Le Monde diplomatique
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September 2000
GEORGE W. BUSH DOWN HOME
The backward state of Texas
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Texas breaks all the records. It rates first for capital punishment,
second for size and population, last for public spending, and it is
nearly always behind in health care, racial equality and protection of
the environment. Two former presidents, Lyndon Johnson and George H.
Bush, come from Texas. Now it is George W. Bush's turn to run for the
White House.
by DANIEL LAZARE *
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Most Americans, including most Texans, assume that Texas, home to
George W. Bush, gets its distinct political character from its cowboy
heritage, its wide open spaces, and its long history of violent
struggle with everyone from Mexico and the Comanche Indians to the
Civil War armies of the American North. When the Indians are on the
warpath and the nearest neighbour is miles away, a man has nothing to
fall back on except his trusty six-gun - which explains why Texans
have long prized individualism and self-reliance above all other
virtues.
Thanks to Bush, the United States presidential election is fast
turning into a referendum on Texas and all it stands for. But while
guns and geography have certainly played a part, explanations like
these tend to understate the degree to which Texas was consciously put
together during a brief period in 1875 by a group of 90 or so
lawmakers, all of them white and many of them ex-Confederate
(Southern) army officers. Over the previous half-dozen years, a
Northern-sponsored radical state government had struggled to bring
Texas into the modern world by building public schools, encouraging
industry and putting an end to some of the worst abuses of Mexicans
and blacks (1).
The results were so traumatic for Texas's large-scale landowners that,
when the North abandoned reconstruction and the state's brief
experiment with democratic reform was allowed to collapse, they seized
the first opportunity to restore the ancien régime. They decreed
racial segregation in state schools, slashed education, banned the use
of general revenues to fund black colleges, and all but dismantled the
governing apparatus that the former governor, Edmund J. Davis, had
worked so hard to create. The upshot was the deliberate reinvention of
a state whose name would become synonymous with hostility to
government, opposition to political change, and violence towards
racial minorities, workers and the poor.
This side of Texas is apparent in virtually everything the state says
and does - in its abysmal urban conditions, its class structure, its
boom-or-bust economy, and its love affair with capital punishment.
Texas, as the tourist brochures say, is a land of contrasts. What they
don't say is that many of those contrasts are the result of
deep-rooted contradictions in its political structure. Texans are
contemptuous of politics, yet they have produced some of the canniest
politicians in the country. They abound in oil and gas millionaires
who preach the gospel of free-market capitalism while milking
Washington for tax breaks and subsidies.
Texans are imbued with a can-do spirit, an irrepressible frontier
optimism, yet, thanks to chronic political disorganisation, their
history is a record of one failure after another. The battle of the
Alamo, the famous Spanish fortress in San Antonio in which 187 Texas
independistas were killed by Mexican forces in 1836, was a wholly
preventable military disaster. With unerring accuracy, the state's
white population chose the losing side in the US Civil War of 1861-65.
Then, in subsequent decades, local politicians did everything in their
power to make sure the state stayed an economic backwater by cutting
schools and all but outlawing trade unions.
Despite the discovery of oil in 1901, the state remained undeveloped
well into the 1950s. Although Texas's fortunes took flight in the
1970s when Opec forced up energy prices, it lost much of its wealth in
the savings-and-loan financial disaster of the 1980s when, relative to
the nation as a whole, its per-capita personal income fell nearly 10%.
It has a loser as governor. George W. Bush managed to go through
$4.7m, put up by family friends and wealthy Republicans, in the oil
business in the 1980s. He nearly ran two energy companies into the
ground and only turned a profit in 1990 when, on the eve of the Gulf
war, a third company in which he was involved won a lucrative
oil-exploration contract from Bahrain - helped by the fact that his
his father was president at the time. George W. Bush did well as the
owner of a professional baseball team, but only after persuading the
town of Arlington, a Houston suburb, to pick up much of the tab for a
new $191m stadium - another example of the Texas bourgeoisie's
reliance on public largesse (2).
George W. Bush did better in his bid to become governor, winning the
election in 1996 and again in 1998, and, of course, he may also do
well in his bid to become president. If he does, however, he will
merely succeed in imposing Texas's losing policies on the nation as a
whole. It's hard to think of anything the world needs less than a
right-wing Texas oil man at the helm of the sole remaining superpower,
but that may be where America's political system is now heading.
Oligarchy and frontier republic
The Texas that rose from the ashes in 1875 was very much an American
creation. In other circumstances, a land-owning class intent on
putting down ex-slaves and impoverished tenant farmers might have been
expected to monopolise political power and wield it with ruthless
force. But Texas's neo-Confederate elite did something more
complicated. Because the previous regime had tried to create a
centralised governing apparatus that would be a force for change, it
instinctively set about dismantling it.
In a special convention called to draft a new state constitution, a
group of hand-picked delegates voted to cripple the executive branch
by dividing it up into five different posts, each one separately
elected. They further fragmented executive power by dividing it up
among what are, by now, some 200 administrative boards, whose members
are chosen by the governor with the advice and consent of the Senate
and are largely unaccountable to either. The delegates also crippled
the local legislature by restricting its members to two-year terms,
and limiting their salaries and the times they could meet, so as to
ensure a high turnover of members.
On the assumption that a judge immediately dependent on the voters
would be less likely to challenge the other two branches, they then
hamstrung the judiciary by requiring that every last member be
popularly elected. As a final measure, they decided to hamstring the
electorate as well, by disenfranchising blacks en masse, and by
requiring even white voters to pay a poll tax and register in person
nearly a year prior to each election. A $1.50 poll tax may not sound
like much, but in the days when subsistence farmers rarely saw money
from one season to the next, it was enough to keep thousands of people
away from the polls.
Although often described as a return to loose forms of government that
had existed prior to the Civil War, the new system was actually worse
- more fragmented, more decentralised, less responsible to the voters
at large. Rather than a dictatorship, it was a kind of oligarchic
frontier republic that large-scale landowners had no trouble
manipulating behind the scenes.
In creating their pseudo-democracy, members of the 1875 Texas
convention were able to draw on a sizeable body of US constitutional
beliefs and structures. Although Americans like to think of themselves
as the most modern people on earth, the US constitution of 1787 was
(and is) curiously pre-modern in its elevation of what medieval
jurists described as jurisdictio (law) over gubernaculum (government).
Because law is the closest thing to a sovereign power, the law is
always right. Because it is strong, government can afford to be weak.
Indeed, since Americans have traditionally regarded their constitution
as a charter of liberties, the weaker the government, the stronger and
more undiluted those liberties will be.
Constraint on constraint
This is what Richard Coke, Texas's first governor after the Civil War,
meant when he told the state convention in 1875: "The accepted theory
of American constitutional government is that State Constitutions are
limitations upon, rather than grants of power...." (3). Even though
the US constitution already put permanent limits on the people's
ability to govern themselves, the purpose of a state constitution was
to limit it even more. Constraint was piled on constraint.
Texas's unshakeable state constitution - the state legislature
attempted to create a new one in 1975 but failed - has distorted state
politics ever since. Texas has a brand of folk conservatism that has
become the law nearly as much as driving on the right or stopping at
red lights. If the political culture of the Texas land-owning class
helped shape the Texas state constitution in the 1870s, the
constitution has, in return, served to ensure its hegemony over the
ensuing 125 years.
A rigid constitution has led to rigid politics, morality and much else
besides. In the 1890s Texas saw a brief populist revolt by
impoverished farmers, which was all too easily crushed and co-opted by
the state's Jeffersonian elite (4). Thereafter it saw a collection of
colourful politicians go trooping through the governor's mansion, each
one promising change while doing his best to preserve the status quo.
When one governor found himself impeached by the state legislature, he
arranged for his wife to run in his place so he could continue
governing from behind the throne. Another governor travelled the state
in the 1930s with his own country-and-western band, campaigning on a
platform consisting of the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, and a
promise to provide each retired citizen with a pension. (The pension,
needless to say, never came to pass.) Others made names for themselves
by railing against communism, the federal government, or literature
professors who assigned "obscene" books at the University of Texas.
While politics degenerated into little more than empty theatrics,
morality remained almost tribal. If a Comanche "enjoyed heaping live
coals on a staked-out white man's genitals," wrote T. R. Fehrenbach,
then a white Texan would, just a blithely, "bash an Indian infant's
head against a tree, or gut-shoot a 'greaser' [a Mexican-American] if
he blinked" (5). Texas probably saw more lynchings of blacks between
1900 and 1930 than other states in the deep south. Meanwhile the state
militia known as the Texas Rangers - also the name of the baseball
team that George W. Bush owned before becoming governor - conducted a
reign of terror against the state's Mexican-American population,
executing, without trial, an estimated 300 in the years 1915-19 alone.
Political impoverishment has also led to intellectual impoverishment.
According to Fehrenbach, "The Texan's ... distrust for theories [was]
profound. ... The practical outweighed the conceptual; things were
more important than ideas; education was to fit children to society,
not change them or produce inherent confusion by educating too many
students beyond their station" (6). If, traditionally, Texans "were
not antisocial but asocial", this perhaps explains the deep sexual
unease that Texas's most famous novelist, Larry McMurtry - author of
The Last Picture Show (1966), Terms of Endearment (1975), and
Lonesome Dove (1985) - argues underlies much of West Texas cowboy
culture.
Locked in the past
The Texan economy is also anchored in the past. Thanks to massive
federal investment in military installations and aerospace, Texas has
been successful since the 1980s in its efforts to diversity into
computers and other forms of high tech. Yet it remains an essentially
land-based economy. Regardless of how they make their money, wealthy
Texans consider it de rigueur to buy a few thousand acres out in the
hinterlands, put on jeans and cowboy boots, and set themselves up as
ranchers - as George W. Bush has done with 1,500 of desolate scrubland
that he recently purchased near the remote West Texas town of Crawford
(7). Wealth is not really wealth apparently, unless it takes the form
of property.
Texas's economy is also rooted in the past in terms of its social
policies. Although it ranks dead centre among the 50 states in terms
of personal income, its distribution of wealth is so lopsided that by
1998 it was among the 10 worst in terms of the portion of the
population living below the poverty level. Proportional to its
population, Texas is also in the bottom fourth in terms of such social
indicators as the number of physicians, full-time college enrolment
and infant mortality (8). Thanks to relentless budget cutting under
George W. Bush, it now ranks last in terms of state spending per
capita, an indication that the distribution of income is continuing to
worsen (9).
Because landed wealth is intrinsically anti-urban, Texas has little by
way of mass transit, multi-family housing, neighbourhood playgrounds
or other urban amenities. Because government is so undeveloped, the
people have no means with which to create effective environmental
policies. As a result, Texas is responsible for more water and air
pollution than any other American state or Canadian province. Hundreds
of ageing utilities, chemical plants and oil refineries are exempt
from pollution regulations while, thanks to rising traffic levels,
Houston, the state's petro-chemical capital, beat Los Angeles in 1998
as the city with the worst ozone levels in the US. Not that George W.
Bush seems to mind, though; one of his top environmental appointees
once testified in Washington that ozone is actually a benign substance
(10).
Texas has emerged in the late 1990s as the nation's leader in
"sprawl," a term that Americans use to describe a cancerous blight of
shopping malls, fast-food outlets, and discount stores that now covers
much of the landscape (11). Imagine a smog-shrouded, stiflingly hot
(36 degrees centigrade) city with about 20% fewer people than Paris
but spread out over an area more than 13 times greater, where there
are virtually no pedestrians or cyclists but an abundance of
traffic-clogged eight-lane highways going every which way like strands
of spaghetti - that is pretty much what Houston is like today.
Texas incarcerates more people per capita than any other state in the
nation: indeed, it has a system of law enforcement that is now the
most punitive in the industrial world. Though it only has one-tenth of
the population, it hosts a prison population that is now greater than
that of France, Germany and Italy combined. Its criminal justice
system is an uncontrolled Gulag consisting of some 250 county
sheriffs, 500-plus municipal police departments, more judges than in
the whole of Great Britain, and some two dozen state boards and
agencies, all more or less autonomous. The state legislature lacks the
constitutional authority to reorganise this hideous mess even if it
wanted to. Given the thousands of defence attorneys who also have a
stake in the status quo, serious change is unlikely.
Texas's criminal justice system is drawing international attention
because of the more than 200 prisoners executed since the 1970s.
Predictably, state officials have responded to the protests with
resentment and hurt. "I happen to think we live in a rather fine
place, and I think that Texas is being showcased by some for political
reasons as not such a fine place," declared Bush right-hand man
Lieutenant-Governor Rick Perry on the eve of the execution of Gary
Graham on 22 June. Graham, a black, protested his innocence to the
end, and the press failed to mention that he was under the age of 18.
The US is one of only six countries still to carry out the death
penalty on minors and the mentally ill - along with Iran, Nigeria,
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
Incompetent state government not only invites criticism, it fairly
thrives on it. Rather than protecting state autonomy, the Texas state
constitution consistently undermines it by leaving the federal courts
and other US agencies (12) no choice but to step in and clean up state
abuses. Texas's consequent reliance on the federal government serves
to thrust it deep into federal politics, which is why the state has
turned into such a prolific breeding ground for national politicians
since the turn of the century - not only ex-President Lyndon Johnson
and the Bushes, father and son, but also long-time Speaker of the
House Sam Rayburn, Clinton Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen Jr., Bush
Secretary of State James Baker and numerous other Washington power
brokers.
Texas's backward political structure manifests itself in an unusually
unified ruling class. As an oligarchic republic, Texas not only allows
its wealthy residents and corporations to manipulate politics behind
the scenes, it fairly mandates that they do so to ensure their class
interests are protected. The upshot is an intense level of political
involvement on the part of the state's super-rich, most of them
reactionaries to one degree or another, who have moulded themselves
into "a formidable force that wins more often than it loses in
confrontations with ... the largely depoliticised masses" (13).
Texas's energy sector is America's very own Opec, a corporate clique
that believes that global warming is a myth, that the health risks
from smog are much exaggerated, and that it is the duty of every US
citizen to burn all the fuel he can. It is a sector that has never
seen a car, highway, or 10,000-square-foot suburban home that it
didn't like as long as it was filled with oversized refrigerators,
72-inch television sets, costly exercise machines and other
energy-consuming gadgets.
The Texan energy sector is America's own Opec, a corporate clique
believing that global warming is a myth, that the health risks from
smog are much exaggerated, and that it is the duty of every US citizen
to burn all the fuel he or she can: the clique never saw a car or a
highway it didn't like. This sector has backed George W. to the hilt -
to quote The New York Times, oil has been the essential lubricant for
his unsuccessful run for Congress, his two gubernatorial campaigns,
and his bid to become president. Bush's most important patron is the
Enron Oil Company, and at least 25 of his top donors are connected to
the oil business (14). The reasons for this support are obvious. The
son of an oil driller and a former oilman himself, George W. Bush is a
local patriot whose years at boarding school in New England, Yale
University and the Harvard Business School only served to strengthen
his loyalty to his home state. He is an enthusiastic glad-hander - as
a college student, he reportedly memorised the names of a thousand
fellow undergraduates to ensure his popularity - and he is thoroughly
at home in the deal-making world of Texas politics (15). He is also a
resolute conservative, well to the right of his father, and he exudes
a jovial, anti-intellectual manner. In Texas, ignorance rules.
Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 the US has grown ever more
like Texas. The process has continued in the last eight years under
Clinton, with the prison population up 50%, the growing use of capital
punishment (Clinton and Gore are both supporters of the death
penalty), and an increasingly punitive war on drugs. If Bush gains the
presidency, the process will simply change pace.
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* Journalist, author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is
Paralyzing Democracy (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1996).
(1) Robert A. Calvert and Arnold De Leon, The History of Texas ,
Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1990, p. 153. One historian
estimates that one black male in 100 between the ages of 15 and 49 was
killed by marauding whites between 1865 and the advent of a radical
state government in 1868.
(2) Molly Ivins & Lou Dubose, Shrub: The Short but Happy Political
Life of George W. Bush, Random House, New York, 2000, pp. 19-42. In
1998 Bush sold his share in the Texas Rangers baseball team for $15m,
acquired for $600,000 in 1989.
(3) Gary M. Halter, Government and Politics of Texas: A Comparative
View, 2nd edition, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1999, p. 21.
(4) Chandler Davidson, Race and Class in Texas Politics, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 1990, p. 20.
(5) T.R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans,
Macmillan, New York, 1968.
(6) Ibid.
(7) Frank Bruni, "Bush Finds Comfort Zone In a Remote Texas Ranch,"
The New York Times, 22 July 2000.
(8) 1997-98 figure. For further information see:
http://www.census.gov/statab/www/ranks.html
(9) Louis Dubose, "The Gospels of the Rich and Poor," The Texas
Observer, 12 November 1999. The Observer's extensive coverage of the
Bush presidential campaign can be found at
(10) Molly Ivins et Louis Dubose, "Bush and the Texas Environment",
The Texas Observer, 14 April 2000.
(11) See John W. Gonzalez, "Urban sprawl in Texas fastest in the
country," The Houston Chronicle, 26 December 1999. See also Danièle
Stewart, "Do you know the way to San Jose?", Le Monde diplomatique,
English edition, July 2000.
(12) The federal government often intervenes in the States of the
Union to ensure that fundamental rules, which apply to all Americans,
are respected.
(13) Davidson, op. cit.
(14) John M. Broder, "Oil and Gas Aid Bush Bid For President," The New
York Times, 23 June 2000. Bush broke all records by accepting nearly
$100m in gifts four months before the general election.
(15) Nicholas D. Kristof, "Ally of an Older Generation Amid the Tumult
of the 60's", The New York Times, 19 June 2000.
Original text in English
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