The Great(er) Divide
I’m never moving back to Texas. That’s a problem for Texas. And Russia. And Alabama. And …
“People are too various to be treated so lightly.” – James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (h/t KYE)
I grew up in North Texas and went to college in Austin before spending time in Iowa, Tokyo, and now, New York. Leaving Texas was a psychological as well as professional necessity for me after nearly two decades of being surrounded by the bitterness and hostility of the people in charge there.
I’ll share just one anecdote. When I was 12 or 13 years old, I loved to ride my bike. But in the Fort Worth suburbs where I grew up, there were no sidewalks along a few major, car-packed thoroughfares that I had to navigate to get where I wanted to go. So I would pretty often ride along the edge of the street rather than risk death.
One day when I was (probably) on the way to some Nerd Store or another, a red pickup truck occupied by two red-faced guys in cowboy hats sped past me as I rode. The driver stuck his head out the window and, with a malice so terrifying I remember it three decades later, screamed: “Get off of their lawn!”
I’m sure it could happen anywhere, but having grown up there, trust me that this is a sterling encapsulation of a large part of Texas politics and culture: enraged screaming in defense of private property over a child’s attempt to navigate an inadequate system as best they can.
A Brief Interruption For Something Fun! The Nerd Store I was riding to when I got harassed by those rednecks was probably a tabletop gaming store. I’ve recently launched a game company and our first project is on Kickstarter for five more days. It’s called Encounters for Dark Cities and it’s a small zine with material for grimdark roleplaying in D&D and similar systems. It's written by yours’ truly, so if you enjoy this newsletter and that sounds at all up your alley, please support us for as little as $5. You’ll also be supporting this newsletter!
This and similar experiences were not, to be clear, because I am black or gay or disabled or any of the other groups who I’m sure got it, and continue to get it, vastly worse than I ever did. I am straight, white, and tall, with an only vaguely potato-shaped and -textured head. But I also happen to like books and thinking, and what’s probably worse, I wear glasses. That’s enough to threaten a lot of folks in certain regions of this country. I’ve never identified with a joke more than I do with fellow Texan Bill Hicks’ “What you readin’ for?” bit, because that was basically every day in Texas, even in a big city.
Still, I had great hopes for Texas until very recently. My wife and I are planning on having kids soon, and my parents and siblings still live in Texas. I had held out a vague idea that maybe circumstances would allow us to move back, even just for a while, to be closer to my brothers and parents. The rise of more progressive politics during the early 2010s made that seem more plausible, if still not exactly ideal. And worst case, Austin would always be there.
Well, so long to all that. The fundamental meanness and stupidity of Texas’ perennially conservative politics and culture have roared back in the Super Saian far-right form of SB8’s absolutely stunning cuts to abortion rights. There’s also the thoroughly insane ban on teaching about race in public schools, and the recent trans bill is somehow even more Orwellian, offering incentives to harass those who refuse to comply with social norms. Austin is also basically cooked as a haven, as I’m sure the arrival of people like Elon Musk has reignited the Ron Paul libertarian hippiedom that was so invigorating 20 years ago but has now thoroughly curdled into just another flavor of hatred and know-nothingism.
So no, we sure as hell won’t be moving back to Texas, buying a house, or working for local businesses. That’s notable because I am quite plausibly one of the (picking a random number) fifty most informed and deep thinkers about the emerging cryptocurrency industry on the planet right now. That’s knowledge of a growing and exciting business sector that is simply gone from Texas because of its rising politics of viciousness and stupidity. But every person who makes the decision not to move to Texas, or to leave, is depriving the state of something, and a lot of people are going to be making that decision in the coming years.
Bobos in Paradise, Again
This is nothing new – brain drain from various U.S. backwaters to major metros was a serious concern back in the nineties and oughts. Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class (2002) and David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise (2001) were a particularly well-matched set of works highlighting the desire of top creative performers for certain amenities, among them a generally liberal social politics. Consciously or not, those insights likely shaped the “compassionate conservatism” of George W. Bush and Rick Perry’s governorships – a performance far more than a policy, but a tacit acknowledgment that people so ignorant they equate homosexuality with pedophilia probably aren’t smart enough to run that great of an economy, either.
But the recent Trump-fueled wave of brazenly fascistic policies, in Texas and elsewhere, thrusts that understanding away with great force. It is going to rekindle out-migration pressure on young Texans who don’t want to have careers and raise a family in the Republic of Gilead. This time, it’s going to be even worse – for Texas in particular, but also for everyone else. Because brain drain in 2021 does not look like brain drain in 1993.
For instance, Texas’ SB8 abortion bill is making it harder for tech companies to recruit. Two-thirds of surveyed recent graduates say Texas’ abortion policy would discourage them from taking work there. I’ve heard this described lately as a kind of inverse “Atlas Shrugged,” with the liberals and leftists increasingly choosing to leave the hillbillies to their own sloppy, degenerate devices.
The same thing that’s happening in Texas is also happening in Russia, for even more extreme but structurally similar reasons. Evidence is necessarily anecdotal, but the war on Ukraine appears to have triggered an exodus of professionals and intellectuals, particularly including computer developers – a long-term crippling blow to that nation’s economy.
In the case of Russia, the motives to leave are a lot stronger than in Texas, considering the tendency of full-blown autocracies to execute or imprison people with skill and knowledge. When it occupied Poland, Germany enacted what it called Intelligenzaktion, the mass murder of 100,00 Poles, most of them identified and catalogued as influential “enemies of the Reich” before the invasion even began. Russia has been much more selective in its killing and sidelining of opponents, but its impending isolation from the world could change that calculus.
It's tempting to call this all good news on a macro scale: the interconnectedness of the world seems to be structurally biased to punish obvious state-backed malfeasance with increased harshness. Freedom of information and freedom of movement, fundamentally enhanced by technology, are punishing states and polities that marginalize their most productive workers by catering to the Chuds.
Information technology like job boards and Zillow have made leaving a place like Texas for another state much easier – at least for the most privileged and talented. And the same goes for people who actually do want to live in a place like Texas – the state has enjoyed huge net in-migration in recent years, much of it predating the desire for more living space (hh) during the pandemic.
The problem for Texas is that a lot of those California transplants are going to change their minds once the realize what life is like there. This points to the real impacts of SB8, anti-trans, and anti-Black legislation: They are a softer Texan version of the Nazi’s Intelligenzaktion, a cleansing from the state of those most able to fight back or offer alternatives.
If ‘compassionate conservatism’ was theater for the David Brooks crowd, this new Texas Reich is weaponizing the ongoing social dynamics of Bill Bishop’s Big Sort. By enacting terrible policies, it is accelerating the ongoing self-segregation of Americans into politically uniform enclaves. Those able to leave will. Those unable to leave remain as the internal enemy, an endless rhetorical gift to the heretical Prosperity Gospel theocrats in charge.
The Even Bigger Sort: A Self-Inflicted Catastrophe for the U.S. South
Texas is a particularly interesting case not just because it’s where I ran away from, but because it has for years avoided the fate it’s now turning assertively towards. You can preview that fate if you look at states like Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and Kentucky.
The bottom of the U.S. GDP distribution is overwhelmingly dominated by former slave states, particularly deep-south slave states where racial antipathy was most ingrained. For perspective, the average per-capita GDP in Mississippi, the poorest U.S. state, is $35k. The average per-capita GDP in the U.S. is $58k, with random states like Nebraska ($59k) and Illinois ($62k) highlighting the dramatic failure of the Deep South as an economic proposition. The exception here is Georgia, only somewhat below average at $51k per-capita GDP – and notable for the presence of a strong Black polity.
Texas, by contrast, actually has above average income, at $62k per person, which fits the pattern that has left slave states brutally underdeveloped. Despite its well-earned reputation as a racist state full of “sundown towns,” Texas was only partly a slave state prior to the Civil War. The population of slaves there in 1861 was largely limited to the eastern part of the state, where wetter conditions made plantation slavery more economical. On a ranch, where workers are spread out by miles and relatively autonomous, slave labor just doesn’t make a ton of sense.
That’s the historical root of my fantasy of someday being able to move back to Texas. It’s plausibly a long-term reason that in 2017, Texas was experiencing no more “brain drain” than New York. I grew up thinking of Texas’ white ruling class as, yeah, very racist – but certainly less racist than Mississippi when it came to Black people, and unquestionably less racist than Arizona when it came to Latinos. I still believe the second part, at least.
Slave societies, like most totalitarian societies, are extremely profitable in the short term, but economically and socially self-destructive in the longer term. My rubric here is Heather McGee’s excellent “The Sum of Us,” an economic analysis of the white Southern retreat from the social contract that followed the end of slavery. McGee describes both the psychological and economic dynamics as the South defunded or privatized a huge proportion of public infrastructure because of white fears of having to share public facilities and services with Black people.
This is a complicated subject, because adherence to the neoliberal free-market ideology that creates such wealth in places like New York is not itself unambiguously laudable. But the continued economic failures of Deep South states can be clearly linked to the inefficiencies inherent to racial hierarchy. Texas had a long stretch in which to choose to turn away from those impoverishing dynamics, but it has instead, at least for now, leaned into them.
This choice – and it is absolutely a choice – will ultimately push away economically productive residents and send Texas, too, into the dustbin of economic history, over the course of ten to twenty years, if current politics don’t change. There will be no small help from the continuing slow death of the petroleum industry, only marginally mitigated by disruptions in Russia/Ukraine.
Lonely Russian Cowboys
I hope I don’t scandalize anyone by saying that Texas’ political leaders aren’t really thinking about those long-term consequences – they’re throwing red meat to the hounds to keep their own jobs. Greg Abbott, like most of Texas’ political leaders since Ann Richards, is largely a windsock. There’s no percentage in it for him to actually think about right and wrong, good and bad, or the human beings he is nominally responsible for cultivating and protecting.
But if they did care to see the consequences of the path they’re pursuing, Texas could simply look to Russia. The former superpower turned strongman operation is suddenly on the brink of becoming a North Korea-style pariah, if not an outright failed state. Either of these would obviously be terrible for Europe. It has already been unbelievably bad for Ukraine. But it would and will also be a nightmare for the millions of Russian professionals who have spent decades looking Westward and hoping for better.
They’re leaving en masse now, but they’ve been trickling away for decades. In the decade before 2019, about 2 million Russians, more than 1% of the Russian population and disproportionately people of means and skill, had left for Western countries. Much of the recent exodus has come in response to sanctions, but longer-term it is also a matter of political sentiment, ethics, and perhaps above all, self-preservation. Professionals and high achievers do not like being told what to do, and that’s every single day living in a dictatorship – or, in Texas, a theocracy.
The impact has been clear and brutal. Though it’s not the only factor, this brain drain has gutted the Russian economy over the last decade – ever since Putin’s 2012 return to the Presidency, confirmation that there would be no further democratic progress. Russian GDP peaked in 2013 at US $2.3 trillion, then took a dizzying plummet to $1.3 trillion in 2016. From being just slightly larger than Italy’s, Russia’s economy shrank in three years to being just slightly larger than Spain’s (which would still be a condemnation of Putinism if the latter drop had never happened).
Texas may not be looking at a disaster of similar scale, but it will rhyme. North Carolina’s infamous 2016 “Bathroom Bill” cost the state at least $3.7 billion in revenue, close to 1% of its GDP. And that number, the product of an Associated Press analysis, only included known and documented withdrawals from the state as of 2017, not knock-on effects or subsequent decisions, so the real number could be twice as big.
Putin’s political base, meanwhile, is reputedly made up largely of “babushkas,” or old ladies. These women – most of their men are dead from war and alcoholism – remember the glory days of the Soviet Union and believe that Putin can, essentially, Make Russia Great Again. They believe his fantasies like their own.
It is staggering to look at those babushkas and see the faces of MAGA wine moms. Putin’s babushkas engage in precisely the same fetishizing of Putin as a “real man” that runs implausibly rampant in Trumpy circles in the U.S. This is actually made much more comprehensible by the context, by the way – once you’ve been to Texas and looked around a bit, you might twig how Trump becomes a plausible icon of masculinity. Men there, and in most of the pro-Trump parts of the U.S., are much more likely to resemble meat-filled tubes than human beings.
That’s just one aspect of a much larger dynamic in which failing societies make their own fascist gravy. Their failure to meet the needs of citizens breeds resentments that can then be channeled towards convenient targets like trans people. Trans people make up roughly 0.3% of the U.S. population, by the way, making the demonizing and targeting of them by right-wing pols who clearly control the levers of power that much more demented and terrifying for anyone considering moving to Texas. You never know, after all, who they’ll turn on next to assuage the deficiencies of their own lives.
I’ve thought about it for many years, but there’s no better way to describe this than simply as the Politics of Stupidity. By accident or by design, Texas is pushing away its smartest and most skilled residents. The Bigger Sort will leave behind a less thoughtful, empathetic, creative, and adventurous population – the kind of people that are easy to manage and exploit for the benefit of big business.
This is also ultimately the motive for people like Peter Thiel to discourage people from attending college, or former Florida Governor Rick Scott’s attempts to denigrate and defund humanities and liberal arts education in colleges. People without critical thinking skills are simply easier to rule because they don’t have the tools to ask hard questions. They are easy to distract with fantasies and resentments about race and gender.
I certainly hope the Texan far right has overplayed its hand, though the lack of sustained outrage over SB8 for the past six months doesn’t make me very hopeful. Again, that’s kind of the point: many people who would otherwise have been pushing back don’t live in Texas anymore. And those of us who have left do have to reckon with that as a kind of abandonment – obviously there remain millions of women, people of color, and LGBTQ folks who can’t simply pull up stakes and leave.
I don’t have much of a conclusion here. It’s all very bleak, and despite the enhanced pressure caused by easier out-migration, I’m inclined to predict a continuing downward spiral of brain drain and resentment that leaves Texas more akin to Mississippi than California. That won’t happen overnight, but it’s the path the state has chosen – the same choice Russia is making.
In the next installment of Flesh/Markets, I’ll be diving into a related thorny question: Why is the far right so full of incompetents and clowns? See you then.