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The Fall of Texas and the One Party State

Link: https://wilderwealthywise.com/the-fall-of-texas-and-the-coming-one-party-state/

When I was a lad, I stumbled upon the book “The Ayes of Texas,” by Daniel da Cruz. In it, the wealthy Texas entrepreneur, who lives in Texas, funds work on the Battleship Texas (BB-35) to make it seaworthy again in time for Independence Day, 2000.

Alas, the sneaky USSR proposes a treaty to the United States: put your weapons up, and we’ll put ours up after you put yours up. And, led by East Coast leftists, we fell for it. Except for the Texans, who vote to secede from the Union, and fight it out alone against the USSR. Oh, and our entrepreneur, has secretly outfitted the Texas (BB-35) with nuclear reactors and particle beam weapons.

It’s a good yarn (it has the Battleship Texas surfing on a tsunami of liquid fire), and you can get a cheap copy on Amazon.

And it does, I think, highlight the lynchpin that Texas is in modern politics, and not the one where the Soviet Union is still a thing.

My consideration of this started in the hot tub. The hot tub is great – we sit and either relax quietly, or engage in conversation. And it was just this sort of conversation a few weeks ago about the Civil War (Civil War, Cool Maps, Censorship, and is Fort Sumter . . . Happening Now?) that led to The Boy saying:

“It all comes down to Texas.”

I was interested. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” he began, “From what I’ve read, Texas today looks a lot like California in 1980 or so. Look what California looked like then, it was prosperous. It was wealthy. It was a beacon for the country. Everyone wanted to move there.”

I remembered. Heck, I remembered one time when a family stopped at our house when I was young asking for a cup of flour so they could make gravy at a campsite. They were making their way from Oklahoma to California. California was a place where your economic dreams could come true.

“Now, that’s Texas. The economy is great there. They’re reliably Republican, and with that, there are all of the low tax, low government interference policies that lead to prosperity. People are streaming into Texas.

“And that’s the problem. The people streaming into Texas, well, they aren’t Texan. Over 300,000 Californians have made their way to Texas over the last five years, and the trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down. They’re fleeing the highest poverty state in the nation, which coincidentally has the greatest wealth inequality in the nation.”

I responded: “Yeah, California is regulations-happy. I read that it was against the law for a homeowner to change a light switch – it had to be done by a licensed electrician. And one time I was talking to a friend on the phone a few years ago. His dog started barking. He was afraid he’d get fined again. Because dogs barking in California is . . . illegal. Sadly, when the Californians leave to go to another state, they want to bring those regulations with them, not realizing that those regulations were the cause of the economic problems they have now. Heck, Californians can’t figure out that their restrictions on housing cause house prices to go crazy faster than Elon Musk with a few minutes to kill and a connection to Twitter®.”

The Boy responded. “California used to be solidly Republican. At some point in the near future, a Republican might not even be on the ballot. Did you know that Ronald Reagan was governor there?”

It’s amusing when 18 year olds begin to discover the world.

“Yeah, now that you remind me of that, I remember it.” I smiled

“Well, California voted solidly Republican, at least until 1992. From then on, it became a lock for the Democrats. And it happened quickly – within a decade. Once Texas flips to voting Democrat, it’s over.”

Once it flips? Will it flip? The percentages voting Republican have dropped, and with the continual influx of Californians that are heavily collectivist as well as the rising proportion of Hispanic voters, which vote Democrat on a greater than two to one margin, it seems assured that as the Hispanic population rises in Texas, the flip to permanent Democrat control in Texas will be nearly inevitable.

Honestly, if Hispanic immigrants voted 2 to 1 in favor of Republicans, Democrats would have insisted on a 200 foot high wall topped with automatic machine guns.

Looking at the map, it’s theoretically possible for a Republican to win the White House without Texas, but it’s unlikely. Once Texas becomes Democratic the presidency will become, like California, permanently Democratic.