Messing with Texas (What liberals don't like about Texas is their inability to transform it)

National Review ^ | 07/27/2012 | Windsor Mann

[SeekAndFind]

Liberals talk about Texas the way conservatives talk about France, only with more passion and profanity. During an appearance on Don Imus’s radio show in 2007, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews said, “I’m so sick of southern guys with ranches running this country. I want a guy to run for president who doesn’t have a f***ing ranch.” Asked why he was swearing on the air, Matthews said, “I don’t know. I got excited.” F-ing excited.

This is what Texas does to liberals.

In her new book, As Texas Goes . . . : How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda, Gail Collins, an Ohioan by birth and a New York Times columnist, says that Texas is running the country and also ruining it. In her view, Texas is “frequently somewhat lunatic,” as evidenced, for example, by “its completely crazy abstinence-only sex education in high school,” “its lunatic war on family planning,” and its board of education’s “overall craziness.”

To be sure, Texas politicians can be unhinged at times. In 2003, Representative Debbie Riddle of Houston asked, “Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell.” Such talk is not only uncivil and theologically unsound but also factually inaccurate. The idea of free education, after all, came from Leningrad, not Moscow.

Texas’s craziness wouldn’t be so ominous but for the fact that, according to Collins, “Texas runs everything.” Whether or not it does, it is clear that liberals want to run everything in Texas. For example: “We,” Collins told Rachel Maddow, “should get to have a little bit of a say about whether or not there is any family planning [in Texas].”

Among the problems Collins finds in the state are “a tax system that favors the wealthy”; lax environmental regulations; a “stupendous lack of enthusiasm for ongoing social services”; the state’s gun laws; its voter-identification laws (“your gun license counts as a voter ID but not your university ID card”); weak labor unions; low voter turnout, specifically among minorities and other traditional Democratic constituencies; “education privatization”; its school textbooks; its style of sex education, which teaches that having sex carries the risk of “transmission of the Ebola virus”; its population growth (surprisingly high for a state where Ebola is an STD); “the almost complete lack of state family planning funds”; “a two-tiered economy in which the failing underclass looks resentfully at the happy sliver on the top”; and “its obsession with states’ rights.” Texas’s problems, you see, are mostly conservative problems. And the cure is liberalism, or what Collins calls “the American agenda.”

The debate, of course, really isn’t about Texas’s problems so much as it is about the Left’s problems with Texas. As far back as 1964, The Nation found “something rotten in the state of Texas.” Twenty years later, Nicholas Lemann deemed Texans to be “sorely lacking in compassion” (i.e., sorely lacking in government social programs). Michael Lind faulted Texas for having “a primitive extractive economy,” “inadequate spending on public goods like education and pollution abatement,” and “a cruel caste society” in which minorities toil for the benefit of “a cultivated but callous oligarchy of rich white families.” A liberal columnist for the St. Petersburg Times said that even friendly Texans “have conservatism’s instinctive meanness.” The late Molly Ivins referred to Texas as “the National Laboratory for Bad Government” (a title more suitable for the District of Columbia).

This last point is an important one. One of the advantages of federalism is that it allows each state to serve as a laboratory of democracy. “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system,” Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote in 1932, “that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory, and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

Inevitably, the results aren’t always gratifying. But just because you don’t like the way one state conducts its affairs, that is no reason to subvert the experimental process.

What liberals don’t like about Texas is their inability to transform it. “The rest of the country can’t do all that much to dictate where Texas goes,” Collins laments, “what with states’ rights, states’ rights, states’ rights.” She wants Americans to “work together for our great national goals [i.e., liberal goals] rather than obsessing so much about how we want to be left alone.” Is it any wonder that Texans want to be left alone when New York Times columnists seek to convert their state into a big Massachusetts?

If Texas is inflicting damage on the country, federalism can mitigate the damage. It cannot solve the problems in Texas, but it can contain most of them. Sometimes the best way to settle disagreements is to avoid them. As a general rule, it’s better to localize the problems than to nationalize the solutions. Let Texans mess with Texas.

— Windsor Mann is the editor of The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism.

[NativeTxn]

I am a Native Texan and I live in Austin. I have lived in other places in the country but always couldn't wait to get home. Just this morning I noticed in my neighborhood that at least 30% or more cars are from another state and I should add another country as there were 2 from Mexico. California, Minnesota, Oregon, Michigan, Louisiana just to name a few. We have so many Arabs that the public school is hiring or thinking about hiring Arab teachers and we are so full of Mexicans that they pretty much run the Austin School district. Forgive me for feeling so hopeless but I think it won't be long before even Texas is lost. Pains me but reality hurts.

[NativeTxn]

Sorry didn’t mean to post twice.

[Hojczyk]

If enough move there they will ruin it........it will just take longer....Look no further than Colorado..

[CORedneck]

IMHO, it is the East Coast elitists and stuck-up a-holes that have been ruining this country for years. And those elitists include the media, country club executive types. Time for common sense for change.

[Monorprise]

Yea I know this is a big problem for Texas. Liberals are like Locust they lay wast to their own lands and then move on to anywhere there is a shred of prosperity so they can leach off it till its dead.

[Monorprise]

Assimilation is the key, that means Texas Cultural power is going to have to become more prominent & pervasive to match the influx.

With regard to the “Mexican population” we are going to have to fight the anyone for control of the “group” teach them Texas values and encroach them to see their new roots as Texan.

The biggest problem with the idea of race is that people try to enslave entire groups “races” a political faction.

[dragnet2]

100% correct. Demographics will do the libs’ work for them within a generation or two.

Absolutely...Was there a few years ago...Done that, and it was painfully obvious.

BTW, the entire country will go this way....All thanks to government.

In fact, the direct cause of all America's problems are caused by government. Borders, economy, foreign policies which benefits all except America, more punitive biggov control, twisted trade laws, etc.

The more people that understand this, the better.

BTW, the reason why some refuse to see it in TX and other areas, are because it's painful and difficult to accept watching your homeland be subverted, trashed, and overrun.

For decades America has become and immigration dumping ground for multiple millions of legal and illegal foreigners.

The government could care less there are tens of millions of Americans out of work or underemployed. They're dividing the united and intentionally creating an epic problem, for which government will eventually need to create a, "Solution", which will only mean more socialism and more control.

[TexanByBirth]

I am a Native Texan and I live in Austin.

MOVE THE HELL OUT OF AUSTIN!!!

Once you escape the ignorant bubble that exists around Austin and the surrounding area, you will realize the rest of the state is doing just fine. The best thing I ever did for myself and my family is leave that miserable liberal hell hole eleven years ago!

The major cities in Texas are cramp just like they are throughout the rest of the country, but small-town Texas still is a great place to live, work and raise a family.

[Isabel2010]

The rest of the country should be damn glad Texans still hold the pioneer spirit and will fight for liberty instead of rolling over like a wimp

As a Californian~~~I do appreciate that!

[Windflier]

Texas is crawling with illegal aliens.

Yes, unlike California, where they only have undocumented citizens of extra-national origin, who only speak Spanish, and who have nearly displaced the Americans of the last century.

But don't you dare call them "illegals". *rolls eyes*

Funny how conservatives and patriots are fleeing California to move to Texas, and not the other way around.

[dragnet2]

Funny how conservatives and patriots are fleeing California to move to Texas, and not the other way around.

Funny how running away only makes one tired.

In Texas 70% of Illegal Aliens Receive Welfare

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2011/04/in-texas-70-of-illegal-aliens-receive-welfare/

Those who run away from trouble, will run again. Enjoy your new friends.

[CenTex]

“Once you escape the ignorant bubble that exists around Austin and the surrounding area, you will realize the rest of the state is doing just fine. The best thing I ever did for myself and my family is leave that miserable liberal hell hole eleven years ago!”

Agree with most of your post but some of the most conservative areas of Texas bump up against the famous Austin City Limits. We are 60 miles north but share a representative with those folks...

[ansel12]

You just can’t win the argument of California versus Texas, California is a disaster and a liberal paradise.

The mystery is why you love Obama’s stronghold state so much and hate America’s right wing strong hold state.

[Windflier]

Funny how running away only makes one tired.

Sometimes, one just has to vote with their feet. The original colonists of America did just that. Seems to me, they had enough strength left over to build the greatest country the world has ever known.

Who knows the fate of California? Perhaps it'll implode, and the few free Californians left, will pick up the pieces and set the place back to rights. Perhaps many of us refugees will come home to help on that day.

And let's not get started with another battle of the statistics. The border states are all suffering the ill effects of illegal immigration. So is the rest of the country, now. Every state will have to come to terms with the problem in their own ways, and in their own time. Some will get it more right than others. I hope that Texas is one of them.

[dragnet2]

The mystery is why you love Obama’s stronghold state so much and hate America’s right wing strong hold state.

The bigger mystery is where you got that?

Ya see, my state was flooded with illegals going back 25 years ago, way before Obama. In fact during Bush's last term, the invasion totally exploded, from coast to coast, including Texas, during war time no less.

Here's Dallas Texas during Bush's last term....Ya had 500,000 illegals and there supporters waving foreign flags in your face and making demands and threats....

Dallas Texas, 2006.

You implying this all happened under Omama, is just stupid, and politically ignorant.

[dragnet2]

Funny how running away only makes one tired.

Sometimes, one just has to vote with their feet.

Hey, anyone wanting to run from here to there, I welcome. I've said before, if I could wish 10 million out of here to there overnight, I'd do it.

When they build 10,000, 5-story pink apartment buildings across the wind swept plains of Texas, with greedy-marts owned by A-rabs, on every corner, report back.

[ansel12]

Yeah, Texas has always had illegals, it is just like California, except that Texas is populated by conservative Christian Texans, and California is populated by moderate to liberal Californians who were never very religious.

Texas and California are different in their basic character, California was never famous for theirs, Texas always has been known as a state of strong, problem solving people.

Texans fight for conservatism and Christianity, that is why the left hates them so much.

The left hates Texas like you do, and they love California, like you do.

[DainBramage]

And it was the dumbest thing they could have done. It enraged the res of Texas and their cause exploded.

[ansel12]

You sure make strange arguments to express your bitterness, Texas is not California and never will be.

Your hatred for conservatism’s strong hold, is bizarre, and to do it in the name of the left’s strong hold, is even more bizarre.

[dragnet2]

Texas is populated by conservative Christian Texans

Well, that wraps that up!

Take care!