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Notes -
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.
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.
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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