Texafication of American politics? (2)

The Ronnie Duggar mentioned in my last post on this topic is still around.  He just did a piece given his own less-than-cheery take on The Texafication of the USA Texas Observer 12/03/04.

Driving north of Austin toward Dallas during the early days of my work on the Observer, suddenly I had one of those counterintuitive ideas that chill your brain. Could it be, I thought, that instead of what we’re working for—Texas growing into a more just, less racist place—the opposite will happen? The United States will become just like greedy, reactionary, racist, poverty-blighted, religion-ridden Texas? It was one of the clichés among us on the Observer that we were dragging our state, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century. But lo and behold, as of November 2nd this year, Texas has dragged the United States back into the 19th.

My premonition was hard to credit, back then. After all, we were competing for the bottom among the worst of the Southern states on poverty, unemployment benefits, worker’s compensation, aid for impoverished children, education, health, you name it. Apart from within the Lone Star State itself, the only equally threatening concentration of the same weird forces we were fighting—the book censors, the superpatriots, the fundamentalist zealots, gay-bashers, hate-the-poor greedheads, kill-’em warlovers, and the slick skyscraper men silently servicing, up and down the elevators, the corporations and the banks—was in Southern California. We simply could not have imagined that, after John Kennedy was murdered, presidents from those very two zones of darkness would rule the United States for two-thirds of the next 45 years.

Although he's arguing a kind of negative Texas-regional viewpoint, his mention of Southern California as a stronghold of far-right politics is a reminder that it's easy to over-generalize about regional influences in such things.

Duggar's article has some interesting stories, as well as providing some insight into his own Texas populist viewpoint.  Duggar is still a sharp critic of Lyndon Johnson, noting in this article than when Kennedy selected Johnson as his running mate in 1960, Johnson "his own state Johnson was a corrupt conservative party boss."  To quote again from Willie  Morris' North Toward Home (1967), he describes Duggar's position toward Johson this way:

Ronnie Duggar ... was an idealist, heavily indluenced by his readin of the Transcendentalists; he distrusted the compromises of political power and saw his own role in Texas as that of the social critic, the journalistic conscience, the polemicist.  "Let those flatter who fear, it is not an American art," was the phrase from Jefferson he placed at the top of his editorial page.  As editor of the Observer during the political wars of the 1950s, he was one of Johnson's main public antagonists.

Here's Duggar's take on the state of the country today.  I think it's safe to say it's a grim viewpoint:

One would have had to stretch it, back then, to call Texas a democracy. Seen as a system unto itself, it was a corrupt oligarchy, endorsed and abetted, rather than challenged, by its mainstream press—in substance, precursive fascism, still democratic in form. After November 2nd last, one now would have to stretch it to call the Texafied United States a democracy. It is a corrupt oligarchy, protected and celebrated by a mainline TV industry that is the first privately owned propaganda system in the history of major modern nations. Instead of stepping forward for national health insurance, Bush II, protected by this propaganda system, is gutting Medicare, letting private corporations betray the workers to whom they owe pensions, and preparing to kill Social Security. In place of the rifles and pistols the Texas Rangers used to keep the Mexican Americans and blacks in line, the Texafied United States deploys the superpower’s nuclear weapons, our helicopter gunships and heat-seeking missiles, and soon to be, our long-range weapons circling every nation on earth day and night in space. After Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II, the United States, too, is crypto-fascism with lingering democratic forms, and during Bush II’s second term, depending on the nature and extent of his further uses of force against other nations and against us ourselves, we may be plain fascist.

Since he brought up the f-word, fascism, I'll take the opportunity to say that I wish liberal writers would be a little more careful with the term.  I have made the argument myself that today's Republican Party is becoming increasingly more authoritarian.  And since they control all three branches of the federal government, their partisan tendency in that direction is influenceing the style of government as well.  In addition, the corporate domination of the media has reached the point where a propaganda channel (Fox News) that East German party functionaries in the 1970s would have envied is the major source of news for a large segment of the American population.  Along with what we might generously call the laziness and fecklessness of our Potemkin press corps adds to the authoritarian atmosphere.

But it ain't fascism.  And the fact that most people today have only the vaguest idea of what the term means anyway, except that it has something to do with the Second World War and maybe with the Russians - or is that Communism thing something else? - is another reason to be careful with the term.  David Neiwert uses the term "pseudofascism" in his very worthwhile essay posted in installments on his blog, with an index here.  But I'm more comforable calling this an "authoritarian" trend.

But Duggar manages to end his article on an optimistic note.  And near the end, he seems to reaffirm his faith in a kind of Thoreau/Emerson role as social critic:

None of this is to say that any blow for liberty and justice struck in Texas during the past 50 years has been in vain. As the historian Hugh Seton-Watson has written, “There will be no sudden miraculous and sensational victory over the powers of darkness…. Every blow against injustice… should be struck… because it will lessen the volume of injustice in the world.”