Texas politics and the meaning of the 1960s

This essay from the Texas Monthly looks at how the Texas Republican party has undergone cumulative radicalization for a full generation now, ever since the Bush machine successfully destroyed the Democrats as a party that could win a state-wide election. This has created a dynamic where the GOP is in a spiral in which ever-more right-wing Christo-fascists are battling old-style pro-business (meaning among other things look the other way on undocumented workers) types like John Cornyn:

In their primary runoff for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, John Cornyn can say that Ken Paxton is divorcing his wife, that he’s alleged to have had multiple mistresses, that his own senior staff has accused him of corruption. All that is damning and true. But Paxton can make one charge that is more powerful than anything Cornyn can pin on Ken, and which may well push the attorney general over the line on May 26: John Cornyn was in office twenty years ago. There’s really no getting around that. It’s on his Wikipedia page.

To put a finer point on it, Cornyn has the stink of George W. Bush about him. The problem with the senior senator, as one representative online poster put it this week, is that he’s “a corporate hack who was an instrumental member of the Bush/Rove machine” and “the last vestige of those hacks other than [Greg] Abbott.” The problem for Cornyn is that the sentiment above wasn’t shared by a bleeding-heart Austin liberal with a long memory of the Bush years and a Coexist bumper-sticker, but by someone who identifies as a Texas conservative. 

The expectation might be that the Texas GOP has golden statues to Bush in every place it meets. It does not. A substantial portion of Republicans in the state are out to seek and destroy any last trace of the party left over from the Bush era—between 1994 and 2004 or so. When it was reported on April 15 that Bush had donated $5,000 to Cornyn’s campaign, the signal fires went up through the right-wing movement. (Even though it was a minor sum from a private citizen in a very expensive race—pro-Cornyn organizations, along with his campaign, spent $17 million in the first quarter of 2026.) “[The] old guard is all over Texas trying to claw back control and push out America First candidates,” wrote Kambree Nelson, a pro-Paxton influencer. “Bring it.” Another MAGA influencer posted a picture of an aged Bush and wrote that “voting for this RINO twice and defending him for 10 years after he left office was the worst political decision I’ve ever made.” 

A demographic curiosity that throws some light on how radically this country has shifted over the past 35 years is that Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump are all turning 80 within two months of each other this summer. All three of them were born in the first year of the baby boom; each of them represents a different ideological orientation toward the the big issues of that generation, which can be summed up as “how to deal with the legacy of the 1960s,” which is, I believe, the one thing that has most dominated American politics for a half-century now.

It’s hard to remember sometimes that a state like Texas is not actually that right wing: rather it’s a state where about 53% of the voting public manages to maintain a stranglehold over the other 47%. It is a microcosm of how divided this country now is, and how dangerously it is teetering on the edge of authoritarian herrenvolk democracy. And at the bottom of all that is an unresolved and probably unresolvable ongoing generational fight about what could be called the meaning of the 1960s.