By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, March 02, 2026
DALLAS—If you stop and listen with the right kind of
ears, you can hear his asinine call. If you turn on talk radio, you can catch
him good and clear. The Great American Jackass haunts this place.
One thing about the vast urban sprawl of the Dallas-Fort
Worth metroplex—which, in square-mile terms, covers more land than Israel and
not much less than Albania, just a whole big hot mess of asphalt and tilt-up
construction and car dealerships with those weird wavy inflatable tube figures
gyrating in front of them and baroque highway interchanges—is that it is kind
of hard to say where it stops and starts. It just kind of sneaks up on you at
some point past the Audie Murphy American Cotton Museum and the Exxon “diesel
dhaba,” when the casino billboards (“Everclear! Live at the Choctaw Resort!”)
give way to the lawyer billboards (populated by dorks who give themselves
heroic nicknames: the Lion, the Texas Hammer, the Car-Wreck Cowboy, the Muscle,
etc.) and signs that are implicitly rather than explicitly about
despair (“RV PARK: WE DO BIRTHDAYS!” and “VISIT A BOMB SHELTER FACTORY!”) that
remind you there’s a good reason the speed limit is 75 mph out here and not
much enforced at that, all of which, in spite of the muchness of it all, isn’t
much to look at—it ain’t pretty, but there sure is a lot of it.
I grew up about five hours west of here. I lived in
Dallas for a few years, too, and they were wonderful years—the first years of
my marriage, the first year of my oldest boy’s life, etc. I have cherished
friends in Dallas and had a terrific church, and all of my children were born
here, but it was never home. Not really. There is something distinctly un-Texan
about Dallas and the surrounding gigantic spread of urban-to-suburban-to-exurban-to-rural
development, weird as that may seem to say about Dallas, of all places, which
is what a lot of people think of when they think of Texas. But Dallas, a
pleasant and mostly convenient (especially for frequent fliers) if badly
administered city, is not like Dallas, or Landman, or even Friday
Night Lights or The Last Picture Show or any of that romantic Texas
cowboy-roughneck stuff, or even anything like the grittier real-life Texan-ness
of the Panhandle or Jeff Davis County—at its worst, Dallas can seem like just
one [expletive deleted] Panda Express after another, one more smug finance bro
(Dallas has more finance jobs than any U.S. city outside of the one where the
literal actual historical Wall Street is) in a fleece vest eating another $29
bagel at Sadelle’s and talking about Series B funding, one more traffic jam,
one more very slight variation on the theme of the generic American cityscape.
My working theory is that the neurotic Texan obsession with what we might call
“Texas exceptionalism” is felt most acutely in those bits of Texas that are the
least distinctive: the vast might-as-well-be-Atlanta sprawl of DFW, the suburbs
of Houston, etc. Much of the greater DFW area could be almost anywhere in the
United States. It’s 50 shades of beige.
But there are wrinkles.
There is a lot of cheap land out here on the outskirts of
the metroplex, which you can tell from all the self-storage businesses and
vacant commercial and residential lots (even if you didn’t read about it in
Erica Grieder’s insightful Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can
Learn From the Strange Genius of Texas), some of it owned by some pretty
fancy Dallas developers, some of it already given over to a few little pockets
of high-end, gated developments that are slowly filling in the spaces between
the unlovely stretches of wild scrub and concrete and blacktop and pawn shops.
And one of those developments, currently on ice, is just outside the town of
Josephine, about 45 minutes outside of Dallas proper, bears the eye-catching,
aspirational name “EPIC City, Texas,” which is practically the only real-estate
development in all of the 268,597 square miles of Texas to which the state’s
Republican apparatus, normally a friend of developers, is adamantly opposed.
The project constitutes an “illegal development” that would “destroy beautiful
Texas land,” says Attorney General Ken Paxton, a corrupt imbecile and a lowdown
scoundrel even by the standards of Texas politics, who is using every tool in
his considerable arsenal to block the development and who just happens to be
trying to unseat Sen. John Cornyn in Tuesday’s Republican primary. I’ve been
out to the site where they want to build EPIC City, and I can tell you that
this is not “beautiful Texas land.” It is pretty ordinary Texas land. It could
be Houston. It could be Borger. It could be the outskirts of Indianapolis or
Chicago. It’s just dirt.
What you really need to know is that EPIC is an acronym
identifying the motive behind the planned development: East Plano Islamic
Center.
It is not like Texas does not have its share of
religiously distinct communities—it surely does, but they are mainly
Christians, such as the German-speaking Old Colony Mennonites who are doing
their part to Make Measles Great Again in West Texas. But Gov. Greg Abbott
nonetheless signed into law a bill targeted directly at EPIC City, which he
characterized as a planned “sharia compound.” Gov. Abbott, like most Texas
Republicans, has leaned hard into the culture-war stuff: “One of the issues at
stake is the freedom of religion,” he said of the anti-EPIC City bill. “Another
issue at stake is what’s called the right to contract. The fact is, religious
freedom is a central part of the Texas Constitution. But bad actors like EPIC
and EPIC City tried to use religion as a form of segregation. We will ensure
that we have the laws and law enforcement in place to prevent attempts to build
such discriminatory compounds in the state of Texas.”
Compound—a funny word Texas Republicans keep
coming back to, hearkening to some long-ago events just outside Waco.
Sharia is the A-list bugaboo of the moment. The use of
religious law in religious matters is pretty common in the United States, and
more common in Texas than in many other states if only because Texas has a lot
of Catholics who rely on religious law to settle matters such as marriage
annulments, but there is a pretty obvious double standard when it comes to
Muslims who want to build a neighborhood centered on a mosque. You can bet that
homeschooling Calvinists would have had no trouble building a MAGA-MAHA compound
and might very well have been celebrated for their effort. I do not think much
of the EPIC City project or some of the people associated with it, including
EPIC’s resident Islamic scholar, Yasir Qadhi, a Saudi-educated Pakistani
American former Salafist and quondam Holocaust denier,
albeit one who has lately repented of his ugliest
antisemitic views. (Qadhi did not respond to my offer to interview him for this
article.) And I’m ecumenical here: I don’t think much of the Christian kooks
out there in my native West Texas refusing to vaccinate their kids and just
practically cultivating preventable diseases that could kill or cripple
or disfigure my kids, and I don’t think I’d much like having them as neighbors.
The EPIC City gang may very well be schmucks. But if
there is one thing I know about Donald Trump’s America, it is that schmucks are
allowed to be real estate developers.
Traveling around in Texas, I hear from farmers dismayed
about the loss of Chinese markets for their soybeans thanks to Trump’s second
trade war and from oil and gas guys who wish the price of a barrel of West
Texas light sweet crude would rise just a bit and who do not think that bringing millions and millions of barrels
of Venezuelan oil into the marketplace is the way to
get that done. I talk with businessmen who are building vast data centers and
who are having to go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that these projects can
be powered.
I also talk with Democrats who are excited that their
party just picked up a big win in a state Senate election with Taylor Rehmet, a
union machinist who ran a campaign focused on—forgive the cliché—kitchen-table
issues and handily saw off Leigh Wambsganss, whose political career has
consisted of yelling at a lot of terrified school board members and running the
PAC of a right-wing cellphone company (because right-wing cellphone companies
are thing in Anno Domini 2026), who often seemed like she was auditioning for a
Fox News gig rather than a seat in the state Senate. Rehmet, a Democrat and a
first-time office-seeker, won 57 percent of the vote in a district that Trump
had carried by 17 points in 2024—a headline ass-whipping. He talks about
schools and health care and jobs and all the usual stuff, which maybe lands a
little different right now than it would have a decade ago: Texas’ economy is
slowing, with the Dallas Fed expecting only 1.1 percent job growth in 2026. The
state currently is seeing its lowest net internal migration (i.e., people
moving to Texas from other states) in more than 20 years, a stagnant housing
market (Austin, once the nation’s hottest housing market, is today the slowest,
with houses spending a record average 106 days on the market before moving),
and its trade and services sectors hindered by tariffs and tariff hangovers.
Every major Texas city experienced double-digit declines in home sales in 2025,
according to Redfin. U.S. soybean exports are at their lowest levels in a
quarter-century. The oil patch is bracing for an energy recession, with
ConocoPhillips planning a $5 billion divestiture over the course of 2026,
including offloading at least $2 billion in Permian Basin assets.
The upcoming U.S. Senate primary features a three-way
race on the Republican side: Longtime incumbent John Cornyn, who would have
been one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate if he had served
during the Reagan years, is the moderate establishment squish challenged by
Attorney General Ken Paxton, a corrupt Trumpist grotesque, and some other guy
whose role in the race is keeping Cornyn from winning a majority and avoiding a
runoff. There is a rough symmetry on the Democratic side, with the soft-talking
(young, white, male) Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico carrying the banner
of stylistic moderation against (young, black, female) social media
bomb-thrower Rep. Jasmine Crockett, whose combative affect sometimes obscures
the fact that she is relatively moderate on more than a few issues, for example
trying to stake out a middle-ground position on gun control. Both parties have
angry base voters who prefer maximum confrontation and party bosses who lean
toward the less polarizing candidate. And while it would be unfair to put
Crockett into the same category as Paxton (she’s a troll, not a villain), the
Senate primaries are, in that sense, a test of whether one or both of the major
parties in Texas is going to lean into the crazy or opt for a more conciliatory
posture.
And Republicans are talking about . . . Derka
derka Muhammad jihad!
***
A quiet big-money group calling itself the Consortium
might sound a little mysterious and maybe even a little sinister, but the guy
who runs it, Ferhat Guven, is a fellow Lubbock native I’ve known since I was
12, and there really aren’t any secrets between people who went to junior high
together. (Even if you wish there were.) The Consortium puts on a series of
topical mini-seminars (I spoke at one of its New York meetings; recent subjects
have included artificial intelligence and energy) in cities around the country,
with the discussions separated by “speed dating” rounds matching the owners of
growing, capital-seeking businesses and investors looking to get in early on a
promising new thing. The Consortium event here in Dallas has attracted some
serious money looking over some serious businesses touching everything from
data centers and national-security technology to nuclear fusion. It is all very
interesting, but—inconveniently for your favorite correspondent—off-the-record,
operating under the Chatham House rule.
What I can tell you is that the difference in the
conversations between the derka-derka Republican political types trying
to gin up small-dollar donations on social media and the
billions-under-management investment types putting their own capital on the
line in the quest to turn a profit while solving real-world problems—in energy,
AI, data, climate, etc.—is striking. It’s like watching a Tom Stoppard play in
New York and then getting on the No. 6 train afterward to go home—a real
sharp contrast. At the Consortium, there were guys giving presentations that
hinged in part on the size of certain graphene particles and how this might
affect the manufacture of sodium-ion batteries in the United States. The
political guys, in contrast, are basically barking at the moon. Texas
separatists (they call themselves the Texas Nationalist Movement) are more
influential in the state than you might guess. It is as if Texas Republicans
have grown so used to winning so easily (everywhere except within the city
limits and inner-ring suburbs of Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, El Paso, Austin,
and, sometimes, Fort Worth) that they have stopped doing real politics and are
instead engaged in a kind of weird public fantasy role-playing game. They’re
like the political equivalent of those lawyers who give themselves superhero
nicknames on their billboards.
Guven, a 25-year private-equity executive with a lot of
fingers in a lot of interesting pies, has lived and worked all over the world,
extensively so in the Middle East, but remains very much a Texan. (He is, among
other things, co-author of a book written with famed Texas Tech football coach
Mike Leach.) He is also of Turkish background and a Muslim. He, too, sees an
obvious and radical disconnect between the state’s economic innovators and its
tired state politics, which has been dominated since the late 1990s by
something very close to a Republican political monopoly—at least outside of the
urban cores, which are almost overwhelmingly Democratic.
(NB: Fort Worth is the largest city in Texas—and the
country—to have elected a Republican mayor in recent years, the sensible
and pragmatic Mattie Parker, though the office is officially nonpartisan.
Dallas is a special case: Lifelong Democrat Eric Johnson, a veteran of the
Texas House elected mayor of Dallas as a Democrat, switched to the GOP after
becoming alienated from the city’s Democratic power brokers, one of whom
subsequently denounced him as “ineffective and truant.” He is only the second
Republican to hold the office this century and the fifth Republican mayor in
the city’s history.)
“Texas is trying to do two things at once,” Guven says.
“On the one hand, Texas is trying to become a magnet for businesses from around
the country and around the world. So ‘Y’all Street’ has attracted Goldman Sachs
and Bank of America and these other primarily New York-based financial
institutions, which understand the tremendous value of the economic growth in
north Dallas and throughout the state. You have the same thing with the tech
companies in Austin. They come to Austin because there’s talent there. You have
Texas trying to position itself as a destination for data centers, because its
economy is energy driven and you have a light regulatory framework. Those
businesses are voting with their feet. On the one hand, you see that
development, and, on the other, you have this retrograde retail politics
utterly divorced from what is happening at an economic level in Texas. You have
the redistricting and the culture-war plays. And if you look at all that, then
you eventually have to say to yourself that there will come a time when you are
not going to be able to have both.”
That tension between the state’s political life and its
economic reality gets pointier and stickier in times of slowing economic growth
such as the current period. And how would Texas’ political institutions do in a
period of genuine economic crisis? “There are rumblings in the market about AI
having profound impacts on white-collar, middle-income professional jobs,”
Guven says. A lot of those jobs are in Dallas, Houston, and Austin. “What is
Texas going to do to meet that challenge, and does it have the right politics
for this moment? I would argue that it doesn’t. Because Texas has been so
Republican for so long, with no real competition for ideas, I’m not sure the
state is prepared politically for these big shocks that are going to be coming
through.”
He isn’t super-keen on religiously oriented housing
developments such as EPIC City, but the boobish and opportunistic opposition to
it speaks to a kind of cheap and xenophobic nativism that is at odds with
Texas’s present realities, so say nothing of its future. “Toyota is here doing
amazing things,” Guven says, indicating the automaker’s North American
headquarters in Plano, just north of Dallas. “They’re doing that with engineers
from every part of the planet. But on the street the politics is one of division
and anti-immigrant sentiment. There’s a complete disconnect there. It’s very
frustrating.”
He is not alone in that. One investor and major
Republican donor who pronounces himself genuinely confused (and appalled) by
the rise of Ken Paxton and his brand of politics tells me that a Paxton victory
in the GOP Senate primary might very well be the signal that it is time for him
to withdraw from politics and focus on other things. Small-dollar donors are
driven by social media engagement and the voyeuristic dopamine hits they get
from Paxton-style politics of maximum confrontation, while the more responsible
and long-term Chamber of Commerce types, whose influence has naturally
diminished, are increasingly tempted to sit out a cycle or two and maybe just
buy a new boat. There’s a kind of Gresham’s Law of political fundraising at
work: Bad money drives out good. But if you are an investor, how much are you
going to invest in data centers or wind energy in a state whose political
culture is typified by figures such as Paxton, whose political travails have
included having his estranged (and now ex-) wife, a state senator, being
obliged to aside her complaints about his adultery to vote for his acquittal
when he was impeached on grounds of bribery and abuse of office? (She cited
“biblical grounds” for her subsequent divorce—no complaints about religious orthodoxy
intruding on civil affairs from anybody in that case.) If you were a big
private equity investor, how much of your own money and your clients’ money
would you bet on a state where the levers of power are in such hands? The
answer right now is: plenty. But there is no reason to suppose that will
last forever. As Guven notes, institutions looking to invest big money in
physical things such as factories and energy projects care a great deal about
the local political and cultural conditions, which affect everything from how
they are regulated to what kind of workers they are able to attract.
Guven lets his inner Texas chauvinist show just a little:
“There’s a reason Apple and Oracle are not in Mississippi.”
***
The private equity guys will probably be okay. They
almost always are. But there is some churn and some tension among those
blue-collar and pink-collar workers in the cities and suburbs, and there is a
good deal of trouble out in the farming country, too, where a complex economic
and logistical ecosystem that has long connected sophisticated, high-tech U.S.
agricultural producers to hungry markets—none hungrier than China—has been
convulsed, and in some cases probably damaged beyond repair, by Trump’s trade
wars. U.S. soybean producers—including substantial producers in Texas—have lost
out on market share in their most important export market when Beijing
responded to Trump’s tariffs not by putting tariffs on U.S. soybeans but by
simply cutting them off full stop, which is the kind of thing you can do when
you have the levers of an authoritarian police state at your disposal. Brazil’s
gain has been Texas’ loss. But, for the moment, the politics of farm country
seem to be pretty well fixed in place: Maybe it is the culture-war stuff, maybe
it is natural rural conservatism—or maybe it is, as I suspect, the fact that
agriculture has long been the most corporatist of any of the major sectors of
the American economy, a mess of subsidies, market manipulation, and protectionism
that very much accords with Trump’s view of the government’s proper economic
role. Economically, American farmers are in no small part natural Trumpists and
were even long before Trump came along—and they are sticking with that, even
when it costs them dearly.
“I do believe the administration has domestic industry’s
best interests at heart, that they’re trying to get us fair trade,” says Daniel
Berglund, a family farmer (soybeans, corn, and rice) south of Houston and
president of the Texas Soybean Association. Texas soybean farmers have it a
little easier than some of their colleagues around the country in that they are
not nearly as export-reliant as producers in much of the rest of the country,
but when China cuts off U.S. orders and production expands in Brazil and
Argentina to fill in that supply, they suffer the same low prices as everybody
else. Like most farmers I talk to, Berglund is, to put it gently, skeptical of
any notion of a free-market approach to agriculture. “Our competitors are
foreign governments and government-subsidized commodities that we cannot
compete against on our own,” he says. “We need a better deal, either through
trade agreements or protectionism, which I am not a big fan of. You’d rather
the economics of your commodity drive you to produce or not. When the
administration—any administration—makes decisions about how commodities enter
or leave the country, that’s not in our hands. People always talk about wanting
free markets, but that doesn’t exist.”
It isn’t only the disruption of export markets that have
undermined Texas’ farmers. Farmers are among the largest consumers of steel,
petroleum, and chemicals, and tariffs have driven up the price of imported farm
inputs ranging from fertilizer to machine parts. Berglund does not love those
tariffs, but, at the same time, he wants a “blanket tariff” on rice imports to
protect U.S. producers from very low-cost rice coming out of India and other
Asian producers. He’d like to see incentives to encourage more domestic
production of fertilizer and inputs such as urea and potash, the latter of
which U.S. farmers buy overwhelmingly (80 percent to 85 percent) from Canadian
exporters. He thinks there probably have been too many mergers and too much
consolidation in the seed and fertilizer industries and complains that U.S.
farmers are subjected to “technology fees” (including surcharges for
genetically modified seeds) that are outlawed in some other countries.
Berglund is not enthusiastic about trade protectionism
per se, but, like many farmers I have spoken to, he finds it difficult to
imagine a world in which the federal government does not have a big footprint
on the farm. “It’s not fun when you can’t be successful on your own, when
you’re having to count on support from the government. You don’t feel
successful.” I ask him whether, after two Trump-led trade wars, Texas farmers
are having any buyer’s remorse. “I don’t think so,” he says. But he does note that
soybean prices started rising when the Supreme Court handed down its tariff
decision, clipping the Trump administration’s wings, at least in theory, when
it comes to his capricious and chaotic approach to import taxes. And he
believes that the numbers are ultimately on the side of soybean producers.
“China has a lot of people,” he says. “They eat a lot of protein. Their animals
of choice need a lot of soy.”
Whatever the average Texas soybean farmer needs, it isn’t
a copy of Atlas Shrugged. Is it bigger and better corporatism? That’s
what they’re voting for. Can they get the tariffs and protectionism they want
without the tariffs and protectionism that hurt them? Farmers are a politically
powerful interest group hurt by steel tariffs; steel producers are a
politically powerful interest group that has a rather different attitude toward
steel tariffs, though not as uniform an attitude as you might expect, inasmuch
as many U.S. steel producers are also steel importers. None of this is simple,
and real-world farmers with real-world experience such as Daniel Berglund know
a hell of a lot more about soybean economics than I do, more than you do, and
more than Donald Trump does.
The subject of religiously themed planned communities in
the north Dallas exurbs does not come up.
***
Taylor Rehmet, the Democratic victor in that Tarrant
County state Senate race, mostly talked about affordability, public schools,
health care, and that sort of thing. His Republican opponent was fixated on DEI
and culture war stuff while her employer—that right-wing cellphone company
PAC—hosted Steve Bannon and Glenn Beck at an event titled “Save Texas From Radical Islam!” in the run-up to the vote,
which should give you an idea of where her party and her movement are in their
dark Conradian heart of hearts.
Rehmet, who will face the right-wing cellphone lady again
in a November election, may have stumbled into the successful counterintuitive
strategy of trying to talk to voters about things they actually care about. Or
maybe he just lucked out with an especially bad opponent.
“She was pretty bad,” says Tarrant County Democratic
Party chair Allison Campolo.
But there’s more to the story.
“Tarrant has always been touted as the last red urban
county, and there has been depressed Democratic turnout and engagement,” she
says. “Now we’re seeing the Democrats who’ve always been here starting to
engage. And some Republicans are a little disenchanted with their own
candidates. That Patriot Mobile-brand of Republican Party may be starting to
turn off some people, while that same brand is activating a lot of Democrats.”
Texas’ statewide gerrymander, undertaken at the behest of Trump, has riled up
Democrats, but Tarrant County got two rounds of mid-decade gerrymandering, with
an earlier redistricting of the county commissioners’ court (which is what they
call the main organ of county government) having been redrawn in June in order
to fortify the Republican majority there. “A lot of Democrats here were going
along to get along,” Campolo says. “But they keep poking at the sleeping bear.”
There are other hot-button issues at play, too, from the national ones such as
the ICE crackdown to local ones such as the fact that more than 70 people in
custody of the Tarrant County Jail have died since a new sheriff, Bill
Waybourn, took office in 2017. But there are not Minneapolis-style street
blockades in Fort Worth, which has a more conservative political culture.
“Taylor stuck to issues—public education, health care, jobs, the economy,
property taxes—that are important to people on both sides of the aisle,”
Campolo says. Rehmet’s win also involved a lot of very old-style politicking,
with Tarrant Democrats coordinating efforts from the national party, the state
party, and the PACs—to perform more than 1 million voter contacts in Senate
District 9—not texts and social-media messages but door-knocks and live phone
calls from real people. “You can’t overstate how important that is,” Campolo
says. “That’s how we educated people on who Taylor is and why they should vote
for him. That kind of collaborative coordination is everything. That’s how you
win.”
Which is to say, they brought the campaign off Facebook
and Bluesky.
Almost every cycle, the Democrats discover a new great
Texas hope—Wendy Davis, Beto O’Rourke—and they are routinely disappointed. Are
Democrats finally ready to put a big win on the board in Texas? When will they
deliver?
“NOW! Of course,” Campolo says—but with a laugh. “I’m not
ashamed to say that I’ve said that every year since 2018.” She tries to be a
realist. “Republicans wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade, and they
spent 50 years on that before they finally got their wish. You have to give
them credit—they never give up the bone. That said, the numbers in our favor
are higher now than in 2018 and in earlier years, and we had very high voter
engagement for what it was, a special election.”
If you follow Tarrant County politics, you will have seen
the charts and graphs made by Chris Tackett, the local Democratic data nerd
whose hobby (he has a real job) is quantifying that which is quantifiable in
the politics of Tarrant County, to which he and his wife relocated a few years
ago. The question he wants to answer is whether the trends Tarrant has seen so
far in the primary vote are transferable into November. In 2018, for example,
the ratio of Democratic primary voters to Republican primary voters was .7,
which was a pretty good number for Tarrant Democrats, and Beto O’Rourke won
Tarrant County in his bid to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz. In 2024 the Democratic ratio
was .45, and Republicans enjoyed a romping victory. So far this time around,
Democrats are running about 10 percent ahead of Republicans in early primary
voting statewide and 33 percent ahead in Tarrant County. “If it plays at 1.1,
if that transfers through, that makes the state competitive,” Tackett says.
***
I thought I’d miss New York City more than I did when I
moved out. I didn’t think I would miss Dallas at all: With its traffic jams,
terrible streets, crime, old-fashioned urban politics, the vast chasm between
the well-heeled $29-bagel-eating parts of town (Sadelle’s is not technically in
Dallas but in Highland Park, a separate municipality entirely contained within
the Dallas city limits) and the rougher stretches, and all that—Dallas is a lot
like Los Angeles without the nice weather. But it is a very comfortable place
to live—comfortable for the comfortable, anyway, not as inexpensive as you
might hope but still a bargain compared to New York or the D.C. area or Austin
or a lot of other places highly mobile white-collar types might choose to live.
You can see why so many of those middle-level finance jobs have migrated to its
northern suburbs: $500,000 a year isn’t all that much in Manhattan, but at that
income you’re rich in Frisco or McKinney, and those places are pretty nice.
Like many places built to automotive scale in the 20th
century, Dallas permits the locals to choose their own environments to a great
degree, avoiding, if they choose, much of what used to be described by the
euphemism “the other side of the tracks,” a convenience that is both a private
blessing and a social problem, inasmuch as problems that stay out of sight tend
to stay out of mind. You can eat sushi at the local Nobu outpost and see
husband-hunters at the bar all dolled up like high-end Russian hookers and see
what’s on offer at James Perse or Khaite or Brunello Cuccinelli (or ogle
$50,000 shotguns at the Beretta Gallery—this is still Texas) strolling around
Highland Park Village, eat really good Tex-Mex, and even with a pretty nice
house probably still keep your mortgage payment under $5,000 a month, Goldman Sachs puts a big picture of tacos right in the middle
of its Dallas-recruiting web page. Goldman knows what’s up. It is a good
life.
It is also the kind of life that was, until the day
before yesterday, a stereotypical Republican life. But that was before
Republicans became so goddamned embarrassing, beyond whatever more
substantive criticism they may deserve. A rich-guy lawyer friend of mine who
used to be a hell of a lot more Republican than I ever was tells me he’s
holding a fundraiser for U.S. Rep. Gina Hinojosa, a Democrat running for
governor. “Tariffs and Trumpism are bad for the American brand and they’re bad
for Texas, too,” he says. “Greg Abbott, though, further typifies the problem of
one-party rule of any kind. He’s abused his emergency powers to award no-bid government
contracts and turned a blind eye to Ken Paxton’s
corruption. Texas will not be blue anytime soon. Frankly, I don’t even want
that. I have always liked Deep Purple.”
I drive east out of the metroplex, pointed toward
Arkansas, past Josephine and the would-be foundations of EPIC City. I wonder
why anybody would want to tour a bomb shelter factory, and meditate on one
billboard’s implicit message that, if I should happen to find myself in jail,
it would be preferable if my bail bondsman were a very shapely woman in a
constrictive pink dress and my lawyer an almost identical-looking woman in an
even briefer black one, or maybe two guys who corporately describe themselves
as “the Muscle” or the Lion or the Hammer or whomever. This state does not want
for lawyers. “Texas, dear Texas! From tyrant grip now free / Shines forth in
splendor your star of destiny!”
I do like it here. And on the wind I can just about hear
the braying of the Great American Jackass, the mischievous and malevolent
spirit animal that flits from party to party and from pol to pol across the
great expanse of American political history, momentarily settling here and
there—on Andrew Jackson, on George Wallace, on clinically diagnosable Texan
psycho Ross Perot—in places where the red-in-tooth-and-claw ancestral instincts
are running hotter and higher than they should and where the stakes seem lower
than they actually are, who has settled for the moment in Texas (which, after
all, may be his natural habitat) possessing Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott and Ted
Cruz and their voters like some kind of particularly unholy and low-rent
Pazuzu, howling and kicking up dust out here where some enterprising derka-derka
roadside semiotician has gone to the trouble to assure me “NEVER SHARIA LAW IN
AMERICA!”
Hee-haw.
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