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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.
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.
It's interesting to read this sentiment in light of comments like @ArjinFerman's below about politics not being about philosophy because it seems to lay bare one of the major philosophical differences between the median Republican and the median poster here.
Namely that there even being such a thing as a "lower level than necessary" betrays a very Rousseauean top-down brand of thinking that is largely non-existant in the mainstream American right. The obvious question from a Hobbesian/Burkean bottom-up perspective being "shouldn't we endeavor to solve all problems at the lowest possible level at all times?"
That's not to say there aren't philosophical differences between the movements, of course, but that they will fall to the wayside when running into simple pragmatism. There's plenty of cases where the right acts in a top-down fashion (though arguably, as you point out, still at the lowest possible level), and the left asserts it's bottom-upness. The only people who are consistently bottom-up seem to be libertarians, and while they tend to keep to their principles, they have to compensate that with cope when those principles result in unintended consequences.
As for 2rafa, I hesitate to comment on her philosophy, because she's playing on a level my feeble pleb brain is unable to comprehend. What is supposed to be the point of the "but Muslim schools are going to be really Muslim" argument? Does it come from an honest disagreement with radical Islam, or is it supposed to be a 4D chess move to sour non-progressives on vouchers, because everyone knows they hate Muslims, or something? I honestly can't tell.
I think it's just supposed to be a pragmatic reason for why the right might not want to support school vouchers.
So the latter of the two options I outlined. The problem with that is really Muslim Muslims are nowhere near as scary LibProg European elites. The other problem is that if you're trying to scare me with something you think I should be scared of, rather than saying what your actual problem is (i.e. naming the thing that might change your mind if I address it well), you're ruining the conversation.
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