I Have Seen the Future

And it is Texas? That’s what Lawrence Wright claims in his article in the New Yorker:

Texas leads the nation in Latino population growth. Latinos account for more than half the 2.7 million new Texans since 2010. Every Democrat in Texas believes that, if Latinos voted at the same rate in Texas as they do in California, the state would already be blue. “The difference between Texas and California is the labor movement,” Garnet Coleman, a Houston member of the Texas House, told me. In the nineteen-sixties, Cesar Chavez began organizing the California farmworkers into a union; that kind of movement didn’t happen in Texas, a right-to-work state. “Labor unions create a culture of voting and political participation,” Coleman observed. In Texas politics, he says, “everything is about race—it’s veiled as public policy, but it encourages people to believe that their tax dollars are going to support lazy black and brown people.” Political views have become more entrenched because of redistricting, and yet the demographic majority in Texas is far more progressive than its representatives. Coleman predicts a showdown: “This is a battle about the future of the country, based on a new majority, and we have to have this out.”

He paints a picture of Texas politics in all its garish, bizarre, contradictory glory. Read the whole thing. It’s a whole ‘nother country.

Regardless of the pretensions of the residents of both of those states, I don’t believe that the future of the United States is either California or Texas. I think it’s much more depressing. What I think is likely to happen is resegregation. Mexican-Americans will become an ever-larger proportion of the populations of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and, probably, Texas. Blacks will flee the violent dysfunctional cities of the North in a reverse Great Migration and move to Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. White flight will take the form of moving to the upper Midwest, Plains States, and mountain West. New York will become like London where in many parts of the city you need to mount an active search to find an Englishman. It will be a poorer, angrier, less egalitarian, less optimistic country.

It will more closely resemble the America of my grandparents than it will the one I expected to see in my adulthood when I was a kid. Fortunately, I won’t live to see it.