"Texas' Toxic Heart," Frank Bruni, The New York Times

 

Ben Wiseman

"Texas' Toxic Heart," Frank Bruni, The New York Times There are states worse than Texas — states even more regressive, states even more oppressive, redder states and madder states and states without its complicated charisma and pockets of charm.

But is there a state more meanspirited these days? A state prouder of its divisiveness? A state more committed to vilifying an enormous share of its citizens and to making sure they have no say? In those regards, Texas has plenty of competition but no superior, at least not of late.

When I say “Texas,” I’m obviously referring not to all or even a majority of its citizens but to those with a domineering grip on political power, by which I mean Texas’ Republican leaders.

Not a week goes by when I don’t smack up against — or get smacked down by — fresh news of their gratuitous mockery of President Biden, their excessive provocation of Democrats and their unapologetic suppression of democracy. The national crackup you keep reading and hearing about? Its fault lines are as wide and deep and vivid in Texas as anywhere else.

That was part of what Steven Pedigo covered in an excellent guest essay in the Opinion section of The Times this week. It’s titled “Texas Is the Future of America,” and he spends most of its first half focused on economic and demographic matters. Then comes this:

Gov. Greg Abbott and the Republican Party have embraced a top-down policy agenda that is backward-looking, excludes huge swaths of Texas’ citizenry and runs against the grain of many of its new stakeholders’ values. They are looking to shore it up by a combination of gerrymandering, voter suppression and relentless cultural warfare.

That’s the part that fascinates and infuriates me. Our country’s second most populous state, Texas has become a provocative theater of performative defiance and a laboratory for imposing the will of the minority on the majority.

The state has much physical beauty. It has even more political ugliness.

Last weekend The Times published an article by Nick Corasaniti, Ella Koeze and Denise Lu about how Texas Republicans, who control both chambers of the Legislature and the governor’s office, plan to gerrymander the state’s congressional districts beyond even the currently ridiculous map, which has created an imbalance — 23 Republicans and just 13 Democrats represent Texas in the House — unreflective of the state’s narrower partisan split.

The new district lines that Republicans have proposed are meant to “lock in the party’s advantage in Washington over the next decade” and “offset recent population growth spurred by communities of color,” the Times journalists wrote. With similar goals in mind, Republican leaders in Texas have also moved to restrict ballot access.

And Gov. Greg Abbott projects a disdain for President Biden that I’d call operatic if that adjective weren’t so dissonant with his and other Texas Republicans’ strenuously rough-and-tumble affect.

Democratic governors certainly went out of their way to thumb their noses at Biden’s predecessor in the White House, hewing to a new norm of outright contempt for leaders of the rival party. But they had more cause, and Abbott has less tact.

A looser grip on reality, too. Shortly before he issued an executive order forbidding any “governmental entity” and “any public agencies or private entities receiving public funds” to require proof of Covid vaccination, his spokesperson put out a statement saying, “Texans and Americans alike have learned and mastered the safe practices to protect themselves and their loved ones from Covid, and do not need the government to tell them how to do so.” Mastered? That’s one part hype, one part hooey and hilarious through and through.

Intent on humiliating Biden during the latest border crisis, Abbott didn’t merely pledge the deployment of the Texas National Guard; he said he would park vehicles end to end for miles and miles to create a “steel barrier” to hold migrants back.

Intent on turning Texas citizens against one another, he signed a horribly restrictive abortion law, being challenged by the Biden administration, that encourages vigilantism by abortion opponents.

This is much of Republican politics now — simultaneously seething with rage and siring it — and deep in the toxic heart of Texas, it thrives.

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