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Texas Politics Lurches Right
Yesterday, for those of you who don't know, was super Tuesday(goodbye Nikki Hailey). Trump's victory in all of the states except one was obviously foreseeable and, while the NYT claimed a Trump-Biden rematch was inevitable in their morning brief, with all due respect to the paper of record, that's kind of been obvious for a while.
More interestingly, Texas's elected republicans in both federal and state politics are assured to be much farther right on average than they were this time last year. https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/06/texas-primaries-gop-incumbents-defeated/ I apologize for using a snarl-words filled source, but it's both reasonably comprehensive and not-paywalled.
They're leaving out that Trump made a set of endorsements of his own, mostly aligning with Ken Paxton's.
Those appeals court candidates benefited majorly from Trump endorsements, and so did several of Greg Abbott's challengers. Now, Ken Paxton has a 5-4 minority of the appeals court supporting his authority to prosecute voter fraud directly, instead of an 8-1 minority. It's... I wouldn't say probable, but certainly within the realm of possibility, for Paxton to get another judge to switch giving him 5-4 the authority to prosecute voter fraud without the cooperation of a district attorney. But it's worth noting that Greg Abbott's endorsements far outperformed Paxton's(https://twitter.com/bradj_TX/status/1765263680210342343) where they conflicted. Turns out getting into a confrontation with the federal government and looking like a winner pays off, to the point of getting majority support from young voters(https://www.newsweek.com/greg-abbott-won-over-gen-z-millennials-1871679).
The other big primary news is that the grassroots conservatives in the Texas house now have at least 10 votes(https://twitter.com/bradj_TX/status/1765400527993540690) in their anti-establishment block. That's not just an arbitrary milestone; 10 challengers to a ruling of the speaker subjects that ruling to a floor vote, which gives Shelley Luther- yes, the one that got arrested for operating a salon during lockdown- the power to potentially force concessions. This group could expand significantly with runoffs. Either way, the Texas state government will assuredly have a much more conservative direction in 2025.
Federally, the democrats decided that Collin Allred, currently the US representative for a nice part of Dallas, will have the honor of losing to Ted Cruz in November. I'm mildly curious as to the odds; will he spend more or less than $100 million to lose? For US house primaries,
Brandon Herrera is a firearms influencer on social media as a day job.
On vouchers, I tried to look up what's happening in Arizona, since it passed a pretty expansive voucher program a couple of years ago, but it's hard to find much information aside from the standard "democrats think it's bad" and "republicans think it's good, and also costs less per student than public schools." An article says there are currently 68,455 enrolled in the voucher program, with $7,200 available per child, vs $13,000 per public school student. I would expect the very high needs children to be in the public education system, and for it to be basically impossible to create private programs on that voucher budget that meets federal requirements, but haven't heard anything about it. Google says that responsiblehomeschooling.org says there are 38,983 homeschoolers (but the link is dead now?), which would make almost twice as many voucher students as homeschoolers. I don't see any qualitative reports on what kinds of schooling arrangements people are choosing, so it's kind of hard to have an informed opinion. I'm basically in favor, since as far as I've heard from people like Caplan and DeBoer, kids learn about as much in any modern, structured educational setting, so they might as well do it somewhere they and their families like. But all the articles are biased (mostly from the anti side), so it's hard to tell how things are going.
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Were Ak-50, Brandon?
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"Lurches"? That's newspaper headline speak, and I dislike it because I routinely see it being used in "Vatican slams!" or "Conservatives demand!" where, of course, the reasonable nice people are all liberal and get moderate language describing them, the opponents are presented as yelling table-pounding demanding ignoramuses.
Did it "lurch" or did it "move towards"? Would you describe a leftward shift in another state as "Californian politics lurches left"? "Lurching" has negative connotations (clumsy, random, abrupt, uncontrolled) which is why it's used by media to describe the unapproved side.
I'm surprised at this reponse, register me as thinking "lurch" is a neutral word for "unexpected change in direction/acceleration".
I think whether or not it's truly a neutral word or just one with plausible deniability as being neutral would be determined by if the same phenomenon of some sudden unexpected change in direction/acceleration in right/left direction get described as "lurches" at similar rates by right-leaning and left-leaning media outlets. They'd have to be at least somewhat close; otherwise, that'd be reason to believe that the writers, at least subconsciously, don't consider it a neutral term.
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Yes, I would describe ‘Vermont lurches left’ if they suddenly elected another crop of the Vermont progressive party.
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Lurches might not be the right word but it's definitely something more than drifts or moves towards. I've lived in Texas for more than 20 years, and this past year is the first time that state politics has really impacted my life in a meaningful way. Abbot's fight for vouchers has had the side effect of starving urban school districts, who are unable to raise funding because the state takes the majority of their property tax revenue through the "robin hood" program (and no longer even uses it for education -- now it just goes into the state general fund. It's purely kleptocratic now in a way that I don't believe it always was). My school district is getting rid of librarians and counselors as they can no longer afford them, cutting gifted and talented programs (very much done to piss off the rich -- it's not saving much money but it generates lots of ire), and generally laying off teachers and increasing class sizes. It feels like a game of chicken between the governor and the school district, and right now Abbot is winning (at least from my standpoint as angry parent).
The irony is that school vouchers are not popular in rural districts, where public school tend to be the largest employer. I'm curious how this plays out but I'd really like them to get on with it already, declare a victor in this round of fights and go back to governing.
Also on the lurch -- the republican platforms first plank is completely abolishing property taxes (this was discussed a few months back). There are a number of similarly ludicrous ideas on there -- again -- if it's not a lurch it's definitely something out of the ordinary.
That sounds awesome. Cutting government funds to religious schools is something I support wholesale.
He hasn’t cut government schools, and the revenue restrictions are unrelated to the voucher fight.
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Abolishing property taxes is, per the numbers, actually pretty doable. It would probably entail restructuring some county-level spending but it’s not a pie-in-the-sky idea.
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For me, this is somewhat hopeful. I know that Covid is a dead issue for most people, but there is nothing I want more in politics than to see the lockdownists punished. If someone ran on the platform of removing and permanently barring public health officials that spearheaded Covid rules, I would vote for them as a pure one-issue voter. Luther's central plank seems to be that she stood up to these petty tyrants, so this might not be quite as dead of an issue as I thought.
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School voucher programs are an excellent idea. Unfortunately here in the UK we have no such thing which means that if you want to send you kids to private school you have to pay full whack (with an extra 20% whack coming soon once Labour win the next election) even though you don't get any tax rebates for your children not using up public resources by going to a state school.
Sadly no party is even campaigning for them here...
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School vouchers address a problem at a much lower level than necessary. Firstly, they allow Hispanics, Muslims, other minorities to run their own schools, destroying any future hope of even partial assimilation (this is a growing issue in Western Europe cf the UK, it’s hard to see vouchers as a win in this context in any case). Evangelical Christian schools will mostly still be only mildly Christian (for reasons expanded upon below), but Muslim schools are going to be really Muslim.
Secondly, they fail to address the fact that most teachers are still fundamentally progressive. Even conservative Catholic (or Baptist, or Orthodox Jewish) schools often have liberal/progressive teachers because that’s who studies education. Your based and trad voucher-taking school will set up operations, look to hire teachers, and find that….there is no magic well of right-wing teachers out there. Sure, in some ultra-conservative communities you can get some of the way by hiring/training older married women, but most still prefer to be homemakers, or have jobs of their own, or don’t want to work as teachers in any case*.
* Muslim schools get around this latter problem by being able to rely on first-generation overseas staff from conservative Islamic countries. Evangelical Christian schools, unless they start hiring Ugandans, have to make do with American staff.
And how do you propose places like Texas address this instead? What does addressing the problem at a "higher level" look like?
Pass laws that affirmatively teach whatever it is they think kids should know, then pay what and train who is necessary to alter the majority ideology among teachers.
Except, as we've seen in Florida, this doesn't work. It gets characterized as "right-wing cancel culture," "don't say 'gay,'" "'whitewashing' history," and so on. And, as a number of teachers and union representatives have asserted, they're not going to obey. I've seen invocations of the Scopes trial — 'it didn't matter how many laws the backwards creationists passed to forbid it, we never let those stop us from teaching the truth of Darwinian evolution; and similarly, it doesn't matter how many laws the stupid right-wing bigots pass trying to mandate we teach lies about America's racist history, LGBT+ identities, or whatever, we will keep on providing children with the Truth!' Personnel is policy, and there's a general dearth of enforcement mechanisms when the entire profession is ideologically captured and in opposition. Which gets to the next part.
The only way to do that is to fire pretty much all the existing teachers and replace them with new ones that aren't beholden to the current ideology. So, first, how long would it take to train enough new teachers to replace the over 400,000 teachers and administrators Texas currently has. Second, this would require replacing the current ideologically-captured system of teacher-training, which would pretty much require the wholesale purging and replacement of American academia, at which point one gets into the domain of coup-complete problems.
Right, because most of the smartest and best people are still fundamentally progressive, and oppose your actions. Change that, and you win. Don't change that, and you lose.
The thing is, I think you and I have very different ideas as to the best method to go about changing that. In short (per Sun-Tzu's 'fight where you are strong and the enemy is weak, not where the enemy is strong and you are weak'), I don't think "the marketplace of ideas" — particularly under the current institutional and media landscape — is the correct battlefield for the right to be acting in.
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It all goes back to the universities. All methods of recruiting skilled workers except credentialism were made de facto illegal in the 60s, and then the left took over the institution that issues credentials. What more do they need? Personnel will always be in their favor. Everything in American history since has been an endgame where checkmate is guaranteed for the right unless the left bungles its moves, allowing a stalemate; in other words, an ending where both sides lose.
Texas can have their own state run teacher's training programs separate from the research universities. They probably do. Nearby states do, along with alternative licensure that doesn't require a teaching degree. Community colleges aren't even all that leftist for the most part, just kind of pragmatic.
Edit: removed some stuff.
I contend that if Texas made serious strides towards a parallel credentialing infrastructure, it would come under attack by selective enforcement of disparate impact — disparate impacts in the existing mainstream universities notwithstanding. If it didn't succumb to entryists first. Outright conservative credentialers for knowledge jobs are tolerated so long as they remain in the JV league (eg Liberty University).
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Texas, notably, doesn’t require teachers to have an education degree, any old four year degree will do. Now for practical reasons teaching is going to lean left, but normie democrats with the Catholic Church holding the leash are a big improvement over what we have now.
As for your other concern, Texas doesn’t have enough Muslims or religious Hindus for that to be a concern and Hispanics here want to assimilate, not live in an ethnic enclave. There’s reasonable concerns to be had over subsidizing Hasidic Jews, but Texas’ welfare state is otherwise niggardly enough that I think it’s still not an attractive location for the ones that insist on not working even if it is cheaper than New York and willing to pay for their private schools.
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Something about reading school vouchers as far-right just rubs me the wrong way. Though I agree it comes from people generally associated with the right the actual policy feels very liberal to me. Politics have strange coalitions I guess where certain policies become coded to a tribe.
On one hand you have “Individuals get to choose what and how their children are taught in school while selecting an environment that best fits them as an individual” versus a “top down the government decides what and how children are taught”.
The origional purpose of public schools was a bit of let’s teach kids to read and do arithmetic plus a lot of we are a new nation state and public schools will uniform our language, memes, national Origen mythology and become good citizens within the territory we have won thru war and declared a unified political authority. The building of a nation-state or the process most formed thru feels very right-wing.
Perhaps, initial America founding was a little left wing but public schools also served a purpose in American history of taking Irish/Italian/Polish/Hispanic immigrants and turning them into nice little Protestant value Americans or as close as they could.
Alright, if the public schools are teaching the pre-existence of souls, I want a voucher right here and now.
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It is very liberal, philosophically; it's just not inherently left-wing.
Principled right-libertarians exist (though in insufficient numbers...), and many other modern right-wing people have been pushed to adopt liberal philosophies, at least out of expediency, since liberal philosophies are the ones that still let you coexist when (like the modern right) you're not powerful enough to expect to come out on top in an illiberal system. @ArjinFerman is probably correct below when he writes "Politics is not about policy as it relates to various philosophies, as nice as that would have been." I fear many supporters of school vouchers would never give the idea a second glance if only control of their public school systems was still in their allies' hands rather than their opponents'.
There's this too. Schizmogenesis is a powerful force. I never imagined I'd see leftists defending the unimpugnable integrity of pharmaceutical companies and voting machines, or rightists becoming pro-Russian tankies, but maybe that's just what happens when the vibe of "not only am I not like Them, I'm the most not-like-Them it's possible to be!" gets socially rewarded.
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The most hilarious part is that Elizabeth Warren wrote favorably about school vouchers in The Two Income Trap. She also expressed a decidedly mixed view on women entering the workforce. The past really is a foreign country.
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It's not even so much about coalitions, as it is about assets. Public schools are a center of power for progressives, a voucher system would upset the structures this center is built on, it might even let the conservatives build a few forts of their own. Politics is not about policy as it relates to various philosophies, as nice as that would have been.
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Oh, that word!
This characterization is all wrong. Phelan didn't "decline to stop the impeachment". He was one of its public faces! Phelan even had personal incentive after Paxton accused him of coming to the House floor drunk. This is one of those weird press tics where they propagandize and make their own position sound more weaselly than it has to. Imagine an alternate phrasing: "Speaker Dade Phelan was forced into a runoff [...] after controversy over Phelan's role in the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton."
Phelan was the driving force behind the impeachment, but the impeachment process was already in the works before Paxton accused him, accurately, of being drunk on the floor.
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