gracchusdixit

The Governor of Texas recently announced that the Texas State Guard—not to be confused with its National Guard, which has certain, inconvenient entanglements with the federal government—is being called out to “monitor” a military training exercise which the Pentagon intends to conduct in several southwestern states.  He provided the following rationale: “It is important for Texans to know that their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights, and civil liberties will not be infringed.”  Infringed by whom?  By the federal government, of course.

This bizarre proclamation came in response to a feverish conspiracy theory now making the rounds of our country’s lunatic fringe, the claim that the federal government is getting ready to impose martial law and, as part of this devious plan, is building a series of secret detention centers buried—if you can believe it—in tunnels beneath a handful of abandoned Walmart stores stretching from California to Oklahoma.

There are certainly many reasons to view the actions of the federal government (or any level of government, for that matter) with a skeptical and watchful eye.  If we needed any further demonstration of this, we got it when Edward Snowden exposed the illegal and sweeping surveillance activities of the National Security Agency.  But a plot hatched by Walmart and the Pentagon to lock up the gun-toting patriots of Texas?  This eruption of paranoia raises the hysteria jump bar  a couple of notches higher than anything we have seen before.

Let it be said that Texas is not the only loony state in our wonderfully loony union.  In the Great, Crazy State of Alabama, the Chief Justice is an evangelical wing-nut who got kicked out of office for trying to install a monument of the ten commandments in the state capitol, was promptly reelected, and immediately required Alabama judges to defy the federal courts by refusing to recognize same-sex marriages.  In the Great, Crazy State of Tennessee, the House of Representatives recently voted to designate the bible as their state’s “official book,” to complement its “official bird,” its “official fish,” and, for all I know, its “official rock”.  In the Great, Crazy State of Mississippi, almost a third of GOP voters not very long ago told pollsters they would support a law criminalizing interracial marriage, which just happens to have been declared unconstitutional 40 years ago.  And in the Great, Crazy State of Louisiana, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan may soon be running for Congress—again.  There is, in short, plenty of craziness to go around.

Still, Texas is in a class all by itself.  The lunacy of Texas, like the sheer size of the state, is uniquely gargantuan.  This cries out for an explanation.

I think it may be that the worst aspects of our national experience all converge in Texas as they do nowhere else.  Southern racism.  Secessionist defiance.  The delusional fairy tale of the western frontier and “rugged pioneers”.  A pathological obsession with guns.  And of course, the unholy and corrupting influence of Big Oil and all its billions.  They all come together, to an unrivaled degree, in Texas.

Then, there is all that self-aggrandizing mythology.

For 13 years in the early 19th century, Texas was a separate Republic, having declared its independence from Mexico, which had won its own independence from Spain a generation earlier.  Texans today—as least “Anglo” Texans—look back upon this time as an heroic age, in which courageous patriots struggled against all odds to win their freedom.  The ultimate symbol of this struggle is the Alamo, where in 1836 several hundred “Texians” were defeated and killed by an invading Mexican army.

The reality is less heroic.  The so-called “Texas Revolution” was in fact a brutal land grab by slave-owning whites.  The government of Mexico had outlawed slavery, and the “heroes” of Texas were quite correctly worried that they were about to lose their human property.  Their ultimate victory led not only to the preservation and expansion of slavery, it also led to the massacre of thousands of Native Americans who not surprisingly thought they might be better off under a Mexican administration.  This, needless to say, is not how John Wayne told the tale in his 1960 movie, arguably the most lavish and expensive  propaganda film ever made.  Unfortunately, most contemporary “Texians” have swallowed the propaganda.

Last but not least, there is the physical reality of Texas itself, as bleak and colorless a landscape as the mind can imagine: 800 miles long, 800 miles wide, larger than France, almost twice the size of Germany, nearly 270,000 square miles of…nothing.  No wonder Texas is so crazy.  If you lived in such a place, you’d go crazy too.

The stunning results of this week’s national election in the United Kingdom were eerily similar to those of our own mid-term elections last fall.  Pollsters in both countries predicted close races, with uncertain outcomes.  In the U.S., it was never expected that Democrats could retake the House, but it seemed entirely possible that they might retain, even expand, their majority in the Senate.  That didn’t happen.  In the U.K., the Conservatives seemed to be on the verge of disaster, and it was widely predicted that they, even with their coalition partners the Liberal Democrats in tow, might not be able to retain a majority, leading to months of post-election chaos.  That didn’t happen, either.  Defying all predictions, the Conservatives won outright, winning a slim majority all on their own.  The Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, were decimated, while the Labour Party lost ground nearly everywhere, causing the leaders of both parties to promptly resign.

What happened?

For one thing, the pollsters in Britain got the election wildly wrong, just as pollsters here got it wrong last November, failing to foresee that voters on the right would come out in droves while those on the left would stay home, unconvinced that the Liberal Democrats or Labour offered clear, credible alternatives.

There was, however, one exception to this pattern—an exception that took everyone by surprise.  It occurred in Scotland.  There, left-leaning voters did indeed turn out, but instead of turning out for Labour, they swept the Scottish National Party into power.  Until this election, Scotland had been a Labour stronghold.  No more.  Of 59 Scottish seats in the British House of Commons, the SNP now holds 56, a result that stunned even the leaders of the SNP itself.

Just eight months ago, the SNP demanded, and got, a referendum to test the idea of Scottish independence.  That idea was soundly defeated.  In the wake of that defeat, many concluded that the Scottish National Party was finished, along with its dream of an independent Scotland.   Just seconds after the latest election results became clear, however, pundits in the U.K. rushed to a new conclusion: that the desire for independence was about to enjoy a comeback.

But another, more significant, factor is at play.  The Scottish National Party stands for something a good deal more threatening than political independence.  It stands for an entirely different social and political philosophy.

Scotland has its own Parliament; of the 129 seats in that Parliament, only 12 are held by Tories.  Scotland has its own version of Britain’s National Health System, one that is more comprehensive, and many would say, more effective, than its English counterpart.  Indeed, the Scots have more in common with the egalitarian Scandinavians than with the governing elite in Westminster, simpering in their upper-class accents and strutting in their bespoke suits.  The Scots are quite simply tired of being lectured to by such people.  They are tired of five years of “austerity” that have done little to restore the U.K.’s economic health and nothing whatever to benefit a majority of the British people.

In the cushy suburbs surrounding London, where the Tories hold sway, the Scots are routinely dismissed as spongers and welfare drones.  In Scotland itself, the relentless accumulation of wealth by the privileged few is despised as selfish Darwinian greed.  The stunning victory of the SNP is a reflection of this fundamental divide.

The irony in all this is that the idea of free-market capitalism to which the Tories are so devoted was invented by Adam Smith, a Scot to his fingertips.  However, Smith understood what the Tories seem to have forgotten: the market only works when it is channeled by what he called the “moral sentiments” of common decency, human kindness, and social obligation.  Ignore these sentiments, and we are left with an amoral monstrosity, with a market, not a nation.  Smith’s modern-day devotees in London, Washington, and Brussels may have forgotten his warning, but his fellow Scots have not.

In the wake of this election, Prime Minister David Cameron vowed to govern a “United Kingdom”.  Despite his victory, this quintessential child of the elite is in for a tough time, because the British people are less united than they have been in three centuries.  Whether the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland survives as a political entity remains to be seen. It is sadly clear that it ceased to be a united society long ago.