The Race Is On
texasmonthly.com: Would you say that the major difference between the past rule of conservative Democrats and the present rule of Republicans is a greater emphasis on ideology by the latter?
Paul Burka: This is going to be a long answer. The conservative Democrats—I’m talking about people like Sam Rayburn, LBJ, John Connally, Lloyd Bentsen, Allan Shivers, and Bill Hobby—ran the state from the fifties into the eighties, when Texas was a one-party Democratic state. Since that tradition is dead, it is going to take some explaining. At the beginning of the period, Texas was still largely rural, Southern, and colonial, which is to say that it exported raw materials to northern industries and imported their finished goods. The economy was almost entirely based on oil and agriculture (plus some defense industries, some insurance)—that is, things that came out of the ground. The attitude of political and business leaders was that the primary purpose of state government was to foster a “good bidness climate,” which meant low taxes (especially on business), low spending on state services, few regulations, and hostility to labor unions. They were Democrats not for ideological reasons but because the Democrats had been in power in Texas since, and because of, the Civil War, and if you wanted to get elected, you had to be a Democrat. The Legislature was overwhelmingly white, Democratic, and male. (When Tom Craddick, the current Republican Speaker, was elected to the House in 1968, he became one of nine Republicans in a body of 150.) Because the Democratic party was so pro-business, the Republicans had a hard time distinguishing themselves on state issues. They were really an offshoot of the national party—anticommunist, anti-big government, anti-LBJ in particular, whom they regarded as too liberal and too corrupt. They were strong in Houston and Dallas and in the oil patch (East Texas, the Permian Basin), but had no way to get a foothold. The real fight was between the conservative and liberal wings of the Democratic party, and it was pretty close in the fifties and early sixties. The conservative Democrats were very strong in most of rural Texas but East Texas was very poor and very populist (but culturally conservative), and the large working class white population in the cities tended to be hostile to big business (but also culturally conservative). The conservative Democrats had no choice but to be pragmatic. They had to attract enough conservatives into the Democratic primary (many of them Republicans who wanted to vote for courthouse and legislative offices) to beat the liberals, and then they had to get the liberals to vote for them in the general election, so they could beat the Republicans. That was a delicate balancing act, and it required throwing the liberals a bone now and then—not many at first, but more and more, as the minority population grew. The pivotal moment came in 1964, on all sides. Governor John Connally persuaded the business lobby that the state had to put significant resources into higher education, and from then on the conservative Democrats accepted that a healthy economy required more spending on education. On the Republican side, the insurgent Goldwater conservatives took over the Republican party, nationally and in Texas, and the Civil Rights Act of that year, which integrated public accommodations, began the white flight of cultural conservatives out of the Democratic party (as LBJ predicted it would). After Connally, the system began to unravel. The next two governors were rural Democrats who didn’t care about keeping the state party strong (or much of anything else). School busing imposed by federal judges accelerated white flight from the cities to the suburbs. Urban decay in the industrial cities of the North caused companies and their executives to look for new homes, and Texas was the Sunbelt state with the most advanced economy. The new arrivals had voted Republican in the North and they voted Republican here. So the conservative Democrats began to lose their domination of the business leadership. They also began to suffer defections among middle income voters due to cultural issues. Issues like school busing and flag burning and drugs and legalized abortion changed the Republican party from one that was primarily interested in a Main Street economic conservatism to one that was primarily motivated by cultural conservatism and an increasingly hostile attitude toward government. Even as early as the famous Democratic convention in 1968, where the Chicago cops busted the hippies’ heads, it was obvious that the conservative Democrats (who were mostly but not exclusively from the South) had no place in the national party. The liberals were taking over, and Texas is not, has never been, and never will be liberal. Here in Texas, the conservative Democrats still dominated the Legislature well into the eighties, thanks to their residual strength in the small towns, but Reagan was a magnet who drew the next generation into the Republican Party. In retrospect, the conservative Democrats turned out to be more Democrats than conservatives. They were pro-business, but they would raise taxes when the state was in a pinch, and they would spend money on schools and health care. Rural Texas was the swing constituency, and a conservative populism based on cultural issues came to appeal more to small-town Texas than economic populism. The Republicans won with an ideological message that was much clearer than anything the Democrats had to offer. However, that message was developed when the party was on the outside. Now the Republican party is the dog that caught the car. It has to govern. The problems that are out there—above all, demographic change and its impact on education and health care—exist independently of ideology. They can be ignored, but they can’t be wished away. So far the Republicans have chosen to deal with them inside an ideological framework. The special session, which I wrote about in my story about the governor’s race, embraced “starve the beast” fiscal policies that will effectively strangle state government, including public and higher education, for the next five to ten years. That’s the kind of leadership that we have. I had dinner with one of the governor’s closest advisers recently, and he said, “That’s what the taxpayers want.” I don’t doubt that, but a governor is supposed to be the governor for everybody, including those kids whose only hope for the future is a good public school education and who don’t even know that ideology exists.
My Library
