The Lone Star State is soaring America's future will be made in Texas

For all its bloody-minded independence — Steinbeck was surely right when he called Texas “a nation in every sense of the word” — it would ultimately be the federal government that dragged the state’s marshes and prairies into the 20th century. The New Deal brought electricity to remote rural areas, and massively expanded the all-important Houston Ship Channel. The boom in a quintessentially Texan product surely helped too. “Oil is money,” the historian Robert Bryce has written. “Money is power.”

Dovetailed with a degree of racial pragmatism, with Houston desegregating far more easily than Atlanta, Texas also began to move beyond its dependence on oil and gas. Prodded along by LBJ and other native sons, for instance, Houston emerged as the centre of a gigantic new space centre. And if that banished memories of the city’s parochial past — as recently as 1946, the writer John Gunther grumbled about hotels filled with cockroaches — other towns rose too. Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin, together known as the Texas Triangle, are now home to two-thirds of the state’s population and 70% of its GDP.

Not, of course, that this is simply a historical tale. For if 20th-century Texas flourished on a mix of social peace, low taxes and light-touch regulation, their successors are sipping much the same brew. The numbers here are clear. Texas’s overall tax burden, according to one recent study, ranked 37th out of 50: hardly the best, but much better than California (5th) or New York (1st).

That’s shadowed by less irksome regulations, something that unsurprisingly meant more construction. Drive around any of the big Texas metros, particularly the suburbs, you’ll see new buildings everywhere. Permissive zoning laws mean that what, until recently, were rural pathways are now packed with cars and fast-food joints. Most of Texas is profoundly suburban, but there’s also a vibrant life in the inner cities. That’s especially true of Austin, where an 82-storey residential tower, soon to be the state’s tallest building, joins a score of high-rises near the fabled Sixth Street entertainment district. The whisky joints and honky-tonks, plying punters with reasonably priced booze and loud music, are echoed by new residential developments: over the past decade, Texas has built three times as many homes as California.

This has allowed Texas to keep housing prices low, attracting young millennials tired of frittering away their paychecks in West Hollywood, Crown Heights or the Tenderloin. And if this influx saw Dallas gain $6 billion in gross income from other states last year — even as New York lost $60 billion — it’s not just white hipsters leaving paradise for Texas. The state is especially popular among African Americans and Latinos, hardly surprising when these groups do so much better in Texas than in Chicago or Boston.

That speaks to another strength of the Texan experiment. For if low taxes and cheap homes lure talent, they also attract jobs for them to fill. Once again, the statistics here are plain. Over the past five years, Texas job growth has been three times faster than California and 10 times faster than New York. Far from being a Wall Street satrapy, Texas now boasts some of the largest firms in the land, from Exxon to AT&T, Tesla to Dell. Even Joe Rogan has settled here, buying a vast Austin villa for $14 million. As these names imply, meanwhile, Texas is quickly gaining a reputation for cultural and technological innovation. Houston hosts the world’s largest medical complex, while the legacy of Nasa means the state also bristles with defence startups.

Quite apart from African Americans tired of Yankee snow and poverty, this bonanza is equally attracting foreigners. Consider somewhere like Fort Bend County, the sprawling suburbs west of Houston. From an infamous hotbed of the Klan, the community is now an easy mix of blacks, Asians and Latinos. Locals even brag about hosting America’s third-largest Hindu temple, made of bricks shipped in from India.

Not that the laidback culture here can be understood by numbers alone. Unlike other parts of America, Texas seems to avoid our moment’s worst racial neuroses. In part, that’s simply a question of prosperity: with Texan Latinos far likelier to own a home than their peers in Los Angeles or San Francisco, they tend not to see themselves as victimised “people of colour”. The state’s elites soon realised that Mexican Americans represented a vital and winnable constituency. While Californian Republicans alienated Latinos by pushing Proposition 18, banning undocumented migrants from public services, the former Bush insider Karl Rove tells me the Texas GOP takes a far softer stance. The strategy’s paying off: Latino areas, notably the Rio Grande Valley, went red for the first time ever in November.

At the same time, there are signs that the Texas miracle may only continue: the local economy is likely to benefit from the second Trump presidency. How could it not, when “drill, baby, drill” is a key plank of his platform? For their part, other Trumpworld figures make similar noises. Chris White, the incoming energy secretary, hails from the west Texas oilfields, making him the ideal candidate to exploit reserves that could yet encompass half the country’s output. Certainly, White’s background makes him an outlier: many top energy executives are more interested in appeasing environmentalists than extracting black gold.

Combined with other growth figures — if Texas is set to become America’s most populist state, Houston could become its second-largest city by 2100 — and it’s tempting to see Texas as a model for the country to follow: one that encourages entrepreneurship while retaining traditional social values. It’s a recipe that some Texan Democrats believe the party needs to follow, especially if they want to reach Latino voters. “Family, church, deep roots and entrepreneurship and the desire to weave into American life,” summarises Henry Cisneros, the former mayor of San Antonio and once a Democratic presidential candidate. “The Democrats sometimes go too far and push [people] to the Right.”

Not that a prosperous future is necessarily assured. Arguably the biggest threat to the state’s ascendancy comes from neanderthal elements inside the GOP. They’ve already shown their fangs, attempting to push Christian doctrine into the curricula of public schools. A draconian abortion ban has also been promoted by Ken Paxton, the state’s ultra-conservative attorney general, who’s equally trying to prosecute out-of-state doctors for prescribing abortion pills. This bill is widely unpopular, and seen among veterans of both parties as a threat to GOP power.

“If the identity Left is killing California, far-Right identity politics could be the ruin of Texas,” explains Steve Pedigo, a native Texan and assistant dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Pedigo is particularly worried by attempts by the Texan Right to impose conservative policies on localities, similar to what progressives are trying to impose on more conservative parts of California. That’s bad enough in San Francisco — and an absolute anathema to freedom-loving Texans.

Yet as stupid as these policies are, they’ve yet to change the political complexion of the state. Texans, Cisneros argues, are essentially practical, and prefer a regime that boosts their economic prospects over one that panders to them as victims. Texan Democrats hardly help themselves here. Over recent years, they’ve run culturally progressive figures like Beto O’Rourke: catnip to Eastern papers but dubious to Texans themselves. This year, the state duly continued its tilt to the Right, forcing the local Democratic party chairman to resign in disgrace.

Not that we should write off liberals just yet. As Texas grows, both in population and diversity, the state will need to rediscover its inner LBJ, focusing on genuine shared prosperity amid the high-rises and McMansions. Prayer meets and flag-flying aren’t substitutes for poor schools and inadequate roads, especially as the economy only grows and grows.

The hope here is that Texans remain sane, putting their faith in centrist politicians who promote social justice without succumbing to culture war manias. Happily, there are promising signs across the Texas Triangle, with Democrats and Republicans alike sticking to their moderate guns. One good example is Mattie Parker, the dynamic and nonpartisan mayor of Fort Worth. “I govern a diverse, young city,” Parker tells me. “People want the schools better, and the business leaders also don’t like extremes. They want the lights on, and the streets paved.”

Certainly, Texans themselves seem to think just such a future is possible. Almost 70% believe their state is among the best in the land, and nearly 30% see it as superior to all others, figures far higher than in New York or California. When I was last in Texas, I saw this optimistic spirit myself. Earlier this year, on a chilly Austin night, a well-known local musician called Patrice Pike took to the stage at a wood-panelled spot called the Saxon Club. After a raucous gig, Pike looked down at her crowd, a heady blend of blue-collar types and hipsters and superannuated hippies. And then, she made a dramatic show of Lone Star unity. “I know you have different views,” she said, “but we all love Texas.” Whatever our nation’s ceaseless squabbles, it’s hard to disagree.

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Joel Kotkin is a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute, the University of Texas at Austin.

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