When asked by Law & Liberty if I would be interested in reviewing Lawrence Wright's new book, God Save Texas, I had mixed feelings. I greatly enjoyed two of Wright's previous books, The Looming Tower (2006) and Going Clear (2013), both deeply-researched and impressively-reported works of nonfiction. Wright's journalism also inspired the acclaimed documentary Three Identical Strangers (2018), which fascinated me. Wright is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, who happens to live in Austin, Texas (as I do), the state capital and the home of the flagship campus of the University of Texas. Wright is unquestionably a talented writer knowledgeable about his (and my) adopted state.
At the same time, I was aware that Wright is a liberal Democrat deeply disenchanted with the state's political orientation in recent decades. Wright's latest book, subtitled A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State,consists of an extended (and self-referential) meditation on the history, culture, and politics of Texas. It is also a literary memoir of sorts, as well as a recycling—somewhat disjointedly and repetitively—of some past Texas-themed articles.
I have grown familiar with the smug contempt with which many Austin progressives regard the state's conservative elected officials (and, by implication, the “unenlightened” provincial voters who support them). The scorn is reciprocated; former Texas Gov. Rick Perry used to describe Austin as “a blueberry floating in a bowl of tomato soup,” and conservatives in Texas often deride the state capital as “The People's Republic of Austin.” Texas Monthly, the Austin-based, left-leaning magazine where Wright used to work, has adopted a tone of snide condescension as its official editorial position toward ordinary Texans. Of course, many liberals in Texas reside outside of Austin as well, but dating back to the early 1960s—Billy Lee Brammer's roman a clefof political intrigue, The Gay Place, was published in 1961—Austin has served as the intellectual nucleus for the state's progressives. Austin has long aspired to be the Berkeley of Texas, and as Wright himself concedes, Austin “sees itself as standing apart from the vulgar political culture of the rest of Texas, like Rome surrounded by the Goths.”
My instinct, therefore, was that Wright's latest book would be marred by this one-sided—and narrowly-parochial—ideological perspective. My trepidation was reinforced by Kevin Williamson's brutal review of God Save Texas in the Claremont Review of Books, entitled “Austin City Limits.” (Williamson is a native of the Texas Panhandle and a UT alumnus.) Well, it turns out that my instincts were correct. God Save Texas, although undeniably well-written, is full of sanctimonious disdain for the Lone Star State—save music, food, bike riding, wildflowers, bird-watching, Big Bend National Park, and Austin itself. Wright acknowledges early on that he “could [not] have lasted in Texas if it were the same place [he] grew up in,” and has considered leaving since re-settling here in 1980, as if the state should be grateful that he deigned to stay. But the changes are not all good, either.
Wright bemoans “ugly” suburban sprawl, endless “cruddy” strip malls, and truck stops (especially the Buc-ee's chain), as though these things are unique to Texas, and maintains a book-length sneer at the Lone Star State: “Texas has nurtured an immature political culture that has done terrible damage to the state and to the nation”; the 1960 movie The Alamo, starring John Wayne, was “our creation myth”; the Texas Revolution, which led to independence from Mexico in 1836, was marred by the “original sin” of slavery; fracking, which has made the U.S. the world's leading oil producer, is a “dark bounty”; the state legislature “is slavishly devoted to the oil-and-gas industry”; the state's boom-and-bust economy is “a civilization built on greed and impermanence”; and the legacy of the Confederacy is “shameful.” Austin liberals forever pine after one-term Governor Ann Richards and the spiteful partisan “humorist” Molly Ivins (both departed); Wright predictably follows suit.
The trite, mean-spirited clichés continue: Wright presumes that racism accounts for the differing fortunes of major league pitchers Nolan Ryan and J.R. Richard, briefly teammates on the Houston Astros; the state's political leadership “is far more right wing than the general population”; opposition to the climate change agenda is due to “abject submission to the oil and gas industry”; rugged individualism is a “myth”; Wright compares Texas's lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, whom he openly loathes, to Infowars conspiracy maven Alex Jones, and claims, on purely partisan grounds, that “the Texas Patrick seeks to create is one of exclusion.” Wright falsely maintains that Dallas at the time of JFK's assassination in 1963 was a city “where there were scarcely any Democrats,” even though the mayor at the time was a Democrat (as were virtually all elected officials in Texas, including the then-governor, John Connally).
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