Austin at Large: Good Thing Austin’s Here!

Otherwise, “Texas” would be synonymous with persistent brokenness and failure

Austin at Large: Good Thing Austin’s Here!

Our deformed national discourse is all about how people feel rather than what they do, because the media platforms that host and drive that discourse – retail politics is pretty much a dead letter in America – have no incentive to resolve our sociopolitical issues and every incentive to make them ever more histrionic and divisive, to drive "engagement." On those platforms where left-leaning audiences gather, it's always Fascism Is Nigh O'Clock, which they speculate will look like something out of a graphic novel (we don't yet have a robust post-Soviet canon of antifa literature to succeed 1984 and Animal Farm). Folks, we don't need to speculate what the Future Fascism of America will look like! Texas is right here.

All the outrages that have animated the national Democratic establishment since Biden took office have been the status quo ante in Texas since the ante was Ann Richards, the last official Austinite to run this state (as opposed to de facto Austinite Rick Perry, who lived here for 25 years as a statewide official, 14 as governor). We've been losing our reproductive freedoms, piece by piece, every two years, like clockwork. We've been losing our voting rights in a state where protections of those rights have always been rudimentary, and where the entire structure of electoral politics is purposely opaque and baroque so that people don't vote and don't care. We've watched moral panics and crusades against disfavored heathens scourge families and schools throughout the state time and again. And the desires and tastes of wealthy businessmen, augmented by state power, have dictated Texas policy and politics since bison still roamed the plains.

And Everybody Loves It?

This is the part of the story where our GOP friends come out and boo-yah and spike the football, because if today's Texas is a dystopia, it's a frighteningly popular one – we have decades to go before we collide with the external limits of Texas' own sustainability, the place where California is now, with negative outcomes cascading throughout its communities. But let's be real! It's Texas' blue cities, and Austin the bluest among them, that are attracting people to the state, including probably a couple hundred of you reading this now. Greg Abbott didn't do jack! So why is he trying to hurt us so badly?

Unreflective Austin exceptionalism is an ugly look, and population growth in Houston, Dallas/Ft. Worth, and San Antonio is well above that of Texas as a whole, and those places are a hell of a lot more diverse than Austin is, and their futures are not dependent on Austin's goodwill. But that doesn't make untrue that the Austin metro area is growing much faster than all of those places – indeed, faster than any metro area in the country. Is that going to come to a halt now that people can see the contours of Texas fascism? Dunno! Ask Elon Musk!

Even Elon Knows What's Up

More likely, people – even Musk – will see how thoroughly fucked up and broken everything is that Abbott and his supporting cast have touched. Some of that, like voter access or (before last month) abortion care or the state's gobsmackingly impractical refusal to expand Medicaid, is broken on purpose, consistent with some idea of Republican principle. Those principles have all been corroded and eroded down to the studs, though; I'm old enough to remember when "frivolous vigilante lawsuits" were horrific anathema to previous waves of GOP leaders, and when "the state dictating what local schools teach local kids" was the reason why GOP parents fought to home-school. Now, it's what Greg Abbott says he sincerely believes.

Abbott, who is not a good or nice man, nonetheless retains a measure of gravitas that most of the clowns he has to wrangle, like Ken Paxton or the members of the House Freedom Caucus, have only read about in books. He's the paterfamilias of this third generation of GOP rulers, the lords of misrule. The OGs under George W. Bush were, by definition, a bipartisan crew working within a divided government, and they trimmed their sails accordingly. The long second generation dominated by Perry and his fellow ex-Democrats featured policy initiatives that they'd workshopped over years of public service, not just bullshit they heard Tucker Carlson going on about. This current crew is utterly craven, talentless, and witless even by comparison to Rick Perry, and the evidence piles up daily. Is the power still on? Will Texas' coddled and cosseted cops save your life or just hang out in the hall outside as you scream? Would kids be better off on the street than in foster care? Will the state health department simply waste a bunch of money ineptly handling disease outbreaks and contact tracing, or will it straight-up give people monkeypox? How is cannabis both legal and illegal at the same time?

And what more do these fools have to ruin and break before Texas turns blue? The latest poll shows not just Abbott, but also Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton, at below 50% and barely 5 points ahead of their challengers. They have 10 weeks to avoid screwing up, which given their track record might as well be 100 years.

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