Texas Observer readers,
Three months into a second Trump administration, nearly a decade into the Trump era, more than a decade into the Greg Abbott era, and 22 harrowingly long years into the GOP’s unilateral control of Texas government, the forces of political progress in our state find themselves somewhere between stasis, retrenchment, and the abyss.
There just isn’t much right now to prop up either cheap short-term optimism (backlash midterm) or grander narratives (demographic destiny). One may say the game has been rigged, but a critical mass of the state’s voters have simply continued to empower a party that’s been in control so long that its abandoned principles have abandoned principles, so long that charges of hypocrisy have no stable ground on which to land.
