America’s Future Is Texas SL New Yorker

July 3, 2017 3:53 PM

With right-wing zealots taking over the legislature even as the state’s demographics shift leftward, Texas has become the nation’s bellwether.
posted by Bee'sWing (27 comments total)

The only state with more residents is California, and the number of Texans is projected to double by 2050, to 54.4 million, almost as many people as in California and New York combined.

I am terrified of this. Texas is also the state where the water situation is the most precarious. San Antonio has pretty much no surface source of water. When the aquifer is exhausted, what are those people going to do?
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:43 PM on July 3, 2017 [12 favorites]

Yes, there is no substantial mention of climate change though this article is a pretty comprehensive intro to Texas state politics. The southern tier states are going to be walloped by climate change.
posted by Bee'sWing at 4:56 PM on July 3, 2017 [17 favorites]

I thought this was really good -- both terrifying and hopeful. Thanks for the post.
posted by en forme de poire at 5:38 PM on July 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

When the aquifer is exhausted, what are those people going to do?
Paging Paulo Bacigalupi.
posted by doctornemo at 6:36 PM on July 3, 2017 [12 favorites]

I am terrified of this. Texas is also the state where the water situation is the most precarious. San Antonio has pretty much no surface source of water. When the aquifer is exhausted, what are those people going to do?

SA has one of the best water reuse setups--yes, including wastewater--in the country. They are doing a lot to preserve the water they have.

I'm sure more could be done, of course, and SA has other problems. But their reuse setup is being studied and copied by other Texas towns. We are currently not in a drought, but expect there to be another one before long. The last drought saw some towns run completely out of of water and going by my firm's clients, there's a lot of people who understand what a problem that is.

Anyway, I'm not sure what to make of this article, to be honest. If things go badly enough in my state, that population boom will go elsewhere.

One can drive across it and be in two different states at the same time: FM Texas and AM Texas. FM Texas is the silky voice of city dwellers, the kingdom of NPR. It is progressive, blue, reasonable, secular, and smug—almost like California. AM Texas speaks to the suburbs and the rural areas: Trumpland. It’s endless bluster and endless ads. Paranoia and piety are the main items on the menu.

**engages side-eye** Yeah, this is a cutesy oversimplification.

“Sharp,” Laney said, “I got a young man here wants to know how you hunt pigs.”
“Oh!” Sharp cried. “Well, we do it at night, with pistols. Everybody wearing cutoffs and tennis shoes. We’ll set the dogs loose, and when they start baying we come running. Now, the dogs will go after the pig’s nuts, so the pig will back up against a tree to protect himself. So then you just take your pistol and pop him in the eye.”
And these were progressive Democrats. More or less.

** side-eye intensifies** Feral pigs are non-native, extremely destructive, sometimes dangerous. There is nothing inconsistent with a liberal knowing how to hunt them, unless you assume all liberals are against hunting invasive species.

The rest is a long, and if you don't know Texas politics already, educational lesson on Texas political history and the last session, with a heavy emphasis on the wacky. But I don't see much of anything to suggest Texas is "the way the country is going," and he never makes that point at all.
posted by emjaybee at 6:37 PM on July 3, 2017 [41 favorites]

Wait, I thought Kansas was the bellweather, now it's Texas?
posted by fshgrl at 6:45 PM on July 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

The contrast between Texas elected officials and the people who make up the state is extreme enough that the AM / FM idea kinda works for me. And there has never been a shortage of wacky. But I agree, the 'nation’s bellwether' headline is weak. The political history is the best part.
posted by Bee'sWing at 6:49 PM on July 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

When the aquifer is exhausted, what are those people going to do?

Well, in "Hardwired", hey pretty much took over the aquifers of the adjacent states, leaving them high and dry. Given that Hardwired was written before we knew how bad climate change was going to be, I expect all out war. And then as the climate dries further, digging massive canals that can be seen from space...
posted by happyroach at 8:22 PM on July 3, 2017

There is nothing inconsistent with a liberal knowing how to hunt them, unless you assume all liberals are against hunting invasive species.

I can see why the breathlessness would have annoyed you but FWIW what you said is basically exactly what I took away from the article.

It's kind of funny, I was just saying in another thread that my own birth state (Vermont) has a lot of liberals who participate in "gun culture" without buying into the crazy NRA aspects...
posted by en forme de poire at 8:40 PM on July 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

The problem with these bellwethers is that there's too many alarm bells ringing to weather anymore. Kansas, Texas, sure. North Carolina has been described as the same, with our ridiculously gerrymandered legislature that is curtailing voting rights, stripping the (Dem) governor of power and appointees, trying to impeach the (Dem) Secretary of State, pushing charter religious schools, killing solar funding, outlawing wind farms...

Anywhere Republicans have power from the current Congress and President down to your local school board you'll find more of the same. I wish it was just Texas.
posted by bitmage at 8:53 PM on July 3, 2017 [16 favorites]

Quote from an old article in Texas Monthly "There are snakes in Texas and most of them are in Texas politics."
posted by bjgeiger at 9:43 PM on July 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

But I don't see much of anything to suggest Texas is "the way the country is going," and he never makes that point at all.

Yes, hun, but the word on the vocabulary calendar today is: "bellwether"
posted by sexyrobot at 10:10 PM on July 3, 2017

David Siders at Politico two days ago had a somewhat related story: “Trump fuels Texas and California feud.”
posted by LeLiLo at 11:17 PM on July 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

There is nothing inconsistent with a liberal knowing how to hunt them, unless you assume all liberals are against hunting invasive species.

I can see why the breathlessness would have annoyed you but FWIW what you said is basically exactly what I took away from the article.

Well I'm an ecologist and we are all for hunting the shit out of invasive species. Also killing them with fire and also spraying them with herbicides. And I've never met an ecologist who was the current brand of conservative because you just can't study complex systems for a living and think that will work.
posted by fshgrl at 12:08 AM on July 4, 2017 [8 favorites]

Counting the days till I can flee Texas, a state where the poor are left without healthcare, but at least it's legal to carry a switchblade.
posted by Beholder at 4:37 AM on July 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

One datapoint: Texas is one of the very few states actually seeing an increase in higher education enrollment.
posted by doctornemo at 5:36 AM on July 4, 2017

Wait, I thought Kansas was the bellwether, now it's Texas?
Texas has a load of money saved up from oil & gas revenue. It would be a lot harder for the Republicans to bankrupt the state as they did in Kansas.
posted by Bee'sWing at 12:10 PM on July 4, 2017

When the aquifer is exhausted, what are those people going to do?

Water wars. Earth turning sour. Killing for guzzoline. The usual.
posted by stet at 12:36 PM on July 4, 2017 [5 favorites]

Water isn't going to run out. Its price may rise to that of desalinization + pumping but those are essentially energy inputs and energy is cheap and getting cheaper even under current environmental constraints and those constraints will vanish the moment anyone gets a little thirsty.
posted by MattD at 1:19 PM on July 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

Texas is definitely a bellwether in this sense: if the Dems manage to turn the state reliably blue, the GOP will be locked out of the White House for a long long time.
posted by azpenguin at 1:35 PM on July 4, 2017 [4 favorites]

El Paso has been recycling water from sewage treatment plants for many years now. There is a separate pipe system so that it can be used for watering parks and golf courses and cemeteries, etc.

Anyone who thinks that the rising percentage of Latino voters are going to be reliable Democratic voters is being unrealistically optimistic, IMO.
posted by Bee'sWing at 1:57 PM on July 4, 2017 [8 favorites]

Anyone who thinks that the rising percentage of Latino voters are going to be reliable Democratic voters is being unrealistically optimistic, IMO.

If other option is believing that a Trumpified GOP is going to attract Latino voters in significant numbers, then put my name down in the unrealistically optimistic column.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 6:29 PM on July 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

I see no reason to believe that the Republican party is going to stay "trumpified" past 2020. The only thing that Trump changed is that he's crude, crass, incompetent, and nearly lost an election to a very weak opponent; no one else in the party is trying to emulate that.
posted by bracems at 7:09 PM on July 4, 2017

I actually don't believe that Latinos will be reliably Democratic voters as time goes on. They will be spread across the spectrum, probably leaning Dem but not overwhelmingly so. But that will take some time. It's going to take time to get past the top-of-mind idea that Republicans want to make minorities uncomfortable, that they are portraying Mexicans as a drain on society. That's going to take a while, possibly a generation. It's also going to take the GOP some time wandering the desert while they figure out how to untangle from the most rabid parts of their base.
posted by azpenguin at 7:56 PM on July 4, 2017 [4 favorites]

The only thing that Trump changed is that he's crude, crass, incompetent, and nearly lost an election to a very weak opponent;

Can we please stop lying to ourselves like this? Trying to boil down what happened in 2016 to this reductive nonsense is a good way to not see what is happening.

no one else in the party is trying to emulate that.

Have you not been watching what's been happening?
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:38 AM on July 5, 2017

Have you not been watching what's been happening?
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:38 AM on July 5 [+] [!]

ok, we see your dismissal, but please tell us what you see happening.
posted by eustatic at 9:20 AM on July 5, 2017

Anyone who thinks that the rising percentage of Latino voters are going to be reliable Democratic voters is being unrealistically optimistic, IMO.

Latinos: no.

Mexican Latinos? Yes they will go Democratic.

Latinos includes Cubans in Florida and a lot of them are old school Cubans who bailed at the start of Castro's revolution and want aristocracy and sugar plantations to come back so you can't really use Latinos as any kind of meaningful grouping.
posted by srboisvert at 1:33 PM on July 10, 2017 [2 favorites]