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Fascist State

There are degrees of political insanity. After its recent Republican
primary elections, Texas approaches a psychotic break.

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.

[link removed]

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."

[link removed]

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 [email protected]
.

~ RICK PERLSTEIN

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