Michael Ennis
All Shook Up
The tectonic plates of Texas politics are once again in motion, an early sign of earthquakes to come. Republicans and Democrats, don’t say we didn’t warn you.
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In losing their hundred years’ war, Texas Democrats had scorched the earth behind them, destroying the very constituencies their party would soon enough need to compete with the Republicans and their growing legions of conservative white suburbanites. Texas’s long-suffering blacks helped Ann Richards eke out a twilight victory over catastrophically inept campaigner Clayton Williams in 1990. But relative to whites and Hispanics, black numbers declined dramatically under generations of hostile fire from Texas Democrats, from 30 percent of our population before the Civil War to just 12 percent today. Organized labor might have given Texas Democrats the disciplined though shrinking base that it still provides the national party, except that Democrats here crippled the unions’ power. The big-city political machines that give critical support for Democrats in the Northeast and Midwest never really developed in our big cities; locked into their rural mind-set, Texas Democrats were basically content to let Republican professionals rule our cities, with two of the three largest—Dallas and San Antonio—still sporting clubby council-manager governments and conservative business moguls who pull the strings.
Democrats got a reality check in 2002, when at last they offered a forward-looking “dream team”—Hispanic gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez and black senatorial hopeful Ron Kirk—and were soundly trounced. Conventional wisdom (and relentless rhetoric from the other side) insisted that Texas Democrats were hopelessly liberal in a deeply red state. But Sanchez and Kirk, both wealthy, business-boosting moderates, actually got blown out for the sins of their lily-white Democratic forefathers, who had remained, almost to the end, scorched-earth conservatives, leaving their heirs with only a stunted, poorly organized traditional Democratic base.
The Democrats’ collapse left us with a new Republican political singularity. But all Texas’s new rulers seem to have learned from their opponents’ history is that declaring war on the future is a lot easier than solving its problems. And it’s not just that Republicans have adopted the same minimalist-government dogma that enabled the Democrats to keep Texas barefoot and pregnant for generations. This June’s state GOP convention was a frightfest worthy of the halcyon days of conservative Democratic paranoia, the crisis-mode rhetoric so urgent that you’d have thought that Texas Republicans had only just learned that millions of Mexican nationals have crossed our border illegally and are now living and working among us. “Under attack this very week are our principles of national sovereignty and the rule of law,” inveighed party chairman Tina Benkiser in a tub-thumping call to arms echoed by speaker after speaker. “Well orchestrated by left-wing liberal groups, thousands of illegal aliens marched in the streets waving foreign flags, defacing our flag, and demanding to be recognized as law-abiding citizens.”
The demagoguery (Left-wing liberal puppet masters! Flag-defacing aliens!) was vintage save-our-monoculture hysteria from the fifties, and the state GOP went on to call for a wall across the entire border, “American English” as our official language, an end to bilingual education, and the apprehension and deportation of all illegal aliens currently residing in this country. No consideration was given to how all those aliens would be deported and who would replace one in ten Texas workers (or who, absent the illegal workforce, would build that wall), much less the far more urgent issue of ensuring a twenty-first-century education for the Hispanic kids (most of them American citizens regardless of their parents’ status) who are going to be the majority of Texans in twenty or thirty years.
Little wonder we sometimes observe that Texas has historically had just one political party, a future-averse conservative uniparty once called the Democrats, now called the Republicans. But there’s one key difference. The delayed industrialization and urbanization of Texas—abetted by the Democrats’ fixation on limited government—and the century between the Civil War and LBJ’s civil rights legislation gave Democrats a huge lead on the future; when it finally caught up with them, they were finished. Today’s Republicans are living smack in the middle of the multicultural, highly urbanized, economically diversified future the Democrats fought against for so long, even if the Texas GOP leadership doesn’t appear to get it. And their millennium will be a moment if they don’t realize that their future is now.
That’s why this year’s kooky independents are so portentous. Amid the history of Texas’s eternal uniparty is a long tradition of un-orthodox challengers. The Populist candidate got 44 percent of the gubernatorial vote in 1896, and candidates representing everyone from Socialists to the Ku Klux Klan have made credible runs. Ruling-party primaries have also featured challengers bent on course corrections that almost amounted to a third-party challenge; Farenthold forced the more conservative Briscoe into a primary runoff, and if Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison had taken on Perry and the Christian conservatives the governor has so frantically courted, Republicans might have seen something similar this year. But Hutchison chickened out, and Grandma and Kinky stepped up. Sure, they’re both much stronger on style than face-the-future substance: Strayhorn is just another conservative Republican, albeit hoping to bracket Perry on the left on stem cell research and clean energy technology and on the right on taxes and his supersized toll road, the Trans-Texas Corridor; Friedman is a surprisingly retro political naïf whose media-savvy self-promotion (and fondness for the Ten Commandments) harkens back to flour salesman and radio personality W. Lee “Pappy” O’ Daniel, the huckster who was elected governor in 1938. However, the parties should take note of how many Texans are evidently willing to look past the questionable merits of the independents and embrace a future that doesn’t include the same old uniparty status quo.
But Perry’s going to get out his voters, and the real heat on one-party politics is probably going to come when the Hispanic kids who marched in the streets to protest hard-line immigration policy last spring are old enough to vote. They also have a sophisticated political tradition to build on: the League of United Latin American Citizens, founded in Corpus Christi in 1929; the Viva Kennedy clubs that carried Texas for JFK in 1960; and La Raza Unida party candidate Ramsey Muñiz’s 1972 run for governor, which resulted in Briscoe’s prophetic plurality. Those kids will inhabit a multicultural, ultramodern megalopolis stretching from Brownsville to Denton, and Texas leaders who want to stay on the right side of history should put aside their fears and remember the cardinal rule of Texas politics: The future always wins.
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