By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, May 15, 2016
Dallas — The
scene on the sidewalks in the fantastically scuzzy corner of downtown Dallas
surrounding the Kay Bailey Hutchison (really!) Convention Center is kind of
weird, because there are a few different things going on here, two of which —
the Texas state Republican convention and a gathering of lady bodybuilders —
produce what would be on its own a pretty strange mix of people, the sometimes
pachydermal hindquarters of the old politicos lumbering around from the Texas
Right To Life booth to that guy with the clipboard quizzing people about Texas
secession contrasting strangely with the linebacker-ish shoulders and
canned-ham thighs of the buffed-up young women, but that already-goofy human
stew is peppered with a considerable army of Walking Dead–type homeless psychotics muttering to themselves — one
of them is shouting at the McDonalds for selling dollar-menu poison, says that
she is sure the NSA is listening, turns to me and shouts, “If you see
something, say something!” and then breaking (seriously, this happened, right
there on Griffin Street) into a medley of “Hard Knock Life” and “Rockin’ in the
Free World” — an entire free-range mental ward zombie-marching around in the
brilliant Texas sunshine on a glorious May afternoon.
They keep the vagrants at bay, outside the convention
center, with the police scrutinizing everything from on high in one of those
creepy Panopticon-on-Wheels rigs while a bored-looking middle-aged woman in a
khaki security-guard uniform goes methodically from planter to planter, down
the sidewalk, parting the foliage and peering the middle for potential
miscreants literally hiding in the bushes. She doesn’t find any.
But the deeper inside you go, the weirder it gets. And
it’s not just the secessionists trying to start a platform fight.
For one thing, I cannot find — and I’m really looking — one person named Guzmán or
Perez or Cisneros or Lopez (not even a Kathryn Jean) or Morales or anything
like that. There are lots of black folks to be seen — lots for a Republican
convention, by which I mean black people in something almost approaching their
proportion of the general population — but this seems to be the only place in
Texas where there isn’t anybody of Hispanic background to be found. (Hell,
there are even white-supremacist gangs
in Texas with Hispanic members.) El
Republicano, “The Voice of the Texas Federation of Hispanic Republicans,”
is advertising a cigar-smoker caucus after-party, but in the meeting rooms and
corridors, this is pretty much an Anglo affair.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Texas governor Greg
Abbott, a conservative’s conservative preceded by a conservative’s conservative
pulled out of the same cracker box, did pretty well among Hispanic voters. Rick
Perry had pulled around 40 percent, and Abbott raised that to nearly half. But
that’s still a step back from where George W. Bush was. Texas Republicans have
been building their presence in Hispanic communities the old-fashioned way:
Campaigning there, putting staff and offices there (Abbott stationed more
staffers in heavily Mexican-American south Texas than any previous Republican
candidate), and keeping their faces and their voices in the media serving those
voters. Most of the Republican delegates milling around in Dallas with
presidential-campaign buttons and T-shirts on are sporting schwag with a
Spanish surname on them: Cruz.
But Ted Cruz is not the presumptive Republican
presidential nominee.
“I don’t think Donald Trump will be held against Texas
Republicans,” says David Hagan. He’s at the convention working for Gary Gates,
a candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission, and if you are looking for the
influence of Trumpism on Texas Republican politics, Gates is a good example.
Though its name implies something else, the Railroad Commission is the main
regulator of Texas’s oil-and-gas industry, which gives it a very large
footprint in state politics. For that reason, the Railroad Commission is a starting
point for many Texas political careers. (One of my high-school classmates,
former San Antonio city councilman Art Hall, ran in the Democratic primary for
the commission a few years back; he made a run at a state house seat this time
around.) Gates’s tagline on his radio ads is: “I’m Gary Gates, and I don’t care
about political correctness.” Which is all good and fine; what it has to do
with regulating drilling rigs is anybody’s guess. I don’t think the
transsexual-bathroom thing has come up too often in that context.
Irrelevant? Maybe. But people want to know about those
things, Hagan says. He himself is a former city councilman and mayor pro-tem
for Victoria, Texas, as well as a preacher at a rural church. “People want to
know where you stand on political correctness. They want to know where you
stand on the border, on abortion.” He says he has been “pleasantly surprised”
by the convention’s lack of fractiousness. And Mr. Mexican Rapists? “Trump is
his own brand. He’s a Republican, but he’s also his own phenomenon.”
The general attitude toward Trump here is predictable:
This is Ted Cruz country, but mostly Republicans have come to grudgingly accept
that in a matchup between Donald Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton, then it’s
Trump . . . probably. Hagan says he’ll work for Trump and vote for him, but
admits he sees a Trump win as a coin toss. “You know what you’re getting with
Hillary. With Trump, there’s at least a chance. For me, it comes down to the
Supreme Court. You know what kind of justices Hillary will nominate. Trump
might” — might — “nominate good
ones.” When I put it to him that Trump’s record isn’t that of a conservative,
by a long stretch, he doesn’t disagree. “I hope and pray that he lives up to
the rhetoric of the past several months in the primary.”
That’s a pretty iffy payoff in exchange for backing a
candidate whose identification with the Republican party almost certainly
ensures that it will be a generation before another GOP contender for high
office does as well with Hispanic voters as Abbott, Perry, or George W. Bush
did.
Hispanic voters are not one-dimensional, single-issue
voters in thrall to ethnic identity politics. In Nevada, where Trump is well
known, he did better among Hispanic voters than did the Spanish-surnamed Cruz
and Rubio. (What allure these Cuban-American Republicans would have for
Nevada’s predominantly Mexican-American Hispanic voters is not obvious:
“Hispanic” in many ways is a category that exists more in rhetoric than in
reality.) Cruz wasn’t particularly popular with Hispanic voters in Texas as a
Senate candidate or a presidential contender, and Rubio’s great success with
the Cuban-American community in South Florida, from which he hails, probably
isn’t replicable. Polling suggests that Hispanic voters do not in general have
attitudes toward (or an interest in) immigration that is radically different
from that of the rest of the electorate, and, indeed, the big issues in the most
recent issue of El Republicano are
forced annexation (an acute concern for unincorporated communities surrounding
the Dallas and Houston metroplexes), municipal services (forget your
wide-open-spaces mythology, Texas’s population is 80 percent urban), and port
security in light of recent terrorist attacks. Bringing these kinds of issues
to Hispanic voters, and to candidate recruitment, is the reason why there are
six Hispanic Republicans in the Texas legislature today instead of none, as was
the case in 2009, and why there are an additional eight Hispanic Republican
candidates running for legislative seats this time around.
The threat isn’t Hispanic voters’ fixation on
immigration. The threat is Anglo voters’ fixation on immigration. The rhetoric
surrounding immigration often is ugly and stupid — our friends at the Center
for Immigration Studies just last week published some unfortunately sneering
remarks about Hispanics being “natural conservatives” — but, what’s worse, it
is, thanks in no small part to Trump-ism, bound up in a nasty species of white
identity politics that crowds out other issues. It’s one thing to affirm the
plain fact that our federal authorities need to get control of our borders, or
to argue that recent failures of assimilation suggest that immigration rates
are too high. It is another thing to be so cheesed off by the presence of a
Budweiser billboard in Spanish along the interstate that you embrace a daft
populist-nationalist agenda that insists we are “losing our country” every time
someone celebrates a quinceañera, and that the fundamental problem with the
U.S. economy is brown people from down south. If you’re talking about
Kulturkampf instead of jobs and opportunity, and you regard Hispanics (and not
just illegal immigrants) as the enemy, you are going to lose those inroads
Republicans and conservatives have made.
But that is what the Trump movement is about: Murdering
the Republican party as a vessel of classical liberalism of the Adam Smith
variety and reanimating it, Frankenstein-style, as a vehicle of Anglo identity
politics.
“We are in trouble,” says Artemio “Temo” Muniz, chairman
of the Texas chapter of the Federation of Hispanic Republicans. Muniz is the
evidence for both sides of the immigration debate: He is the son of an illegal
alien, a goat-herder from near San Luis Potosi and a beneficiary of the 1986
Reagan amnesty. He probably took a job or two that a native-born American might
otherwise have taken, but he also created a lot of them, having started a
mattress-manufacturing company that is now one of the largest home-furnishings
businesses in the region, employing about 90 people. Muniz works for the family
business and has just finished law school. When I ask about the lack of
Hispanic participants in the convention, he says my observations are accurate.
“The chairman says he wants a convention that looks like Texas, but we have a
long way to go to get there.” (The Texas GOP leadership is not exactly covered
up with Hispanic officers.) There are a number of problems facing Republicans
looking to court Hispanic voters, starting with the fact that the target
demographic is about 70 percent Mexican American while the Hispanic-outreach
consultants are about 100 percent Cuban American. South Texas isn’t South
Florida, but then South Florida isn’t South Florida anymore, either:
Republicans lost the Cuban-American vote in the 2012 presidential race for the
first time.
There’s plenty of headwind, but there’s no getting around
Trump, either.
“You should hear the ads the Democrats are running,” he
says. “They just play what Trump is saying, and that’s it. You don’t need to do
that menacing voice that they do in political ads. He is the menacing voice.
He’s like a villain from a telenovela.” Texas’s Hispanic population is by no
means homogenous, and while the long-established Mexican-American communities
in places such as West Texas and the Panhandle tend to rank immigration pretty
low on their policy agendas, voters in the big cities, where the Hispanic
population is dominated by immigrants and first- and second-generation
Americans, tend to be much more keenly interested in the subject, and to
diverge from the currently hawkish Republican mood on immigration. And the debate
within conservative circles often overlooks some basic realities.
“Citizenship isn’t a priority for illegals,” Muniz says.
“They’re here for economic reasons. They want to work. If we let them work in
peace, that’s all they’re interested in.” Granting illegals permanent residency
status, or the much-discussed “pathway to citizenship” is mostly beside the
point. In and around Houston, where Muniz lives, Mexican immigrants tend to
undergo a fairly quick economic integration. “They’re driving new trucks and
buying houses,” he says. But the persistence of Spanish-speaking enclaves and
the enduring contacts between Mexican immigrants and their home communities —
which may in some cases only be a few hundred miles away — makes the full
cultural assimilation of these immigrants difficult in a way that was not the
case for European Jews, Poles, Irish, and Italians a generation ago. “We just
want to be treated like Americans, and like earlier immigrants.”
But Mexican immigrants aren’t like earlier immigrants, at
least in some important ways, and that isn’t going to happen.
It isn’t only the Hispanic Republicans who are dreading
Trump. Pro-life activists are wary of him, and one volunteer for a
traditional-marriage organization just rolled her eyes when I asked whether she
thought Trump solid on her issues. (I’d have asked “Texans for Civic
Engagement” what they thought, but, in what I assume was a hilarious Dadaist
prank, their table was empty the entire time I was in the exhibit hall.) Others
I spoke to shared the view of David Hagan from Victoria: That Mrs. Clinton is a
certain disaster, and that Trump presents uncertainty.
Which is to say: Texas Republicans are like a driver late
at night violently swerving across the highway to avoid the oncoming headlights
of a speeding semi, hoping that whatever vehicle whose path they’re swerving
into is moving with less momentum than an 18-wheeler. There’s a related
philosophical question about whether it’s really suicide when people jump out
of burning buildings, but the ground is hard and cold either way.
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