people from predatory guardians. Depressing stuff.”
Another day: “A thing that really irks me about covering conservative dustups is how profoundly dishonest the whole thing is … When it comes time to write, you have two options. Either cut through the BS and call it what it is; then they’ll tell you you’re just biased. Or you can try to finesse it and sound insane.”
Another: “I also just finished a story about how domestic violence homicides are through the roof in Texas (even as overall homicide rates have declined), but we don’t have the infrastructure to really know how bad conditions have become. It turns out when you turn women into second-class citizens and make guns easily accessible, that doesn’t go well.”
A couple of weeks back, he shared with me a dark epiphany: He no longer felt hope. Thought it might be high time to get the hell out of his native state forever. He asked if there was anything out there that gave me hope. Having reached the “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” stage of my relationship with the United States (in part thanks to his testimony from the front lines), I had no comfort to offer.
I did, however, have a suggestion. He could tell me about what all this was like. I could let you listen in. Forthwith, an edited and annotated transcript of my conversation with a man I’ll call Lonely Star. Though it’s not so much that he’s lonely; he has many anguished compatriots who feel the same way. It’s just that they feel like there’s less they can do about it with every passing day.
Rick Perlstein: You told me you once had hope for politics in Texas, but that you’ve lost it. Tell me what you had hope in, and what happened to it.
Lonely Star: I don’t really go for that “demography is destiny” sort of thing, but there was a time when you looked around, and first Harris County, which is where Houston is, turned blue, then a bunch of the suburban countries around Harris County started turning purple, and you feel like, oh, maybe this is a sign that it won’t always be the way it is. But I feel like, recently, the few guardrails that did exist have fallen. I have a friend who has started describing all the recent court decisions around here as “Calvinball”: They’re just making it up as they go along. The Fifth Circuit consistently reversing their own precedents.
Or Senate Bill 4. I don’t have any faith that anyone will put a halt to that, even though constitutionally, they don’t have any ground to stand on.
This is the law stripping the federal government of authority to regulate immigration, despite what every precedent in the history of the Constitution suggests. So suddenly we’re back to a confederacy of states.
Yeah.
This is interesting, because exposing political madness in Texas is practically a genre in liberal journalism. I mean, remember Molly Ivins talking about the legislature outlawing dildos? But it’s always been a complex place, with a lot of contending political traditions. From what you’ve told me, it’s not really Texas anymore, the complicated place; it’s “Texas,” in quotation marks.
Yes. Did I ever tell you that, had only people born in Texas voted in 2018, Beto O’Rourke would have won the election? And I think sort of that idea is what I hung my hat on for a long time. There’s an undercurrent here that wants a different sort of state. [But] Elon Musk is a good example. You have a whole bunch of people coming who, it’s like, they like the idea of Texas, which I think isn’t Texas in actuality, but is like a Wild West amusement park version of Texas. And—do you know Allen West?
From Florida! The guy who won a congressional seat on the strength of his record torturing an Iraqi prisoner!
That guy moved to Texas. At least he isn’t the chair of the Republican Party anymore, but for a couple of years he was.
The Florida Republican Party was too moderate for him.
Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor, is also a great example of this. He runs around wearing cowboy hats. But he’s from Maryland!
Patrick, said to be on the list to become Trump’s 2024 running mate, is perhaps most infamous for saying that “grandparents” should be willing, like he was, to “take a chance on your survival” rather than “sacrifice the country” by keeping businesses closed during the height of the COVID pandemic. He runs the radical Texas Senate with an iron fist.
For a long time, the Texas House was the counterweight to Dan Patrick’s Senate in terms of reining in the most extreme parts of the platform.
The Texas state Republican platform includes planks labeling homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle,” claiming that President Biden “was not legitimately elected,” emphasizing the need to protect the state from “electromagnetic pulse weapons,” and endorsing repeal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But to demonstrate how grim things have become there: Dade Phelan is the Speaker of the House. Very conservative. He’s a big proponent of SB 4 right now. They primaried him. That race is going to a runoff. In the last legislative session, he led the effort to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton. That failed in the Senate. So Paxton turned around and stirred up all these primary campaigns against the people who brought this about.
Paxton, Texas’s three-term chief law enforcement officer, has been under indictment since 2015 for securities fraud. In 2020, his corruption grew so overwhelming that former allies in his office turned whistleblowers, alleging he illegally used his office to protect what Lonely Star describes as a “mafia-type developer in Austin” from FBI investigation, in return for favors including a job for his mistress and the remodeling of his home. The whistleblowers won a $3.3 million settlement after their firing, which Paxton tried to pay out of state funds. After we spoke, Paxton’s securities case was dropped, so as of now it appears he will face no consequences to speak of.
Another turning point is vouchers. The guy who is running against Phelan basically wants to dismantle public education in Texas.
Phelan was skeptical of vouchers because it decimates the schools in these little towns that can’t raise enough money to function by competing in the “marketplace,” right?
Yeah. Texas has been effectively a one-party state for 20, 30 years, but the voucher movement hadn’t picked up steam until this most recent election. And honestly, I think the only way they got that was by demagoguing on the border. I don’t think Republican primary voters particularly care about vouchers. But they care about “building the wall.”
The model I see in my head is a kind of clientelist thuggery, where politicians demagogue on these emotional issues in order to build these power bases from which they can do whatever they want, including looting.
Mm-hmm.
I imagine there must be a lot of mini-Paxtons, that it’s not really the “Wild West” but there’s a strict hierarchy, where you have to pay obeisance to the next thug up the line.
Uh-huh. As cynical and pessimistic as I am by my nature, I was really surprised that he survived. There was no risk, in booting that guy from office, that a Democrat is going to take over that office. You can just put somebody in that’s not corrupt and who’s better at fighting some of these court battles. But not only was he not convicted by the Senate, his allies had a tremendous showing in the most recent election.
They say the right things about the border.
Yep.
And they’re probably going to get a piece of the boodle, I guess.
[Lonely Star chuckles in assent.]
What about the Galveston gerrymandering case, and the attendant madness?
There’s not a single court that this case has gone before that has not found that this county violated the Voting Rights Act. We’re talking Trump appointees saying that this is flagrantly racist. But despite this fact, the next election is still going to be under the new maps, because the Supreme Court has found that until the Fifth Circuit can revisit its own precedent, we’re going to go with the maps that every court has found are problematic.
What does that mean as a practical matter for Democrats? I see they typically get 40 percent of the vote in competitive elections.
It means the Republican majority in Galveston County will go from 4–1 to 5–0.
Galveston is not traditionally a Republican city. From the Civil War through 2012, it had nothing but Democratic state representatives. Democrats typically now get a third of the votes in Galveston elections.
So I was asking you about this race for the congressional seat representing Uvalde, where that kid shot 19 students in 2022, the incumbent voted for a gun safety bill doing things like closing the “boyfriend loophole,” and a YouTuber known as “The AK Guy” just forced him into a runoff as a “RINO,” regarding whom he declared, “The war starts now.” You think the AK Guy possibly can win.
The bar keeps getting lower.
So what about the Democratic Party? Are they a “guardrail”?
South Texas used to be reliably Democratic. The chairperson of the Texas Democratic Party is this guy from South Texas. He oversaw Republicans taking over South Texas. Someone ran against him, but he won re-election. Another journalist tweeted, I remember, “Why ruin a good thing?”
So I see three factors: The Republican Party is becoming more extreme. And they’re getting more votes. And they’re locking in their power by institutional abuse.
Yeah. That sounds like it.
So. What does that mean for the long-held dream of a purple Texas?
I mean, if it still exists, it’s a lot harder to picture.
Kind of like the two-state solution. So now you’re telling me you’re not even sure you can live there in good conscience anymore.
Yeah, that’s really true. I was having beers with another guy and having that conversation. We’re both Democrats, and we were both saying we figured we’d stay here until, you know, Texas decided to change on us. I’m not resigned yet, but I don’t feel very good about it. Watching this last election, and watching the final guardrails come off the system was not uplifting. And then, honestly, I think fellow Democrats’ refusal to really recognize how bad things are about to get is in its own way kind of depressing. Talking to a lot of people, and hearing them say, “Well, we didn’t do well in this election, we’ll keep coalition-building and hope for better in the future!” It’s like, we might be about to see public education as we know it not exist anymore—it feels like we ought to have more alarm bells ringing than we do.
Extra! Extra! Got Infernally Triangular questions you’d like to see answered in a future column? Send them to infernaltriangle@prospect.org.
