Over the last half century, Texas has become the most important stronghold of the Republican Party in the United States. The Lone Star State hasn’t given its huge haul of electoral votes to a Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter won in 1976. It went twice for Ronald Reagan and gave the nation two presidents named George Bush. Since then, it has produced a steady stream of ever-more reactionary politicians who make the Bush tradition look moderate. Texas Republicanism is perfectly in step with the hard-right turn of the party nationally: it leads the way in treating immigrants and refugees with relentless hostility while embracing the megachurches of the Christian right; it shows how to use government power to restrict reproductive freedoms while rejecting any regulation of assault weapons; it thrives on the bogus populism of the Trump era, which uplifts the wealthy and powerful and spurns those who are crushed by bad jobs, bad health, or bad luck.
The Democratic Party has been hapless in the face of all this; no Democrat has won a statewide race in Texas since 1994. And yet, there was a time not so long ago when the Republican takeover of Texas politics did not seem inevitable. In fact, even as Reaganism was rising in Texas and around the nation, the Texas Democratic Party was alive and kicking. In the 1982 elections, Democrats swept all the races for statewide offices. A centrist Democrat named Mark White was elected governor. Jim Mattox, who called himself “the people’s lawyer,” was elected attorney general. An up-and-coming liberal named Ann Richards became state treasurer. A young progressive, Garry Mauro, became commissioner of the Texas General Land Office. And a charismatic, bona fide Texas populist named Jim Hightower was elected agriculture commissioner. “This is the healthiest political climate I’ve seen in Texas in my lifetime,” Bernard Rapoport, the Waco insurance executive and prominent liberal funder, exulted that year to a Washington Post reporter.
I moved to Austin in the mid-1980s, at this high point of Democratic hopes, to take a job at The Texas Observer, an independent biweekly founded in 1954 by a small group of liberals who were at odds with the conservative leadership of the Democratic Party. Before long, I was seeing how surprising and contradictory the politics of the state could be. Rapoport, for example, had grown wealthy by founding the American Income Life Insurance Company but also encouraged his own employees to unionize and was once described by a union leader as “the most radical businessman in the nation.” (He was a major financial contributor to the Observer over the years.) The more typical Texas millionaire leaned either to the right or the far right. With surprisingly minimal effort, I gained the confidence of an Austin heiress named Ellen Clayton Garwood, who was making sizable contributions to the U.S. Council for World Freedom, the American arm of the World Anti-Communist League, which in the 1980s funneled money and weapons to counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua under the direction of shadowy Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. She beamed with pride when she told me that her money helped finance the reconditioning of a helicopter for the Contras that was christened the Lady Ellen.
At the same time, I was following a growing network of largely Hispanic church-based community organizations—in San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, El Paso, and the Rio Grande Valley—that were part of Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation network. Alinsky’s community organizing on Chicago’s southwest side led to the creation of the IAF in 1940; by the time he died in 1972, IAF was seeding organizations across the nation. Their lead organizer in Texas was Ernesto Cortés Jr., a quiet but effective proponent of the idea that ordinary people could be brought into dialogue with power brokers, which often involved “accountability sessions” wherein citizens did most of the talking while politicians were expected to sit and listen. I began to understand that there was another kind of Texas politics always attempting to sprout up: a hopeful, authentic populism with deep roots.
In Lawrence Goodwyn’s classic history The Populist Moment, he traces the earliest stirrings of American populism to a meeting at a farm in Lampasas County, Texas, in 1877. A small group of participants there organized the first Farmers’ Alliance, which initially resembled other rural fraternal organizations, such as the Patrons of Husbandry, better known as the Grange. As the Alliance spread around Texas, it emphasized political education and the election of sympathetic officials, while struggling to find means of economic self-help. In 1887, leaders set up a statewide Alliance Exchange, a cooperative devoted to marketing Texas crops and offering low-interest credit to farmers. By the end of the decade, these economic efforts were floundering, but the political movement was gathering force. The Farmers’ Alliance had spread across the nation. It was becoming clear that, without political power, there was little hope of making the economic system work better for farmers. By 1891, activists of all stripes—unionists, farmers, woman suffragists, prohibitionists—from Texas, Kansas, and several other states met in Cincinnati and resolved to form the People’s Party.
It was on a train back from Cincinnati, historians tell us, that Kansas delegates discussed the question of what members of the People’s Party would be called. Someone suggested adapting the Latin word populus, and the term populist was invented. In 1892, the party met for its first national convention in Omaha, Nebraska. It sought to break the lock of the two major parties and draw farmers and laborers—“the plain people,” in the words of its platform—into the movement. “The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind,” declared the preamble to the Omaha Platform. The Populists fielded a candidate for president in 1892, James Weaver from Iowa, who won 8 percent of the vote. In the next election, they decided on a “fusion” strategy, backing the Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan, who lost to William McKinley.
The People’s Party did not survive much beyond 1900, and over the next several decades, populism became more and more disconnected from the history of those who invented the word. Today, the term is used so loosely that it is almost impossible to come up with a widely accepted definition, though that hasn’t stopped innumerable scholars from trying. At its most basic, populism is understood as a political or cultural attitude that upholds the wisdom and virtues of “the people” against a corrupt elite. Midcentury American historians such as Richard Hofstadter portrayed the early populists as conspiratorial rubes who were seized by a “paranoid style.” And yet, as depicted by Goodwyn and more recent historians, what distinguished early populism was a democratic “movement culture,” which led to a collective self-confidence, a conviction that the power of big corporations and wealthy industrialists could be effectively countered by the masses. The efforts that began in Lampasas County and spread throughout Texas and the South and into the West and Midwest ultimately led to the “flowering of the largest democratic mass movement in American history,” in Goodwyn’s words.
A Populist Moment
In my days at the Observer, I wanted to believe that spirit of democratic insurgency could reshape the state’s politics. To see true democracy in practice, all you had to do was watch the emerging power of those IAF groups, which were always elevating ordinary members of the community into leadership positions. They could put a previously ignored matter on the agenda and force government officials to do something. In 1983, they won the support of the state’s powerful lieutenant governor, Bill Hobby, a conservative Democrat, for legislation that by the late 1980s would begin to bring running water, sewers, and roads to the miles of unincorporated colonias along the border. That looked to me like authentic populism, as did Jim Hightower’s rise to power.
I recounted for him what I’d seen in those halcyon days of the 1980s, when Democrats were still winning statewide elections.
Hightower grew up in the town of Denison, in North Texas. He once wrote that his father, William F. “High” Hightower—the “proprietor and chief BS coordinator of Main Street News,” a downtown magazine vendor—was a man who considered himself conservative but tended to believe that “both political parties have become whores to the Wall Street crowd and don’t really give a rat’s ass about Main Street folks.” In 1967, at twenty-four, Hightower went off to Washington, D.C., to work for Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, one of the great liberal lions in Senate history. For a few years, Hightower ran the Agribusiness Accountability Project in Washington, and then in 1976, he became the national coordinator of the presidential campaign of Fred Harris, the Oklahoma Senator who outlined his plans in a paperback campaign manifesto entitled The New Populism. Harris lost out that year to Jimmy Carter, and by 1977, Hightower had taken a job as editor of The Texas Observer. His first editorial told readers, “You’re in for a heavy dose of populism,” and then stated, in a phrase I would hear him repeat in many speeches over the coming years, “The central fact of economic and political life in Texas is that too few people control all the money and power, leaving the rest of us with very little of either.”
It was Hightower’s election as agriculture commissioner in 1982 that made many of us think there was a future for an assertive updated populism in the Texas Democratic Party. He was the most popular of statewide Democrats on the ballot that year, winning with almost 62 percent of the vote. He used the power he gained: finding ways in his two terms to assist small family farmers, bringing environmental concerns into the pesticide-laden world of agribusiness, and even upsetting the cattle industry with a program to promote hormone-free beef. Watching this kind of practical, reform-minded governance immersed me in a politics that seemed less ideologically rigid, less abstract, than the campus radicalism I’d recently left behind.
After Hightower was reelected in 1986, he began to get national attention. Harry Reasoner narrated a friendly profile on 60 Minutes in March of 1987. “With a new depression in farm country,” Reasoner intoned, “Hightower has emerged as a leading spokesman for the national Democratic Party on farm issues, and as the leading critic of Ronald Reagan’s farm policy.” Texas columnist Molly Ivins commented: “He’s a very effective politician, one of the best I’ve ever seen.” Reasoner speculated that “Hightower seems to be headed for a bigger political future.”
It was not to be. Hightower was narrowly defeated in a bid for reelection in 1990 by Rick Perry, a West Texas legislator who in the previous year had switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party, guided by Karl Rove, the ambitious, Austin-based political consultant who would go on to steer George W. Bush to the governorship four years later, and then to the White House in 2000. After the 1990 defeat, Hightower soldiered on, producing syndicated radio commentary, making speeches, writing books and a newsletter, and operating as the keeper of the flame of traditional Texas populism. But ever since Bush defeated one-term governor Ann Richards in 1994, Texas Democrats have not won the governorship, or much of anything else.
Since I left Texas, I’ve never stopped wondering why some kind of new populism inspired by the old populism doesn’t rise up and propel a phalanx of reform-minded Democrats to power. If Democrats are ever going to stand up to the militant form of Republicanism that has seized control of Texas government, isn’t there something about the spirit of the Lampasas farmers that could guide them? Is it even possible that Texas could once again turn blue? I wondered what it would be like to go to Lampasas and find someone who understood the history of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party and could connect it to the dismal state of things in Texas today. So, I got in touch with Jim Hightower, who at eighty-one continues to agitate from his South Austin house, and asked him if he knew of a politics-savvy rancher or farmer out in Lampasas. Of course he did. And that is how I ended up, one morning in May, having a long discussion at the Alamo Coffee Cafe, right across from the Lampasas Beer Barn, with a youthful man in a cowboy hat named Clayton Tucker.
Running Against the Wind
Tucker met me in the uniform one might expect: jeans, boots, dun-colored Wrangler shirt, and a broad-brimmed hat that stayed on throughout our meeting. He is a part-time rancher and a part-time activist. He takes care of the Lampasas ranch that was once run by his grandfather but also holds a day job working for a labor-funded nonprofit called Trade Justice Education Fund. Starting in 2018, he worked for a couple years for Our Revolution Texas, an organizing effort that sprung from the ashes of the first Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. Hightower was directing Our Revolution Texas at the time, and for Tucker, who is now thirty-three, it was a formative experience. He calls it “my teeth-cutting job.” As he led a statewide campaign to push for better health care funding, he learned from watching Hightower, since they were in the same office a few days a week. He remembers thinking, “OK, this is how it’s done. This is how you work it. This is how you write; this is how you communicate.”
The People’s Party did not survive much beyond 1900, and over the next several decades, populism became more and more disconnected from the history of those who invented the word.
In 2020, he took a risk and ran for state senate against an incumbent Republican. The senate district included more than a dozen mostly rural counties to the west and northwest of Austin. Lampasas County, Tucker’s base, is heavily Republican, voting about 78 percent for Donald Trump in both 2016 and in 2020. Most of the other counties in the district were similar. Tucker lost to Senator Dawn Buckingham, 70 percent to 30 percent. “She ran as ‘100 percent pro-life,’ pro-gun and pro-business,” and emphasized her votes for spending to secure the Texas border, according to the Abilene Reporter News.
Tucker had hoped he’d be able to focus the campaign on economic issues, and that’s still where he thinks the Democratic Party has a chance to connect with rural voters. As he told me about the current state of the farm and ranch economy in Texas, he spoke about the ways monopoly power takes its toll. He said his ranch work is mostly raising goats. The problem with cattle now is that the beef industry is being “chickenized,” he said. “The chicken industry is the perfect example of what monopolization can do. I mean, there’s just four corporations that control the entire thing. And when we say control the entire thing, we mean the entire thing. They tell you what chickens to have, where you can keep them, what to feed them, when to feed them.” As the cattle industry heads in that direction, a small rancher can’t compete. As of now, that’s not the case with goats; the business remains “fairly unmonopolized,” he said, and the demand for goat meat has grown steadily over recent years.
When we met, Tucker had been working with the Texas Democratic Party to expand its platform statement about agriculture policy. As part of the Texas Progressive Caucus, “we’re working to rebuild the Texas Democratic Party,” he said. I recounted for him what I’d seen in those halcyon days of the 1980s, when Democrats were still winning statewide elections. I asked how he understands the plight of the Democrats since the 1990s.
“The short answer is, we shot ourselves in the foot,” he said. The long answer involved a strategy going back to Nixon to turn the South into Republican territory. In the aftermath of the civil rights era, Republicans exploited white resentment and set in motion the partisan realignment that, in the case of Texas, seemed to happen gradually, and then suddenly. “Once they started getting a little bit of power,” he said, “the first thing the Republicans did is they started cutting off Democratic forms of power.” He noted that in the 1980s, Democratic candidates could usually count on financial support from the unions and from the state’s trial lawyers. But by the mid-1990s, Republicans had “kneecapped the unions, and they kneecapped the trial lawyers. That was part of their Southern Strategy, going after our keys of power and taking them out one by one.” And using their control of the legislature, the governorship, and the courts, they also solidified their power by gerrymandering Congressional and legislative districts after the 2000 and 2010 census.
At the same time, Tucker believes, Democrats became accustomed to “a culture of infighting.” For a long time, Democrats in the South didn’t face Republican opposition; the battles were in Democratic primaries. Even now, Tucker said, “I’ve seen Democrats more viciously attack each other than I’ve seen them go after Republicans. I thoroughly believe that if Democrats in Texas, as well as probably most of the South, fought Republicans as hard as we fight each other, Texas would already be purple.”
All of that sounded plausible enough, but it was an anecdote from Tucker’s state senate campaign that, for me, dramatized what even the most articulate populists are up against. Tucker described a conversation he had when he was working the phone banks one evening: “I called this guy. And we had this really long conversation. He was a Republican, and he let me know that from the beginning.” But it turned out they found a lot of agreement on economic matters—on the problem of monopolistic corporations, especially. “We agreed to disagree on social issues. Because it’s like, well, if you’re conservative, that’s OK. You know, live your life the best way you want to live it, just don’t impose it on others.” But at the end of the call, the voter was unmoved. He declared that any Democratic candidate was just going to go along with the party’s leadership, no matter what, and hung up the phone.
After his campaign, Tucker was left with no illusions about how hard it is to break through with rural voters, even when you find common ground on economic populism. “The propaganda machine on the right is so powerful,” he said. “I’m trying to think of a single person I’ve talked to in this area who is not an economic populist. I think everyone, every rancher, every person I talked to is economically populist. They’re just socially conservative, and they ended up falling into the Republican camp.” Still, he holds a conviction that Democrats need to keep holding conversations and running strong candidates in rural Texas. The state is much more urban than it used to be, but the party probably can’t win without at least improving its margins in farm and ranch country.
A Rootin’ Tootin’ Cowtown
When I asked Tucker what kind of awareness exists today in Lampasas about the history of the populist movement, he mentioned the Lampasas County Museum but doubted there would be anything on the origins of the Farmers’ Alliance. I decided to drive over to the museum to find out. Lampasas has a small historic district; the museum is a tidy building on a quiet street three blocks off the main commercial thoroughfare.
They know there is nothing like the original populist movement in Texas today, but they still draw inspiration from history.
When I walked in, I was met by two older women who requested that I sign the guest book. We got to talking. I told them I was wondering if the museum had any materials related to the Farmers’ Alliance. They looked at me blankly, then looked at each other and shrugged. The history of the area that people talk about, one volunteer suggested, was of wild frontier violence and rowdiness. “This was a rootin’ tootin’ cowtown—we had shoot-outs!” she said.
At that point, a woman came through the front door, and the volunteers lit up. They introduced me to Carol Wright, whose family went back several generations in Lampasas. She knew about the Farmers’ Alliance. But, she said, “I doubt that half the people in this town know about it,” even though there is a historical marker out on the highway near the site of the first Alliance meeting. Wright, too, turned my attention to the more storied history of Lampasas in the decades after the Civil War. She described the conflict between the Higgins family and the Horrell family that led to shootings and deaths in the 1870s. “It was over stolen cattle, of course, and cut fences,” she said.
Wright guided me to a local history on Lampasas by Bill O’Neal that devotes a chapter to the “Horrell-Higgins Feud.” O’Neal describes the moment in January of 1877 when Pink Higgins walked into a Lampasas saloon and shot Merritt Horrell point blank. He connects the cattle rustling to the political organizing that followed: “In September 1877 a group of frustrated farmers and small ranchers met at a one-room frame schoolhouse on Donaldson Creek about nine miles northwest of Lampasas.” They decided to form the “Knights of Reliance,” then soon changed the name to the Farmers’ Alliance.
O’Neal also explains what became of that “frame schoolhouse”: “The historic little school was taken by rail to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and dismantled. Plank by plank, piece by piece, shingle by shingle, the building was sold for souvenirs.” So, you can’t go the old schoolhouse to commune with the spirit of Lampasas populists. Still, I wanted to get as close as I could. On a drizzly Saturday afternoon, I drove the nine miles northwest out of town on Highway 190, passing rolling hills and ridges, the occasional ranch gates, and scrubby land dotted with live oak trees and wildflowers. This is a place, Texas historian Gregg Cantrell writes, where three physiographic regions meet: the Edwards Plateau, the Blackland Prairie, and the Western Cross Timbers. It is part of what’s called the “shatterbelt” of Texas, “an ecological and cultural transition zone where the South meets the West but neither regional pattern dominates.”
I pulled over near the historical marker, as cars and trucks sped by. In the field behind, about a hundred yards back, stands a gigantic cellphone tower, held up by multiple cables. The tower mars the view and keeps the visitor in the present, though the marker attempts to conjure, in a mere one hundred words, the significance of an event in the distant past. It notes that the Farmer’s Alliance in Texas “was begun by John R. Allen on Donaldson Creek” one mile to the south and that “it became one of the strongest arms of the national reform movement of the era.”
Driving off, I thought about how transformed the nation was from the agrarian era. Almost half of employed people in the United States worked in agriculture during the 1880s. By 1969, when that marker went up, it was down to 4.4 percent. Now it’s about 1 percent. Does any of that long-forgotten history of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party still matter? I knew of at least one person who would insist it does: Jim Hightower. I had made an appointment to meet with him in Austin.
Where Were the Democrats?
The next day, driving south, I watched the countryside fade away and turn to suburban sprawl. Texas loves to build highways, and you always encounter half-built new segments of cloverleaf interchanges, twisting up into the sky, waiting for a connection. The state continues to grow rapidly—around 1.6 million new residents arrived in the first three years of this decade, according to the Texas Demographic Center—and about two-thirds of the state’s population of 30.3 million people live in the four major urban areas: Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin.
“We have fifty counties with no Democratic Party chair in it, much less a committee,” Hightower said.
With that kind of population growth, new development is unrelenting. You can’t move through urban space in Texas without knowing that people are here to make money, and a lot of people are getting rich. The populists’ Omaha Platform of 1892 spoke of “the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.” Today we have the unhoused, living in the shadow of millionaires and billionaires. But at the same time, there is the mass of people who have their little slice of middle-class prosperity. Driving around Austin, it seemed like every neighborhood that used to be rundown, or considered the barrio, is now gentrified.
One such area is Travis Heights in South Austin. That’s where I found Jim Hightower on a Tuesday afternoon, in the modest one-story house he’s lived in for almost fifty years. I walked up his front sidewalk, admiring his somewhat overgrown front yard, just as he was walking out. It had been more than twenty years since I’d seen him. He was dressed all in denim and had sandals on instead of cowboy boots. Without his trademark Resistol cowboy hat, I could see that his hair is hardly any thinner than it ever was and still dark brown. He ushered me inside and offered me a beer.
We sat on his screen porch, which looks out over a backyard that has a single mulch path curving through trees and shrubs, like a tiny forest. He recalled that when he and his longtime partner Susan DeMarco moved to Austin in 1977 and bought this house for $20,000, the neighborhood drew mostly Mexican Americans and hippies. Now it’s one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the city, full of multimillion-dollar properties. For the last six years, he’s been living here alone: DeMarco died in 2018 at age seventy-five. She had been with him since the Washington, D.C., days and was an essential collaborator on most of the work he did. Now Hightower has two full-time employees, who help him with his travel, social media, and newsletter production (forty thousand subscribers, he told me)—which is fortunate, since he still does his writing in longhand and avoids computer technology as much as possible.
As many times as I’ve interviewed Hightower over the years or listened to his speeches, I’d never had a chance to sit and have an unhurried conversation with him. He showed me the college textbook he had at the University of North Texas, which first introduced him to the word populism—a 1963 edition of A History of the United States Since 1865, edited in part by T. Harry Williams, who later wrote the definitive biography of Louisiana populist Huey Long. When we worked our way to the 1970s, Hightower recalled liberal Democrat Sissy Farenthold’s losing gubernatorial race in 1972, which was the same year George McGovern lost to Richard Nixon. “It just looked dismal. And I remember talking to Democrats when I first began to roam around as editor of the Observer.” People told him, “Oh, we’re doomed. We can’t win. We’re losing—Texas has turned right-wing.”
He didn’t think Democrats were doomed if they could forge a “progressive coalition.” The legislature was still in the hands of Democrats. The office of the lieutenant governor, which by virtue of presiding over the state senate is considered to be more powerful than the governorship itself, had not been occupied by a Republican for more than one hundred years and was safely held by Houston Democrat Bill Hobby. Hightower believes that the ticket he ran on in 1982 “only worked because we decided we would be together. We weren’t running to, say, elect a treasurer of the state of Texas. We were saying ‘elect a government.’ We’re running together. We actually campaigned together and had sort of a pact that we’d share information and campaign as a unit. And sure enough, we did. And everybody won.”
But then what? By the end of the 1990s, I said, it was like a neutron bomb went off, obliterating Democrats. Was it just the delayed reaction of white voters who had been gradually migrating, all across the South, to the Republican Party? Was it inevitable that the Southern Strategy would bring this exodus?
“Well, then, where were the Democrats?” Hightower responded. Why did the party not move to relentlessly increase the turnout among black and brown voters? He recalled an Austin activist who did an election study toward the end of the 1980s. He found that if the Democrats targeted voters in about a dozen South Texas counties who turned out for presidential elections but not the off-year elections and then increased that turnout by 5 percent, “we would win every statewide race.” The South Texas region overall is about 84 percent Hispanic, skews younger than the rest of the state, and was long a Democratic stronghold. But when Hightower and Mauro pushed that strategy to the state party’s leaders, the answer was “No, no, we’re not gonna do that. We’re gonna put money on television. That’s how you win elections.” The Democrats began to lose their connection to retail politics in the areas most important to their future. “That’s the essence of it. And so people quit voting.” I had heard the same thinking from Clayton Tucker, who said there are effectively three parties in Texas: the Republicans, the Democrats, and the nonvoters.
I asked Hightower what a candidate like Tucker can do when he’s running in a district that is so heavily Republican. One road an ambitious rural Democrat can take, he said, is to run statewide. Hightower said he’s been dropping Tucker’s name as a potential candidate for agriculture commissioner. “But it can’t be just him—we need to have two or three more good, solid, serious progressive candidates.” Beto O’Rourke found that out when he ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2022, Hightower added. There needs to be a structure, so that one campaign builds on another. “I mean, luckily with Clayton, he’s not easily deterred. He knew what he was up against, and he was alone to try to make that race. Nobody in the statewide party or Democratic constituency rushed out to support him. So that’s not the way to run, that’s not the way to have a progressive movement in a state like Texas.” The potential movement Hightower envisions relies on black and Mexican American voters, “but also just old-time FDR, white Democrats.” That means running strong in the cities and suburbs, but also cutting into Republican majorities in rural counties. But Democrats seem to have written many of those rural counties off. “We have fifty counties with no Democratic Party chair in it, much less a committee,” Hightower said.
It’s often been observed that few leaders who are branded as populists embrace that description. Hightower was one of the rare politicians who proudly did, and he has labored to stay connected to the early meaning of the word. Toward the end of our conversation, I observed that he uses the word progressive as much as populist these days. He agreed but added, “I also say democratic populism.” Because the word is used so often in a disparaging manner, “I recognize that I’ve got to qualify it, so people can hear it in a different way.”
Who Will Find the People?
Lawrence Goodwyn closes his book with a chapter called “The Irony of Populism.” Suffice it to say, there are many. One irony that dogged me in my recent travels in Texas was this: if I were to canvass the state speaking only to “the plain people” asking them whether populism holds any promise in Texas today, I would probably get a lot of blank stares. What does the question even mean? It’s one thing to ask whether the rhetoric of old-style populism could revive the prospects of the Democratic Party. It’s another to ask whether a new populist movement—multiracial, rural and urban—could press for a fairer economy and an inclusive democracy and win enough people to overpower the white supremacist politics that drives Trumpism. The stakes could hardly be higher: if Texas Democrats could somehow start winning again, if the case against Trump Republicanism could be won here, the Republicans would almost certainly be unable to win the White House. Without Texas, they are sunk.
Is it even possible that Texas could once again turn blue?
And yet, of course, the giant elephant in the room is that Republicans hold Texas because they have developed an electoral strategy that claims to speak for the ordinary people—presumed to be God-fearing, gun-loving, and immigrant-hating. In their cosmology, “the elites” are not their billionaire funders, or the corporate fat cats, or the libertarian-oriented tech sector but university-educated, Cabernet-sipping liberal Democrats, regardless of how much political or economic power the latter actually hold. In these times, we have to speak of a “right-wing populism” and a “left-wing populism.” In a critique in n+1 of Chantal Mouffe’s 2018 book For a Left Populism, Thea Riofrancos made the key distinction: “Right-wing populism prefers the masses atomized, individualized, and alienated from their political power, with their collective agency projected onto a leader and their ire misdirected away from the ruling class. Left-wing populism results from and reinforces bonds of solidarity among a historic bloc of the oppressed allied against a shared enemy.”
The use of the word solidarity is crucial because the American people, even “the plain people,” or “the 99 percent,” have never had an inherent political unity—and now are more divided than ever. Hightower has long argued that the true dividing line in American politics is not between left and right but between top and bottom. But that, too, imagines two groups that do not cohere. In reality, there are blocs of the well-off and the “elites” who are in deep sympathy with the downtrodden, and there are too many of those at the bottom who vote against their economic interests, or don’t bother to vote at all. It’s another small irony, but a notable one, that Hightower’s populist campaigns racked up big margins not just among the poor in the Rio Grande Valley but in the prosperous liberal neighborhoods in Austin. The question isn’t one of unity but of effective coalition-building, combining bigger slices of the working class and the middle class and finding more voters who resent the relentless corporatization of everything, the vast inequalities of wealth, the efforts of the Republican Party to make it harder to vote while pushing a racist and divisive politics, and all the rest.
Hightower conceded at one point in our conversation that he has a “higher than normal—maybe higher than sane—level of optimism.” I heard a similar hopeful attitude when talking with Clayton Tucker. With Hightower, it comes from staying in touch with hardworking activists and organizers around the country. With Tucker, it’s his feeling that the Texas Progressive Caucus is beginning to move the state’s Democratic Party in a better direction. They know there is nothing like the original populist movement in Texas today, but they still draw inspiration from history. As Gregg Cantrell shows in his meticulously detailed 2020 study, The People’s Revolt, the early Texas populists saw clearly the economic powers arrayed against them and still firmly believed that reform was possible. They realized that if you are trying to motivate people to join a cause, you don’t approach them with an “all is lost” cynicism. In Goodwyn’s telling, populism broke through the “mass folkway of resignation” and “sophisticated deference” to the extent that “millions of people came to believe fervently that a wholesale overhauling of their society was going to happen in their lifetimes.”
Today, all the big guns, all the smart money, all the sophisticated consultants and cautious and conservative Democrats, and all of the now-powerful Republican machine are lined up against a new populism in Texas, just as the powerful in both parties always were lined up against the old one. As Cantrell described the core beliefs of the early Texas populists, “They shared a sense that the modern corporate order had grown disproportionately and dangerously powerful, to the point where it jeopardized the ideals of American democracy.” It wasn’t just that analysis that was explosive; it was the popular conviction, so rare in American history, that something could be done about it.