Texafication of American politics? (1)

There is no exact regional base for any one political perspective.  You can find raving rightwingers in the wilds of Georgia and of Idaho, and in the downtown offices of Seattle and St. Paul.  Likewise, you can find hardcore liberal Democrats in backwoods Mississippi (trust me, I know from personal experience on this one) and in Dick Cheney's Wyoming, as well as in the usual suspect places like San Francisco or New York City.

But it's also undeniable that some distinct political traditions have left more of a mark than others on the present-day Republican Party.  Texas is obviously one of them.  Texans often don't consider themselves a Southern state; that would imply more similarity to other states than they might want to concede.  Most people outside of Texas consider it Southern, but not part of the Deep South.  It would be hard to exclude any of the former Confederate states from a meaningful definition of the American South.

One of Mississippi's more famous literary sons, Willie Morris, recalled his experiences working for the populist Ronnie Duggar's Texas Observer in the early 1960s in his autobiography North Toward Home (1967).  (I should note here that "populist" in the US doesn't have the implication of rightwing demagoguery that it does in Europe.)  He wrote the following of the Texas legislature circa 1964, which is particularly interesting for today for his description of the Texas Republicans (my emphasis):

The great majority of the legislators were white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, yet one would have had to go to the national Congress, of all other American parliamentary bodies, to find a legislature which encompassed so many differing regions and values.  There were a bare handful of Republicans, new arrivals who usually dressed better [than the Democrats], disowned Lincoln, and were prone to caucus in phone booths.  Their idol was Senator Goldwater, and ideologically they occupied the low ground somewhere to the right of Ethelred the Unready, though by no means without company from the ranks of their Democratic colleagues.  The provincial political manner, a back-slapping exuberance coated with an uneasy literacy, dominated the place.  An East Texas racist could attack a man in the morning as an enemy of the commonwealth,a nd ask his advice in the afternoon on whether his son should to to "one of them Ivy League schools."  There were men with meanness written on every feature, heavy, red-faced meanness, men you would not want to cross if you could avoid it, and there were decent, friendly, and well-educated men who sought one's respect and attention; it took time to recognize that the votes of the decent and friendly ones against social legislation, against Negroes, and against any meaningful taxes counted as mcuh and usually more than the votes of the straightforward reprobates.

The phony populism, the "back-slapping exuberance," the more open display of affluence, the ideological extremism, the ugly mean streak - all of them are recognizable in today's Bush administration.

Morris also recounts some of the antics of the Radical Right in Texas at that time.  I've often thought of this passage the last few years, where he recounts his observations of a particular group of fanatical Goldwater zealots who promoted various crackpot literature.  The reason I've often thought about it is that, in those days, propagating the kind of stuff Morris mentions here would have marked anyone as a rightwing crackpot with pretty much anyone who could read without moving their lips.  (That's a phrase that used to much annoy rightwingers, to be characterized as the kind of people who couldn't read without moving their lips.)  When I was taking political science in college in Mississippi, the book that he mentions in the excerpt below, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, was used as an example of the kind of worthless source that was simply not acceptable as reference material for papers, being devoid of any reliability.

Today this kind of stuff is routine broadcast fare for the junkie bigot Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, the Christian Coalition, Jerry Falwell, FreeRepublic.com, Fox News, and so on.  A Texan Looks at Lyndon used the same sort of standards of evidence as the Swift Boat Liars for Bush did.  The latter, however, were treated seriously by mainstream and allegedly responsible media who knew better.  And, of course, they were all-but-universally embraced by Republicans.  There were a few exceptions, like John McCain, who criticized the attacks on Kerry but supported Bush actively anyway, playing the role of those "decent and friendly" Texas legislators who still took the same side as those with "meanness written on every feature."

Here is Morris' account of the J. Evetts Haley crowd:

Traveling about he region [the Southwest], I was subjected to diverse arguments.  There were appeals suggesting a state department in every state to counteract America's centralized conduct of foreign affairs; I would not have been surprised by a plea for local control of outer space.  I heard it explained, in so many words, that when Christ expressed the sentiment, "Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do," it was a private remark to the carpenters, was off-the-record, and was not meant for general consumption.  I followed the trail of that most flamboyant of Goldwaterites, a perspicacious old brickbat named J. Evetts Haley (whose book, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, was a runaway bestseller during the 1964 Presidential campaign [between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater]) and his organization, "Texans for America," as they traveled about like the old justices of assize, winnowing the subversive and the obscene from school textbooks.  These middle-class patriots intimidated public school officials, successfully promoted major revisions in a number of textbooks, and by proxy recruitted a majority of the state House of Representatives to their cause before the intelletuals and professors began to fight back, typically, at the last moment.  Haley and his followers opposed any favorable mention in schoolbooks of the income tax, social security, TVA, federal subsidies to farmers and schools, and had harsh words for any mention of John Dewey, the UN, the League of Nations, UNESCO, disarmament, integration, and the Supreme Court.  They further demanded that publishers remove from their books the names of Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Pearl Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Louis Untermeyer Charles Beard, Henry Steel Commager, Allan Nevins, and J. Frank Dobie.  When Dobie led a delegatio of Texas writers to protest against the censorship movement, J. Evetts Haley called the delegation a group of "fathead," "supersophisticates," and "leftwingers."  When a professor quoted from John Milton's Areopagitica, one lady in his group whispered to another, "Who's John Milton?"

This was a mentality that flourished on its own private evidence, carried to dire extremes: films, books, pamphlets, and tape recordings.  In any of the "patriotic bookstores" in the Southwest, alongside Conscience of a Conservative and Why Not Victory? [both by Barry Goldwater] one would find, among others, A Youth's Primer to the Confederacy - What the Historians Left Out; How to Plan an Anti-Subversive Seminar; The Income Tax - Root of All Evil; Why Do Millionaires, Ministers of Religion, and College Professors Become Communists; or Essays on Segregation, billed as "a collection of writings by six Episcopalian clergymen, one of them a bishop, exploring the Christian foundations for the racial settlement in the South called segregation, and exposing 'integration' as an attack on mankind's greatest treasure, faith in Jesus Christ."  I read more even about subversion in high places than I had read about Whittaker-Chambers' bad teeth [a key element in the evidence given by Alger Hiss in his celebrated case].  After a generous sampling of this and similar lore, one could begin to understand how the brooding and uncomplicated mind, with proper encouragement, might detect subversion not only behind the UN and the TVA, but also the French and Indian War, compulsory vaccination for smallpox, the abolition of entail and primogeniture, the bank holiday of 1933, the British Reform Acts, Red Cross blood banks, the Congress of Vienna, the election of Grover Cleveland, Teapot Dome, and public venereal clinics.

Incidentally, hardcore rightwingers will sometimes point to the goofier antics of some of these types, like the business about states setting up their own foreign affairs departments, to portray themselves as more sensible and responsible than the "extremisists."  What's critical for Democrats to recognize about today's Republican Party is that, while there will always be fringe hangers-on to any successful political group, this kind of thinking is now mainstream in the Republican Party.  Laurie Mylroie's conspiracy theories on Saddam Hussein are as kooky as those of J. Evetts Haley, who saw the AFL-CIO as revolutionaries and the US Chamber of Commerce as their allies.  But her view of the world was taken seriously by some of the most senior officials of the government, like Paul Wolfowitz, who planned the Iraq War.

But while you have to enjoy the kookiness in stories like those I just quoted, it'simportant to remember there's nothing charming about this kind of mean-minded  bigotry, whose only result is to promote hatred, ignorance and fear.  In the 1960s and long thereafter, Southern conservatives who wanted to sound reasonable, would say things like, "Well, that Texan Looks At Lyndon book was way out there.  But you read some of the specific references to documents and such that he has and you wonder if some of it isn't true."

Of course, crackpot authors typically cite "sources" fanatically, often much more so than a comparable piece done by a responsible writer.  On closer examination, the "sources" turn out to be misquoted, taken totally out of context, just made up or from some other equally crackpot pamphlet.  Promoting the sleaze attack while expressing some kind of phony personal reservations about the source is a favorite of rightwingers.  Although these days they can often just cite Fox News and not worry about the phony reservations.