Texas Stands Alone

[Onkel Neal]

And we wouldn't have no nother way

Don’t Mess With Texas

What Gov. Rick Perry's hard-right turn says about America in the age of Obama
165 years after it joined the U.S., Texas remains forever ruggedly individualistic

These days, people leave California—seemingly ungovernable, staggering under taxes and debt—and come to Texas. More people moved to Texas than any other state between 2008 and 2009, a time when Texas somehow avoided the worst of the Great Recession. "I'm willing to tell anyone that will listen that the land of opportunity still exists in America, and it's in Texas," Perry declared on the campaign trail last fall as he was on his way to crushing his opponent in the Republican primary, U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. Once thought to be a political powerhouse in Texas, strongly backed by the Bush dynasty, Hutchison was fatally tarnished by her ties to Washington.

But not a few Texans wish the past to be their future—if only Rick Perry can show the way. As these people see it, America is turning into a multicultural hodgepodge, sapped of moral strength, run by government bureaucrats. But Texas, they believe, is different and always has been. "We don't want to become like them," says Shuck Donnell, general manager of Coyote Lake Feedyard in Muleshoe, Texas. (By "them" he means people living in big metropolitan areas, especially on the East Coast.) "Out here, we're the kind of people where if the world fell apart, we would still eat. I would hate to be living in an apartment in New York City…People think that meat comes from a Styrofoam tray."

"Governor Goodhair"