By Wayne Allensworth
The midterm GOP blowout has turned Texas “blue.” The only state-wide elected official is Republican Senator Ted Cruz. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. Beyond the Trump Administration’s blatant betrayal of the coalition it put together in 2024 is something few Republicans want to talk about: demographics. The last time I checked, Texas is less than 40 percent non-Hispanic white. The Democrats don’t mind gloating about the “browning” of the state because they are anti-white — or anti-“whiteness” if they are white leftists — but Republicans, terrified of being accused of “racism,” can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the truth. The “conservative values” they claim to uphold are largely Middle American values and the Constitutional liberty they claimed they were defending is an Anglo-Saxon cultural artifact. They have at least tacitly bought into the “blank-slate” theory of human nature, that “ideas” can overcome all else, including biology and deeply embedded cultural habits. Thus, the knee-jerk GOP reaction against biological males in women’s sports, but no coherent argument against it.
All the way back in the 1980’s, Wall Street Journal editor Bob Bartley touted the globalist line regarding immigration: He supported a Constitutional amendment reading “There shall be open borders.” Bartley believed, as he told former colleague Peter Brimelow, that “the nation-state is finished.” The Republican base was instinctively opposed to that, and Trump was partly a reaction against globalism. But nobody has stated the obvious: If you wish to retain an America that is a desirable place to live, that safeguards traditional notions of limited government and liberty, then preserving a European majority acculturated to Anglo-Saxon norms is necessary. Immigrants from outside that base in small numbers are no threat, but millions upon millions from groups who do not share and cannot even conceive of such concepts are a danger to all. All nation-states have ethnic cores. Russia wouldn’t be Russian without the Slavic majority, for instance. And Russians unabashedly believe they have a right to preserve a Russian homeland and Russian culture.
But America as an ideological abstraction is a dangerous narrative that took root and grew during the Cold War, which anti-Communists cast as a strictly ideological battle, not a geo-political struggle between competing great powers. The U.S. competed with the Soviet Union to see who could sell their ideological brand to the Third World, where the “brush-fire” wars of the era were fought. I have dealt with that problem elsewhere and on this website many times. Republicans abstracted America into a “free market” based on fulfilling an American Dream that was largely one of self-realization and material gain, based on the modernist attachment to “progress.” American financialized capitalism became the enemy of traditional mores and culture, of community, religion, and of the European core, reducing all questions to ones of production and consumption. We all began to think of America as a big box store or commercial enterprise whose only justification was an expanding economy and GDP growth. The people and culture that made it possible were forgotten or treated as mere inputs in an economic model — replaceable inputs. Both “conservatives” and “liberals” forgot where they came from and how we got here in the first place.
I am a native Texan. That’s at the core of my identity, which is always a multi-layered phenomenon. I am a Texan because I am an American and vice versa. But the abstracting of identity has made anybody who resides in Texas a “Texan,” which may be true in a civic sense, but not in the cultural (language, religion, shared history, a common mythology) and ethnic sense. Of course, that is not a hermetically sealed category, but a continuum of more and less, so assimilation is possible, but one cannot count on that happening without a strong core to which an immigrant can assimilate. That is not something the GOP understands, and if it did in an instinctual sense, it could not bring itself to publicly defend. Texas as we understood it was worth defending in its own right, not because of the bottom line of trans-national corporations, with “Texanness” reduced to low tax rates. But that is exactly the way the GOP treated our state.
For decades, people like the aforementioned Brimelow, who has fought the good fight for immigration control for more than 30 years, warned that the foundations of the American order were not strictly a matter of law and ideology, but of preserving the ethnic core. Erstwhile conservatives ignored and vilified him. Some of us viewed the “bluing” of Texas not so much as the result of a civil war between whites, but as one of demographic transformation. Contrary to what the GOP strategists told us, minorities overwhelmingly vote blue, instinctively seeing the GOP as an implicitly white party. No matter how much pamphleteering the GOP did, they were not “natural conservatives” in that sense. Texas became majority-minority more than 30 years ago, and I knew then it was a matter of time before the Texas I knew and loved would vanish.
That wasn’t the only factor, of course: mass culture produces homogenization of things like regional accents and colloquialisms. The old stories go untold in a digitized, incoherent multi-cultural bubble. American commercial culture has a gift for reducing identity to a brand or franchise like a sports team. Thus, the faux Texan bumper sticker culture, with boots and Stetsons mere fashion accessories. Urbanization undercut the rural and smalltown roots of “rugged individualism,” along with a way of life that upheld that ideal. All of us forgot that representative government can’t work in an environment where “we” is a polyglot conglomerate of people who can’t talk to one another or understand the cultural assumptions that underlie such a system. So, each election cycle becomes a tense do-or-die drama or at least appears to be. Some of us began to feel like museum exhibits in a Lost World display.
The only avenue for us — the Texan-American Remnant, assuming there are enough of us left who value our identity — is to build coalitions that serve the interest of preserving us as a people and culture. Donald Trump dumped the usual GOP blather and successfully built that coalition in 2024 by making the perfectly reasonable but previously largely unspoken (except for Pat Buchanan, who was ahead of his time) call for policies that benefit current American citizens. Then he blew that coalition apart by waging war on Iran on behalf of Israel. If the GOP or some successor party wants to hang on politically, it must rebuild that coalition. It can be done. Texas could swing again if the right candidates and right policies were promoted.
But here is the rub: Trump’s second term has exposed the Man Behind the Curtain — the real power structures behind the apparent ones. Your elected representatives represent those power structures more than they represent voters. Elected officials will only do for you what their financiers allow them to. AIPAC and Silicon Valley bought and paid for Trump. In 2016, a number of AIPAC mouthpieces, like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin, were “Never Trumpers.” Likewise for tech oligarchs. Silicon Valley’s technototalitarians made a pact with the Ziocons that the Trump coalition would beat the Davos variant of globalism and its representatives among the Democrats. That round of the internal elite struggle was won by the Silicon Valley/Ziocon coalition. Money is the big driver in campaigns that are ridiculously expensive, and candidates with their eye on the Main Chance will follow the money. Limits on the leverage of the Man Behind the Curtain, including public funding of elections, limits on campaign spending, and a shortened campaign season, are at least theoretically possible. There are probably other steps that could help, too, but the problem is that the people who benefit so much from the current system are the same ones who would have to adopt reforms. And I don’t know how to get past that.
Tucker Carlson has explained the “hidden architecture” of power that Trump’s actions exposed:
Maybe the petrodollar’s erosion as the global currency and the catastrophic budget deficit, as BRICS continues to grow more powerful, will cause such a debacle that we could get an opening for some unforeseen turn of events that could salvage the situation to some degree. Some good might come from the GOP blowout. It appears that the administration is hesitant to renew hostilities with Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu’s rival Gadi Eisenkot will at least attempt to form a new Israeli cabinet, again reducing the likelihood of more war. There is still the Ukraine front to consider, though Trump appears to have lost interest. People of all political persuasions are not anxious to get locked up in a digital prison. The Empire is failing. The radical “woke” wing of the Democratic party will probably have learned nothing and will overstep, turning off some of the voters who returned to their fold this time around.
We can hope.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the U.S. intelligence community.
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