Texas is a state of mind

Texas is both a real physical place--a state--and Texas is a concept in the public mind. 

 
Texas has been undergoing a fundamental shift in reputation. 

Or not.

The Texas of my youth was the Texas where John Kennedy was assassinated. In the 1960s the word "Dallas" had meaning. It was a hotbed of conservative nastiness, and media reports preceding Kennedy's trip to Dallas speculated on whether the trip was safe for him. Dallas was hostile territory. Kennedy would headline a motorcade, but he would be accompanied by his Texan Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, and by Texas' Democratic governor. Kennedy was Catholic, a New Englander, a Democrat, and was increasingly associated with support for the civil rights and equality of Blacks. His assassination, and then the murder of Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald while in Dallas police custody, sealed the deal. Dallas--the idea of Dallas--represented right wing extremism and a place of corruption in service to dark political ends. 

In 1973 I traveled through Texas taking three days to cross from Louisiana to New Mexico, the southern route, through Houston. I intentionally sped through. Texas, to me, represented the worst of Deep South racism, backwoods good ol' boy violence against city folk in the tradition of the 1972 movie "Deliverance," and the still-fresh reputation of assassinations. I was an Oregon boy, White and clean cut, but still an outsider with a college education. I removed the old McGovern sticker from my car to get through Texas. I felt out of place until I got to the safety of New Mexico. 

Then there was the OPEC oil embargo, which changed the mood.  As we waited in gas lines in the mid and late 1970s Texas's reputation repositioned into national lifesaver. It had valuable oil. A prosperous Texas served as foundation for the TV show "Dallas." The show ran from 1978 to 1991--the archetypal show of the greed-is-good Eighties. Texas was swagger, glamour, and tasteless new money, without apology.

Texas was boom and bust country. Busted in 1982 when OPEC turned the oil back on and interest rates climbed. Houston was known for half-finished hollow buildings, I-beam frames in place but nothing inside. Then it recovered, and Texas got a new reputation as that scrappy place that always bounced back. The Dallas Cowboys somehow became "America's team," the NFL's only "national" team and the most valuable franchise because of it.

Now Texas is in crosscurrents. On one hand Texas presents itself as the alternative--indeed antidote--to California. Texas has no income tax. Texas is "business friendly" with an easy regulatory environment. It is open for business and workers. No California woke-ness. Government and NIMBY neighbors don't block new housing in Texas, so Texas had room for you. Dallas-Fort Worth just surpassed Greater Philadelphia to become the country's fourth largest metropolitan area and Texas is gaining congressional seats while California is losing them. Ha! In San Francisco or Silicon Valley or in any suburb within driving distance of the technology jobs there, starter homes cost a million dollars and more. A person making $75,000 or $100,000 a year doing tech or some other 21st century job in Texas--an income to be proud of--could afford a house. 

Texas is repositioning from a place of cowboy boots and pickup trucks to a place with urban sensibilities. Austin is the epicenter of coolness, what with the University of Texas, the live music scene, and its growing technology sector. Austin is the new Brooklyn, and Texas as a whole is repositioning as purple, not red. The parts of Texas that are growing are the cities, and people in cities have city values and city politics. They vote Democratic. They are still outvoted by the rural cowboy counties in Bible Belt North Texas and by Old South East Texas, but people moving to the cities are not so different from ones in California, Illinois, and New York. 

Amid this change, resistance. Their Attorney General led the lawsuit effort to end Obamacare. The Texas AG wrote the lawsuit to attempt to discard votes to overturn the 2020 election. Texas just sharply reduced mail-in voting, and its legislature limited drop boxes for ballots to one per county, both Loving County with 169 residents and Houston's Harris County with 4.4 million residents. Texas proudly passed a law that effectively bans abortion, a giant statement about the civil rights of women and their ability to control their own reproduction.

I am reminded again of The Great Gatsby and its famous closing lines. "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

The future is rushing in on Texas. Its political establishment is encouraging the future, but resisting it as well. Texas sees the green light of a prosperous future on its horizon but it longs for that nostalgic Make America Great Again past that centered power on rural White men. It is too late to stop that future. City people, diverse people, and people with college degrees are moving to Texas, but like Gatsby, the political establishment cannot bear to acknowledge the change that portends.