By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, October 19, 2026
McALLEN, Texas—Poor feckless Mike Johnson looks
like a melting vanilla ice-cream cone in the practically Congolese mid-October
heat in McAllen, Texas, the political heart of the Rio Grande Valley, with just
under 1 million people in the greater metro and more than 460,000 registered
voters. It is an area that swung hard for Donald Trump but many of whose
residents—87 percent Hispanic and 12.5 percent naturalized citizens—are having
second thoughts. Across the spectrum, the locals are engaged: The
unprepossessing Republican speaker of the House is nobody’s favorite figure in
American politics, but the room here is packed and the venue’s parking lot and
off-street parking are crammed with Ford Super-Duty trucks that currently cost
their owners nearly $300 to fill up in the greater McAllen area, which is, of
course, a big part of what this election is going to be about.
How worried are Republicans? People in the valley are
getting provocative phony text messages—“bathrooms and beyond for trans kids at
school”—made to look like they were sent from an advocacy group that had
nothing to do with them. Most plugged-in observers, including Republicans,
assume that they were sent by Republican-leaning activists to stir up fears of
a fictitious effort to insert transgender-advocacy material into the local
public-school curriculum. Anything to change the subject from the economy.
People here in the Rio Grande Valley are very pissed
off about the price of diesel and gasoline, and milk, and eggs, and hamburger,
and lumber, so Texas Republicans predictably are leaning into the crazy and the
smears and the conspiracy kookery and the overall Trump-era GOP weirdness, and
there is definitely a stink of desperation in the air as Johnson, who has been
wearing the MAGA gimp suit for so long that it has become a second skin, goes
through the motions. But even Johnson, who tempts your favorite correspondent
to exhaust his vanishingly small Spanish vocabulary (¡Pinche pendejo!)
cannot quite avoid all the facts of the case.
“I’m not exaggerating: South Texas will literally decide
the majority in Congress,” he says, trying his best to sound hopeful.
It is not clear that he should be.
If the Democrats have a secret weapon in 2026, it is that
economic pain and the all-drama-all-the-time character of the Trump
administration have forced them, in spite of themselves, to turn their
attention to a constituency that they seemed to have forgotten about for a few
years there: normal people.
***
It is a long drive down from the Llano Estacado to the
Rio Grande Valley—from the high ground of cactus-and-mesquite Texas to
palm-trees-and-sand Texas by way of live-oak Texas—and there’s a lot of
eye-popping stuff to see: Up in Lubbock, mediocre hotel rooms are going for
$600 on a Saturday night because people have come in from five states away to
see Ella Langley sing “Choosin’ Texas,” leaving the city unusually packed for a
Texas Tech football bye week, while the suburbs and exurbs of Dallas-Fort Worth
and Houston, which are seeing slower growth than they have in recent years, are
still expanding and changing and mutating so quickly that they feel like new
communities every six months. In Central Texas and down south, exotic African
game can be glimpsed behind the high fences of the hunting ranches, Nubian ibex
and gemsbok and impala strutting around within a 25-minute drive of a Dollar
General and not too terribly far from a Buc-ee’s. Texas is big and weird and a
lot of fun to look at.
What I don’t see as I make a 1,000-plus mile squiggle on
the map from Amarillo through the heart of Texas to Houston and along the coast
to the border and up the Rio Grande Valley is a lot of political advertising:
Not in White Settlement—surely the community in Texas with the most
Republican-comforting name—not in Parker County just west of Fort Worth, the
most heavily Republican of the Texas counties with 100,000 or more registered
voters, not even up in Roberts County, where Trump won a practically North
Korean 95.6 percent of the vote the last time around. And Democratic signage is
pretty scarce, too, with almost nothing other than a few billboards promising
that Senate candidate James Talarico will protect your deadbeat cousin’s
Medicaid and your mama’s Social Security checks. But the signs do thicken up a
bit once you get near the I-35 corridor, and the advertising on television and
online is relentless—the relative scarcity of real-world political billboards
vs. the ubiquity of feverish online denunciations offer a dramatic indicator of
exactly how online Texas politics has become, in every sense of that
word.
It’s pretty ugly at the moment: Between the GOP’s
hysterical TV spots and that Bo French schmuck running for the Texas Railroad
Commission while lamenting that there are too many young brown engineering
majors in the bleachers cheering on the Texas Longhorns this season,
Republicans have now managed to add college football to the list of things
they’re ruining for everybody.
There is a reason for the Republicans’ cornered-rat panic
in Texas: The Democratic nominee has a modest but consistent lead in the polls
over the Republican nominee in the U.S. Senate race, while the incumbent
Republican governor might be in trouble, too. As Johnson notes, a handful of
close House races, including the ones in Texas, will play a big role in
determining whether the expected Democratic majority in the House actually is
elected in a couple of weeks and, if so, how big it is.
And Republicans are getting ready to get punched in the
face.
Texas is not in a happy mood right now, with gasoline and
diesel prices punishing truck-loving Texans in typical communities where pretty
much everybody drives to work and many people drive hundreds of miles in a
typical week. Farmers are pissed off over the uptick in the prices of basically
all of their inputs—fuel, fertilizers, chemicals, equipment,
seeds—contemporaneous with the disruption of important export markets for U.S.
producers of big commodity crops such as soybeans. Tariffs are making life hard
on manufacturers, too, adding to the price of imported components and making
them harder to get. Formerly enthusiastic Trump supporters such as high-profile
businessman Mario Guerrero, the influential CEO of the South Texas Builders
Association, are talking very publicly about their buyers’ remorse after
the White House declared war on their workforces.
The war in Iran has rattled energy markets. Donald
Trump’s promises to whip inflation and end any number of major world
conflicts—including ending the Russian war on Ukraine, another driver of high
fuel prices, on his first day in office—have gone the way of Trump’s previous
promises to voters, allies, business associates, creditors, and any number of
wives. James Talarico may seem like a guy who probably was president of the
University Democrats at the University of Texas at Austin—because he literally
was that—but rather than filling out the rest of the slate with a fresh batch
of Beto O’Rourke analogs, Democrats around the state have nominated a slate of
Tejanos in cowboy hats who like to shoot guns and have a good time–e.g., former
Tejano star Bobby Pulido running in the 15th District, lawman Johnny
Garcia in the 35th–and whose neighbors think that everything is too
expensive right now, and too chaotic, and too obviously corrupt in ways that
are all too familiar to people who have family and community connections to
Latin America. Having burned their fingers on various kinds of stupid
radicalism in the George Floyd era, which they are now trying to put behind
them as “Woke 1.0,” Democrats have put forward candidates such as Garcia, a
20-year veteran of the sheriff’s department in Bexar County (wherein lies San
Antonio) who knows how to talk a good law-and-order game and may even mean it.
Naturally, Republicans are talking about ... pedophilia.
Bobby Pulido’s band, as it turns out, used to employ an
accordionist who turned out to be a habitual criminal, a drug addict, and
worse, who ended up being convicted of sexually abusing an 8-year-old girl.
Truly horrible. Pulido says he knew the guy had drug problems but did not know
that he was a sex offender—and, embarrassingly, Pulido once brought the
musician along to a performance at a middle school. Excruciating stuff, to be
sure, but pretty arm’s-length stuff, too: It’s not like Donald Trump used to be
in a band with a guy who had to pay a multimillion-dollar settlement in the
E. Jean Carroll sexual-assault matter—that was Trump himself, Mr. Grab ’Em by
the Pussy. You’d think the party of Matt Gaetz and the late Dennis Hastert and
state Sen. Mike Folmer (child porn, 2020) and state representative R.J. May (child porn, 2025) and Ralph Shortey (child sex trafficking, 2017)—you get the
picture—would be a little circumspect about that sort of thing. But this is the
great age of brazenness, when the Republican hack at the center of the truly
loony “Pizzagate” pedophilia hoax routinely hosts high-ranking Republican
officials—including, most recently, J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth—on his podcast.
(Garcia has had some troubles, too: It recently came out
that he was twice suspended by the sheriff’s department, once for violating
policy by taking a cell phone into a secure area and once for leaving a firearm
unsecured–a Glock that was stolen and later recovered. Dangerously boneheaded
stuff.)
Bobby Pulido is a celebrity (he was nominated for a Grammy this year) but he also seems
like a pretty normal guy, as celebrities go. He used to be in Coors Light ads,
for goodness’ sake. He once shared the stage with a creep, as did everybody who
ever performed with Iggy Pop or Aerosmith or Led Zeppelin—or, more to the point,
anybody who ever appeared on a stage alongside Donald Trump, as Pulido’s
opponent in the race has. The thing is, Republicans want to talk about
pedophilia—not even that, really, but former workplace proximity
to a sex criminal—while Bobby Pulido wants to talk about why he finds that it
makes more financial sense for him to go across the river to Mexico for medical care.
I wonder which of those is of more acute interest to a
guy putting $5.77 diesel into his work truck at the filling station in Goliad.
It probably depends on how much Candace Owens or Nick Fuentes he is watching
and how inclined he is to internalize that kind of madness. If kooks are your
thing, Texas is ready when you are: The Texas Republican Party is dominated by
the people former Cameron County GOP Chairwoman Morgan Eakin refers to as
“squatters,” a grifty and incompetent set of very online weirdos associated
with super-Trumpy oil-and-gas gazillionaire biblioplangist Tim Dunn, the
“Branch Davidian-lite sugar daddy” of contemporary Texas politics, as Eakin
describes him.
“There is an identity crisis in both parties,” Eakin
says. “Our problem on the right is that we have been dominated by folks who
have an intense focus on stunts and on being provocative but not having any
discipline, tradition, or the institutional respect that is part of being a
conservative.” They also seem to think that George W. Bush’s political circle
is the problem and that Karl Rove is the devil incarnate. “The squatters spend
their time attacking the people who flipped this state in the first place and
tearing down the infrastructure they built. They’re the political equivalent of
the TikTok ass-shakers constantly vying for attention and engagement, which is
not translating into success in the real world.”
At the moment, there are no normal Republicans in Texas.
Not that matter very much, anyway.
There are some normal Democrats.
***
Here’s a theory of Texas politics in 2026: Democrats with
Spanish surnames, especially ones from rural or working-class backgrounds, are
allowed to be pretty much normal, whereas college-educated white
professionals are obliged to engage in the kind of idiotic performative
progressivism that has come to be known as woke. Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic
nominee for governor currently giving Greg Abbott fits, is a pretty lefty
politician—her background is in public-sector unions and public-school
politics, and her father was chairman of the Texas Democratic Party—but she’s a
pretty normal lefty politician, one who has caused some of her party’s campus
activist base to get their dresses over their heads by joking that her pronouns
are “mom” and “Texan” and “future governor.” And so you see this split: Pulido
is a familiar Texas type who suggests that maybe people from Boston or wherever
should mind their own business when it comes to how people in Jim Wells County
dispose of javelinas, while James Talarico has a record of saying dumb stuff
about how God is nonbinary and there are at least six biological sexes.
Talarico isn’t fundamentally stupid, of course—all of his billboards are about
protecting Social Security and medical entitlement benefits, nary a mention of
exceedingly rare chromosomal configurations—but the Anglo-Hispanic cultural
split is real, and Talarico is still more of a Beto O’Rourke than he is a Bobby
Pulido.
And Pulido is a reminder that, politically and culturally
speaking, there is no such thing as a Latino. The notion that Tejano ranchers
whose families have been in the same Texas communities since the 1700s are
somehow in the same bucket as McKinsey consultants who went to Harvard Business
School after emigrating from Buenos Aires 10 years ago just because they all
have Spanish-speaking ancestors is bananas. Rural-urban is a thing.
College-noncollege is a thing. Money is a thing. Texans with Mexican connections
whose great-grandparents were native English speakers living in the United
States do not necessarily have a lot in common with Los Angeles hotel workers
who arrived from Guatemala two years ago and don’t speak much English.
Tejanos famously proclaim, “We didn’t cross the
border—the border crossed us,” and that isn’t really a joke. These are the
descendants of people who were Americans before Americans were, and they’re
patriots with a profound and inescapably conservative sense of tradition
and community. The cynical ploy of trying to use the unassimilated recent
immigrants to otherize Americans with Latin-American ancestry might work among
certain gullible bigots in Queens—you may remember Trump’s argument that U.S.
District Judge Gonzalo Curiel was not fit to judge the border-wall case because
of his Mexican ancestry. (Curiel was born in Indiana.) But here in the Rio
Grande Valley, as in much of Texas and much of the country, people who look and
sound and talk like Pulido or Garcia—Bobby and Johnny—are just
people.
Normal people.
If anything, insufferable campus progressives such as
Talarico are the outliers this time around, and Republicans have had more luck
trying to paint them as out-of-touch boutique radicals than they have had
trying to smear candidates like Pulido. Talarico might win, but not because
he’s a great candidate: He is running against one of the most obviously and
comically corrupt, inept, and self-serving men in American public life—which is
really saying something circa 2026 A.D. And unfair as such factors may be and
as unseemly as it is to talk about them, Paxton also bears the curse of looking
like exactly the sort of man he is, a fact that obviously irritates Trump, who
has made it pretty obvious through his own petty insults about Paxton’s looks
that he thinks of intervening on behalf of a guy like Paxton as beneath his
dignity in a way that pro-wrestling performances and stints in softcore porn
films were not.
That Anglo-Hispanic split is somewhat diminished from
what it was in, say, the 1990s. A fair number of Anglos around my age or older,
particularly if they are Texans, will have a distinct memory of a peculiar
cultural moment in 1995: the murder of singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, simply
“Selena” to her millions of fans, who was gunned down at a Days Inn in Corpus
Christi, shot in the back by a woman who had been the president of her fan
club. Selena’s name recognition was probably right around 100 percent among
Americans with Spanish surnames, whereas most Anglos were only vaguely aware of
the “queen of Tejano music” if they knew of her at all, and the dramatic public
outpouring of grief over her death surprised a lot of white people, who
suddenly realized that there was this big important cultural phenomenon of
which they were generally oblivious, that wasn’t meant for them, that was a
kind of special property of Americans who speak Spanish. It was like they
hadn’t discovered there had been this great English band called the Beatles
until the murder of John Lennon. The episode pushed a lot of buttons: The
mourning had a distinctly Catholic flavor to it (though Selena herself was
raised as a Jehovah’s Witness), a Spanish-speaking character, an immigrant character,
etc. It wasn’t that the country was changing—it was that the country had changed,
and English-speaking white people were the last to hear about it.
Not all of them liked that. Donald Trump would make his
first half-assed run for president just a few years later.
Carlos Valdez is a Democratic candidate for the office of
judge of Texas’ 148th District Court, a seat he held once before but
lost to a Republican challenger the last time around. He knows a hell of a lot
about the Selena murder trial: He was the prosecutor in that case, serving at
the time as the Nueces County district attorney. He was derided at the time as
young and inexperienced, which he was. “When I first started, people said,
‘Hey, who’s the kid?’ So, I grew a mustache,” he says. “And then they said,
‘Hey, who’s the kid with the mustache?’”
Valdez won that case, put Selena’s killer in prison for
life (currently 66, she’ll have a parole hearing in 2030), and wrote a book
about it, Justice for Selena: The State Vs Yolanda Saldivar, the cover
of which features a photo of Valdez that, he notes, shows him with darker hair
and a slimmer waist. He is, to be sure, no longer young and inexperienced. He
has seen some things, and he is not as confident as many of his fellow
Democrats.
We’re at an event for a House candidate in Corpus
Christi, and he gestures around the room, where the candidate and her family
are serving chips and salsa and fried pickles to a handful of supporters and
one out-of-town reporter. “I don’t see the enthusiasm everybody is talking
about,” he says. “You’d think that there should be a line out the door for
this.”
Valdez signs off on my normies-vs.-progressives analysis,
and he is definitely team normie, not in the sense that he thinks Democrats are
necessarily wrong in their policy views about, say, Gaza or transgender issues,
but that these issues simply are not top of mind for ordinary voters. I ask him
whether any voter who is not a young college-educated white person has ever
brought up Gaza with him. He laughs. “No.” He thinks Democrats still need to
work on sticking to the interests of ordinary voters.
“I’ve been telling them, ‘Look, we’ve got the wrong
message. We’re talking a language that people don’t care about.’ I go
block-walking and talk to the real people—they don’t care about these cultural
issues. They just want to feed their children. They want to have a good school
for them. That’s what they’re interested in. And I think, my God, we waste a
lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of resources, talking about these other
matters. The person who is talking about important issues is the one saying he is
going to bring down the price of bacon on his first day in office. That
resonates. That’s what I want.”
I ask him if he has any good ideas for the bacon
deflation. He demurs.
James Carville makes the same argument, as do many other
Democrats. But Valdez does not think that message is really breaking through.
In fact, the Democrats’ dilemma can be observed in miniature right here in this
not-exactly-packed room at the Executive Surf Club, where Tanya Lloyd, the
Democrats’ candidate for the 27th Congressional District, is working
to gin up some enthusiasm. Thanks to the Republican gerrymandering project
lately lambasted as the “dummy-mander,” Texas has more reliably
Republican-leaning House districts than it did before—but this was achieved at
the cost of making some Republican districts less Republican than they had been
before. The 27th is still a Republican district, but not as
Republican as it was pre-gerrymander. It’s a big weird district that takes
three hours to drive end-to-end, stretching from the suburbs of Austin all the
way down to what nobody I have ever talked to spontaneously calls the Gulf of
America.
It will still be uphill for Tanya Lloyd, a 55-year-old
public-school teacher who looks and talks and thinks exactly like how you think
a 55-year-old public-school teacher making her first run for office would. She
worked at car dealerships and in real estate before going back to school in her
30s to become a teacher. She’s bright and earnest and does not seem to have a
lot of very developed political ideas per se beyond a firmly held
conviction that the world would be better if government were run by people like
her in the interest of people like her. E.g., she says that she wants to see a
federal right to abortion codified in law because it seems wrong to her to have
different laws in different states, and when I ask whether she thinks her
progressive interests really would be best served by having Washington
dictating abortion law to California and Massachusetts, given that we have a
government presided over by Donald Trump, who has twice been elected president
of these United States, with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress
and a Supreme Court that seems to most progressives to be overly solicitous of
Republican interests, it is clear that she never has considered this line of
argument. “Well, I don’t want this government doing that!” she says. I
don’t want to lampoon her, and she isn’t stupid—that’s how most people think
about these things. She’s a small-town mom who could stand to read some more
books, sure, but it’s not like her Republican opponent in the race is some kind
of Hayek scholar—he was the PR guy for a South Texas megachurch before being
elected to public office.
Abortion is a famously divisive issue. In general, Tanya
Lloyd is much more one of those price-of-bacon people that Carlos Valdez talks
about. She wants to stop the Iran war because she wants the price of gasoline
to go down. She acknowledges that there are environmental challenges associated
with the local oil-and-gas industry but values its economic effects and the
good wages that come along with energy production. And, like many people, she
is surprised and confused by the intensity and prominence of conspiracy
theories in our political discourse.
“Whatever that wild conspiracy theory is on the other
side, we’ve got to tone down the propaganda,” she says. “I’m not sure how we’re
going to make that happen. But when we have politicians tell lie after lie
after lie, and people are believing it ... and why are they lying about certain
things? Why are they lying about vaccinations? I don’t know. But we have a
measles outbreak in Texas. Why? Because we’re not vaccinating anymore. We’ve
had children die of measles for the first time in decades. Why? What is the
point?”
She and her husband both come from small-farm
backgrounds, and her daughter raised show cattle for Future Farmers of America
competitions. She isn’t exactly Abdul El-Sayed—or Nancy Pelosi, for that
matter.
“I know exactly what you’re going through when there’s a
drought,” she says. “I know what it looks like when your stock tanks dry up,
and you’re having to haul in water and fill up those little Tractor Supply
galvanized stock tanks. I can have these conversations with people about their
gas prices, their diesel prices, that your fertilizer prices are high. I know
what it’s like to balance a checkbook at the end of the month and go, ‘There
ain’t nothing left.’”
The generational split that runs through the Democratic
Party runs through her family, too. I speak with her daughter, a bright young
woman who recently finished up a degree in animal science at Texas A&M–Kingsville
but is unable to find a job that suits her. She was a three-sport athlete in
high school and describes her mother as the reliable and hardworking type who
“went to every track meet, every volleyball game, almost every golf
tournament.” She also talks about affordability and healthcare challenges (some
mothers-to-be in the district will have to drive an hour or more to reach a
labor-and-delivery facility), and she is worried about aging out of her
parents’ insurance coverage before she gets a “real job.” She also is the one
who brings up LGBTQ rights and Gaza: “It’s not okay for people to just be, uh, genocided
on the other side of the world. Right?”
Again, it is easy to make fun of young people offering up
callow political opinions expressed without maximum articulateness, but she
isn’t dumb, and she probably knows as much or more about national and world
affairs than the average person her age anywhere in the country, which may be
faint praise but is worth at least something. But when Democrats decide that
the moral center of their politics is going to be gender ideology and
superficial Hamas-apologist talking points, a lot of people are going to check
out. Never mind the non-coveted demographic of pointy-headed right-wing
ideologues who write for political magazines—there are real gettable voters out
there who may not be signed up for Fox News-style hysteria but still think that
having boys play girls’ high-school sports is a pretty bad idea and that the
word “genocide” should be reserved for actual genocides.
I see the same split play out in similar scenes across
Texas. At another event, there’s an old guy with a well-brushed cattleman’s hat
and a fabulous Sam Elliott-worthy mustache, the kind whom local waitresses just
address in Spanish without bothering to check, and he’s nodding along
enthusiastically as he watches Talarico on CNN talking about the border. A
poster behind him on the wall of the white-kids hipster bar where Democrats
have gathered to watch the town hall shows a vicious-looking dog with a bloody
muzzle over the legend: “GOOD BOYS MAUL TRANSPHOBES,” and the expensively
miseducated progressive Anglo types with the facial piercings and whatnot get real
quiet when Talarico declares that Joe Biden “failed us” on the border. But they
roar their approval every time abortion is mentioned. Culturally, Talarico is
more like these kids than he is like Pulido or Martinez, never mind the guy
here with the extravagant cookie-duster, who I’ll bet has never in his long
life used the Spanish word for transphobe, whatever that may be. The guy
I sat next to at breakfast a couple of days before, taking his mother out for
some post-Sunday Mass migas, whose shirt embroidery identified him as an
usher at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church and whose boots identified him
as a man doing pretty well for himself, might very well be where Talarico et
al. are on healthcare, spending, taxes, education, etc. He probably has some
friends and family who are worried about getting deported. I don’t think he
probably wants to sic his dog on misgenderers, however wanton. But the
Democrats don’t seem quite ready to get over their adolescent boutique campus
radicalism. Maybe they just haven’t had enough pain and humiliation.
If Democrats manage to lose in Texas, rooms like these
will be the place where they lost.
***
It isn’t that there is no overlap between the hot-button
culture-war stuff and the real-world issues that voters in Texas care about:
The Trump administration’s use of ICE as an instrument of theatrical terror to
be directed against Democratic cities and perceived Kulturkampf enemies
is both a symbolic issue for the campus radical left and a real-world issue for
people and communities affected by the raids and deportations. There is a
feeling of betrayal among at least some Mexican Americans in the valley, some
of whom supported Trump and many of whom believe that getting control of the
border is the right policy—but a policy that they understand as being separate
from staging terrifying, humiliating raids and rounding up roofers and
landscapers—and, you know, nuns. Sister Letty Ugboaja, a Nigerian nun
and nurse with the Daughters of Mary Mother of Mercy was arrested, wearing her
habit, walking out of Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows here in McAllen. “They
told us they were going to go after the bad guys,” says one local. “How is a
nun a bad guy?”
You hear the same thing from locals such as Juan Jose
Salinas, a 19-year-old college student at UT-Rio Grande Valley who currently
works at the Hidalgo County Democratic Party office, where tonight they are
offering cafecito y pan dulce to volunteers putting together
literature packets for block-walking in a couple of days. Thanks to dual-credit
high school courses, he is a senior on the verge of graduating, so the
real-world stuff is a little closer on the horizon for him than it is for the
average 19-year-old. He talks about prices and wages, but also about family
members and friends who have had run-ins with ICE, and he says that
deportations have been pursued with particular vigor in nearby Harlingen. Part
of what really got his attention was not the focus on illegal immigrants but
the attempt to overturn birthright citizenship, which was accompanied by some
fairly nasty talk about denaturalization as well.
Salinas’ father is a naturalized citizen originally from
Reynosa, McAllen’s sister city on the other side of the border. “I know what
kind of man he is, and he is a hell of a lot more of an American than most of
these people,” Salinas says.
The immigration issue lands on a lot of people around
here as both a threat and an insult, and it doesn’t help that people already
are feeling stress from the fact that everything seems too expensive, that
wages are not keeping up, that trips to the grocery store have become
positively shocking, and that it feels like ... something bad is lurking over
the econo-political horizon.
Juan Jose Salinas is a teenager, and a little bit of gas
that costs him $40 instead of the $30 it used to cost is a big deal. He
probably is too young to be lamenting the decay of trust in American
institutions and the ravages of affective hyperpartisanship, but he is not
wrong about those, either. “If you agree with one side on 80 percent of the
issues but not the other 20 percent, you’re treated as a traitor,” he says. “I
feel like we are taught to hate each other now just because we have
differences, you know?”
There was a time when precocious young men on their way
to an early college graduation and kicking around the idea of law school—and
thinking, as Juan Jose Salinas is thinking, about how to build an economically
secure life before starting a family—were natural Republicans, Alex P. Keaton
types interested in upward mobility, the professions, an orderly kind of
community life. Salinas is not the only one of those Republicans have lost—and
some of them, at least, they are never going to get back.
***
On Monday, I got a speeding ticket in a classic speed
trap in Falfurrias, Texas. On Wednesday, a minor elected official a couple of
towns over offered to have it fixed for me, as casually as if she were offering
me a cup of coffee. It is the blasé pettiness of the corruption that really
grates, but that’s political life in the Rio Grande Valley, where patronage and
nepotism are unhappy facts of life. This was a single-party Democratic fief for
generations, and the political machine and the compadre networks
associated with it have been practically baked into the ground by the hot South
Texas sun.
Modern technology has a way of making ordinary things
irritating in the pursuit of phantom convenience, and when you get a ticket in
Falfurrias today you get a link to a computer-generated citation and an app and
whatnot that does everything except what you need to do, i.e., pay the fine and
go on with your life. Because while you can get a ticket fixed down here if you
know the right people, you’ll have a hell of a time beating one in court,
especially if you happen to be, you know ... technically ... guilty.
I don’t feel too bad about the ticket. Given the crap
I’ve gotten away with in life and the things I probably should have been sent
to jail for over the years, a couple hundred bucks into the kitty of some
economically moribund valley backwater just feels like karma trying to even up
the score a little bit.
So as soon as the deputy lets me go, I take the first
exit—slowly—and come to a full stop and conscientiously signal a right turn and
then a left and then another right and park at the Brooks County municipal
building, to go pay my ticket. Which, of course, I can’t—the ticket is
electronically generated and a copy of it already is on a website somewhere,
but county governments are a full-employment program for ... well, you’ve
probably been to your county courthouse. There’s a dead-eyed deputy at a desk
who has the same quiet despair on his face that I saw on the deputy who wrote
me the ticket, that awful disappointed self-loathing that guys who thought they
were going to be cops get when they learn that what they actually have become
is tax collectors, that this is it until retirement. The deputy at the desk
does his job, which is telling me that what I need is the window on the right.
He is the human version of the meeting that could have been an email: a
bureaucrat who could be replaced with a sign.
I tell the lady at the window that I’m here to pay my
ticket. I hand her the ticket. She goes and tap-tap-taps on a keyboard for a
couple of minutes while another lady across the room simply stares straight at
me with bovine indifference. Tappa-tappa-tappa, click, click. “I can’t
find it. When did you get the ticket?” Twelve minutes ago, lady, just like
it says on the ticket, which is in your hand. “Oh. It isn’t here yet.”
You’ll know where this is going: The documents are all online, but somebody
somewhere in some other office has to print something out and walk it over to
this office for processing, a bit of old-fashioned meatspace paperwork that
takes 10 business days at least. She tells me to come back in two weeks. “Or
you can call.” Stare Bear over in the corner continues staring—not hostile, not
not-hostile. I keep thinking I’m standing in front of a television she’s trying
to watch or something, but these people don’t sit around the office watching
television all day, which would be unseemly—they sit around the office watching
their phones.
And that old, familiar feeling comes over me—that old
Republican feeling, that radical spirit of ’94 thing, back when it seemed like
rallying to Newt Gingrich’s flag was a good idea. I walk into a government
office an Eisenhower guy and walk out ready to join a militia. The whole
scene—the pointlessness of it, the pettiness, the dehumanizing bureaucratic
stupor, the subsequent bush-league corruption—that is a big part of why the
Republican Party came to exist in its Goldwater-Reagan-Buckley form. (There were
other factors, too, including some ugly ones that I did not really appreciate
sufficiently at the time.) We really meant it when we said, “Government is not
the solution—government is the problem.” And for the few old-school
conservatives who still cling to the Republican Party, the notion of handing
over the keys and the checkbook to ... these people ... is hard to stomach,
even if doing so is the practical political price for liberating their
party—and their state and their souls—from the taint of Ken Paxton, Donald
Trump, Ted Cruz, J.D. Vance, and all that they stand for. But to the extent
that the old reforming Republican Party was a real thing at all and not merely
a projection of our desires, that party is gone: It’s “squatters” and grifters
and Paxton all the way down—and down goes a very, very long way.
“You know, they’re not just a pair of hands,” says
Criselda Vera, an advocate for immigrants’ interests in the valley. “They’re
not just the hands that build your houses or the hands that work your soil.
These are human beings.” She helps deliver food to poor people who are too
terrified to visit the food banks they used to rely on, helps families deprived
of their breadwinner to get help of various kinds—and she and her colleagues
work on both sides of the border, helping deportees dumped in Mexico nowhere
near the places they are from to get back to the place that used to be home.
“That’s what gets me, right? A lot of people are now like, ‘Oh, my housekeeper
got detained and now it’s an issue for me, but I voted for Trump.’ Or, ‘Oh, I
don’t have anybody to build my houses, because they’re all detained or scared
to come to work, but I voted for Trump.’ And that grinds my gears.”
Like many activists of her kind, she can’t quite bring
herself to say to me in plain terms what it is that she actually wants in
policy terms, which is clear enough: that the government stop enforcing
immigration law when the people breaking the law are sympathetic. “Republicans
don’t want criminals here. Democrats don’t want criminals here, either,” she
says. “It’s the cruelty—we shouldn’t be okay with the cruelty.”
I wonder if that is our choice: petty corruption and
destructive permissiveness and inefficiency and economically suffocating
bureaucratic metastasis on the one hand and, on the other—cruelty. There
was a time when the Republican Party did seem to stand for something. Maybe the
cruelty was always there—but now the cruelty is all that is left. And the
Republicans have their own new problems when it comes to government meddling in
the economy, administrative overreach, fiscal incontinence, and, of course, the
wild and open new spirit of utter corruption that Trump has unleashed in the
GOP.
Eakin, the former county Republican chair, says she is
still voting for Republicans—some Republicans. “I’m probably going to be
under-voting in a few races,” she says, meaning that her ballot will have some
blank spots on it. “I can’t in good conscience vote for them—not because of
private scandals but because of the corruption.”
Driving up out of the valley, carefully hewing to the
speed limits, I am spared at least the sight of billboards with gigantic
depictions of the face of Ken Paxton, the living breathing picture of Dorian
Gray that Republicans have pulled down from the attic and are trying to set up
in the Senate rather than, you know, recoiling in horror like normal people
would. I don’t know what to call that.
But it isn’t normal.
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