Blog Posts From The Glorious Future: How Texas Was Won
We faced terrible choices in the early days of the Great Redo. I was in charge of picking the least terrible.
“Federal law is supreme and federal law will be enforced.”
That’s what the president’s note read on that bloody Friday. And I couldn’t square it with my father’s advice, though maybe I should have.
I was ready to relent, to pull back and regroup and maybe rethink our approach to democratizing Texas. It was such a heavy lift. I could sometimes feel the weight of it on my body, in my body, while I tossed and turned at night, trying desperately to get a little sleep before getting up with the sun and starting another day disassembling the autocratic regime that had ruled our state for so many years. I wasn’t eating or sleeping much in those days. I was doing a lot of vomiting though.
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I could feel that weight when my aides told me about more casualties on the front lines of the fight to turn Texas into a democracy. I felt the weight when mothers and fathers sympathetic to the cause would gather by the hundreds outside the governor’s mansion and plead for peace with the insurrectionists who had made it their life’s duty to stop the Great Redo. My body ached from the weight of millions who so badly wanted to live freely in Texas. My head throbbed thinking about the scores of Redo activists who had finally seen the light of democracy after so much darkness and despair, and would now pressure me to do whatever it took to deliver the lofty promises of the Great Redo. It was them who pushed me, who kept me going.
I wanted nothing more than to stop. Perhaps there was a deal we could cut with the insurrectionists taking up arms in various parts of the state as the reformed Surpeme Court undid the authoritarian-style gerrymanders of Texas districts, opened the southern border for migrants seeking food and shelter and work, outlawed all limitations on abortion care, and opened up federally-controlled hospitals that would serve anyone – even immigrants without proper documentation – free of charge. The reproductive health clinics, the federal hospitals, the new border facilities welcoming migrants from South and Central America – they were all under near-constant siege by the enemies of democracy, whose ancestors had turned this great state into a living nightmare of fascist fantasies.
Denny Carter
My father had told me – begged me, in fact – to reconsider running for governor mostly because he knew I could win, and that if I won, I would be charged with overhauling every political and cultural aspect of the state. He knew – if the reformist presidential candidate swept into power with her promises of the Great Redo – I would be charged with running headlong into a fortified opposition of violent men whose power had not been challenged in generations. My dad cried over the phone one night and asked if I would reconsider and settle down and have a family in the suburbs, the way my brothers had done. “They’re happy,” dad said between sobs. “You can be too.”
I had served on the Dallas City Council for a couple terms, then in the state legislature for a decade, where I felt like an ornament in a body that needed some powerless opposition to complete the sheen of democracy. The one time I threatened to gum up the works for a particularly heinous piece of legislation that would have required school children to download apps on their school-provided tablets that allowed them to report suspected undocumented immigrants, the speaker of the House swung by my office accompanied by three marshals with hands on their firearms. He reminded me about the importance of civility in the state house.
“Let’s not ring any bells that can’t be un-rung,” the speaker said as he sauntered out of my office. He winked and added, “The business of democracy must go on.” One of the marshals glared at me as she followed the speaker down the hall.
I never told my dad about that; I feared he’d try to kill the speaker. My dad was the first one to encourage me to get into politics, and I had always seen him as a sort of guiding political light even though the guy had always been the least political person you’ll ever meet. A deeply incurious man, he delivered mail for thirty years and spent his weekends tinkering with old computers and TVs in our garage. Sometimes he drank too much. Mom and my older brothers and I tried to ignore it since he wasn’t a belligerent drunk; after eight or ten beers he’d usually fall asleep on the futon in the garage and get up in the morning like nothing happened, looking like absolute hell.
There was a sadness about my dad during the Bad Times, even though he could not give a single shit about the political machinations of the day. Probably he couldn’t name the vice president or more than a few members of Congress. He certainly had no idea who was overthrowing American democracy from their seat on the Supreme Court during the depths of the Bad Times, before the Court was reformed. But even a politically alienated and disconnected person back then could feel the despair that seeped into the national fabric. It found its way into every crevice of American life, this hopelessness, this sense that only the evil could thrive. It seemed a scientific certainty that our best days were long behind us and we would be ruled by fascists and petty tyrants for the rest of our lives. That lack of agency, I think, turned my dad into a sad sack of a man. I resented him for it. I was young and idealistic and wanted a reason to hope for a slightly brighter future. I’d look at him, half drunk and messing with forty-year-old laptops and listening to horrendous music from his youth and I would think, ashamedly, that he would be better off dead.
You can imagine that such a man encouraging me to do politics was disorienting. My parents had never seen me – a quiet kid, reserved to an almost debilitating extent – quite so fired up as I was after my high school had not only banned what was called the Gay-Straight Alliance Club, but suspended everyone involved. That included me, the club’s vice president. LGBTQ literature had been long banned in Texas schools, but courts had ruled that these alliance clubs were protected by the First Amendment. The ghouls on the Supreme Court couldn’t help themselves during my junior year: They voted 5-4 to allow states to punish students who engaged in organizations that “encouraged anti-natal sexual acts” because these groups “contributed to the nation’s declining birth rates, a national threat,” according to the federal government.
I’ll never forget that Court opinion. I cried hot tears while reading it one morning on my phone. The whole episode triggered something in me that had lied dormant for my first sixteen years. A fire was lit in my belly that day, and my parents could see it. I was never the same.
Always sure to preface his advice with a reminder of his political ignorance, my dad came to life in the weeks after the alliance club was disbanded and the club members served their weeklong suspensions – a warning to anyone who would dare try to reinstitute the club. Two months later I was volunteering for the campaign of an upstart state senate candidate who would end up losing after a Republican judge invalidated a couple thousand Latino votes that helped put our opponent over the finish line. It didn’t matter. I kept going, volunteering for progressive groups and campaigns until one day, I was running for city council. I won handily. I had never seen my dad quite so happy. His eyes, once dull and lifeless, were now vibrant and somehow brighter. In me I think he saw a sliver of light in the darkness that had fallen over everything in the Bad Times.
My father’s only actionable advice throughout my political career was to do the right thing. “That way,” he said with the naivety of a child just learning about his world, “you can’t go wrong.”
Not only was I the first Democratic governor of Texas in more than half a century; I was also the state’s first Latino governor. If that wasn’t enough to invigorate the enemies of democracy, I was also the state’s first LGBTQ governor, though I had internalized the advice of party strategists and wise elders who told me not to “flaunt” my sexuality in public. So I didn’t. I regret that today, of course. In many ways I did not win the governor’s office on my own terms, even if I did claim victory by a relative landslide, 52-46 percent. I would have won by more if the corporate Democrats hadn’t run their own independent candidate – a former Republican who operated one of the state’s concentration camps years earlier – to keep the state in Republican hands. That lady for some reason fled to Russia the day after the election. There was a lot of fleeing to Russia in the early days of the Redo.
I had to be escorted into the governor’s mansion on Day One of my first term. Along with my lieutenant governor and four of our closest aides, I was surrounded by state troopers dressed in full riot gear, fending off throngs of anti-democracy protesters blocking the entrance to the governor’s mansion. I don’t recall much about that harrowing walk to work. I heard gunshots in the distance and found a splatter of blood on my forehead when I finally arrived in my office, though I didn’t know whose blood it was.
My chief of staff, Mina, fell to her knees and vomited when we were finally alone in my office. She dry heaved for a while, my lieutenant governor stared blankly at a wall adorned with portraits of autocratic governors past, I staved off a panic attack while cleaning the blood off my face, and we got to work with the democratization of Texas.
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