COVID and the Texas Way

The news from Texas this week is grim. COVID numbers are spiking and hospitals are running out of beds. The governor, Greg Abbott, has put a call out for doctors and nurses from less overwhelmed states to come in and help.

And yet....

The same governor has been trying to prevent local governments and schools from enacting mask and vaccine mandates. It seems like complete madness, as if a sea captain's ship had a hole in it and he was refusing to let his sailors bail out the water engulfing the hold.

How to explain this contradiction, other than being the result of a fit of madness?

I lived in Texas for three years and some of my dearest friends reside there, so I still feel invested in the state I left ten years ago. (For example, I have traveled back a few times and even subscribe to Texas Monthly!) What we are seeing here is the typical outcome of the Texas Way.

Texas' economy is fundamentally extractionary. The state would be a giant, less fertile Alabama if not for its oil deposits. However, it doesn't just extract and use up resources, it extracts and uses up people. When I worked as a professor at a regional state university I was struck at how poorly prepared my students were compared to a similar institution where I had taught in Michigan. I soon discovered that the state had some of the lowest education outcomes in the country. Some of my students were aware that they had been shortchanged, and were in fact pretty mad about it.

Despite having low test scores and high drop out rates, the Texas economy attracts high tech industry. It does so with lots of land to build on, and with low taxes to lure in those companies. Those businesses then attract highly educated and skilled workers, who have been educated in other states (and countries) where the governments actually bothered to fund education. I noticed a situation (which I was actually a part of) where northern states with higher taxes created the skilled workers poached by Texas' low tax, anti-labor policies. If Texas had to rely on the products of its own education system there would be no technology hub in Austin.

When these skilled and educated workers arrive in Texas, however, they must live under the boot of a ridiculously reactionary state government, one that attacks trans kids, lights its hair on fire about "critical race theory," and currently bans local governments from mitigating COVID. The newcomers might generally be more progressive than "Texas natives" but their numbers keep a stranglehold on the political system. To get elected to state office you have to be a Republican, and to win the Republican primary you have to be the most awful troglodyte possible. 

Now is the time to note that Texas draws a labor pool from south of the border, one that doesn't get to vote in elections. The state's Democrats have also done a horrible job of outreach with those Latinos who are eligible to vote, too. They have spent a lot of time just assuming they will get those voters, and have failed miserably. They don't seem to have a plan, or even a nominee for governor next year.

Texas conservatives like Abbott are thus used to outsourcing the training and education of their laborers to other states, and to treat the poor already in Texas with complete contempt. That explains the contradiction between Abbott asking for outside nurses at fraying hospitals while refusing to let public schools mask up when private schools can. The Texas Way is deadly, from gun deaths to people freezing to death to COVID, but I don't see any signs of it changing.