People write off states like Texas as dyed-in-the-wool Republican strongholds, but it wasn’t always that way. Legendary author, organizer, commentator, and former State Agricultural Commissioner Jim Hightower is living proof that there is a strong progressive tradition in Texas that stretches back to the 19th century. Hightower has fought the far right for decades, but he has also seen how Democrats have abandoned grassroots organizing and how the Democratic Party has been hijacked by corporate money and self-serving elites. In this special episode of The Marc Steiner Show, recorded at Hightower’s home in Austin, Texas, we talk to Hightower about House Bill 2127 (aka “The Death Star Bill”), how corporate power and far-right nuts took over Texas politics, and how to rebuild the progressive movement in the Lone Star State.
Pre-Production: Kayla Rivara, Maximillian Alvarez, Marc Steiner, David Griscom, Alexander Koffler
Studio Production: Alexander Koffler
Post-Production: David Hebden
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Transcript
Marc Steiner: This is Marc Steiner, welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News and to another episode of Rise of the Right. Recently I traveled to Texas with my colleagues, Max Alvarez and Kayla Rivara, to see what life was like when the right-wing begins to seize power. Now we’ll be bringing you a series of conversations and a special production on Texas in the coming weeks. But today I want to share with you the conversation we had with Jim Hightower.
He’s the former agricultural commissioner in Texas who is the personification of left egalitarian populism and the progressive strain in our politics that’s still strong throughout Texas, the west parts of the South, and across the country. Jim has been a force in progressive politics in Texas, in our country, and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party for decades. He produces his radio commentary called Hightower Radio, writes a syndicated column called Hightower Lowdown, and produces a really informative and entertaining video podcast called Hightower Chat and Chew. We’ll be linking to all those on our site.
He’s also the author of numerous books. Let me give you some of my favorite titles. One is There’s Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos, Thieves in High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country and It’s Time to Take It Back, and another, Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow. That’s the name of a few. The books are great, they’re entertaining, and they dive deep into stuff.
Jim Hightower invited us to his home and took us on this journey from history to the present day, what it takes to defeat the monstrous power of the right, and to build a society for all the people. So please enjoy my conversation with American populist, Jim Hightower. Jim, first of all, let me say thank you for letting us coming to your house.
Jim Hightower: Well, of course, delighted to have you.
Marc Steiner: It’s a lovely place. Really a lovely place.
Jim Hightower: Old time place, old Austin.
Marc Steiner: Old time place for a couple of old timers.
Jim Hightower: Yeah, right.
Marc Steiner: So there’s so much to talk about here. I mean, you have been involved in fighting for a progressive populist Texas, a Texas that brings economic liberty and fights racism and does all the rest in this state, your whole life. Just in pragmatic philosophical sense, just like to start your thinking about this arc of the Battle of Texas that in some ways is emblematic of the battle for the entire country, between populism, progressive ideas and building an equitable society, and it’s very opposite.
Jim Hightower: The chief political issue in Texas from the very start in of the Anglo settlement here in 1820s say, and forward through today, and I think also the chief political struggle in America, it comes down to this, too few people control too much of the money and power, and they use that money and power to get more for themselves at our expense. That’s the fight we’re in, and that’s the fight that America has been in from the founding and that Texas has certainly been in from the start. I know that Texas is perceived as a far right-wing state now, but the original state constitution in Texas outlawed banks, you were not allowed to create a bank here because the farmers who settled this state, the Anglo farmers who came in and settled the state, came out of the southern tenant farm system where banks ripped them off and the railroad corporations ripped them off.
And the same thing was happening here in Texas in, particularly after the Civil War, that led to the rise of the populace movement began in Lampasas, Texas about 90 miles in that direction with four farmers sitting around a kitchen table in a farmhouse saying, we got to do something, we’re going broke. And what had happened is that they had come into Texas fleeing the tenant farm system and looking for new opportunity, but the rich farmland was in East Texas and it was kind of already taken. So they kind of kept moving west and they didn’t realize that they were moving to beyond the 33 inch rainfall standard that you had to have to make a crop.
And so they were out there with dry land farms and drought hitting them at the same time the banks were charging outrageous interest rates on them and the railroad corporations, which controlled their shipment of their crops to Dallas and Austin and Houston, and the markets were ripping them off at the same time. So that led to a rebellion of ordinary working stiffs that was not just farmers. They also organized Black members of farmers, but also factory workers in East Texas and down in the Houston area and et cetera. So it was a real people’s movement that really launched this state and that spirit of populism is still alive and well in our state. It’s presently sublimated by corporate power and et cetera, but the spirit is still there in the heart of the people, and that’s what we have to appeal to.
Marc Steiner: So a whole lot of things here pass in my mind as you were speaking. And first thing though is a little aside, when did your family get here?
Jim Hightower: My family came in, they were tenant farmers coming across from Tennessee and Alabama and North Carolina and coming into Texas about four generations ago, my mother and father were both raised on farms and, hard Scrabble farms during the depression, so they were depression kids. And my father’s mother told him when he was 18, get off the farm, there’s nothing here for you. He went to Dallas, which was 30 miles away from where his farm was, and hooked up into a business enterprise that let him go then to Denison, Texas, right on the Red River. The Red River being the north boundary of Texas. We were the first line of defense against the Oakies. So the Red River, luckily I was born two miles on the south side of that river, but he and my mother were able to establish a lower middle class possibility for my two brothers and myself and themselves.
They were new dealers. They believed in Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, and they realized that they did not create their wealth. They realized that they were beneficiaries of a long history of an educational system, of a community. And my father did not know he had a political philosophy, but he did. And he expressed it to me periodically in these terms. He said, everybody does better when everybody does better. And that is as radical a political notion as I’ve ever heard of. And that is a core political belief among the people of our state even today. And so we’ve got to get back to that spirit and to cultivate, to nurture that spirit across the board.
Marc Steiner: So what do you think happened between, whether it’s the era of the Texas People’s Party that took place, the whole populist movement, you, Molly Ivans and that whole movement that was part of a pushing Texas into a very populous way and a progressive way, and now we have this wave of, there’s a kind of radical that has taken over the state, even though every election is tight, they have taken over the state and you’ve been in it for decades. So what’s your analysis of what actually happened and why?
Jim Hightower: Money. Money happened. What happened was that the corporate power began to amass, banking power and manufacturing, corporate power, and of course oil and gas and et cetera. And as long been more than influential in the Texas legislature with the money that they spent there, the lobbying money and the soft bribery. You’d be a legislator in the 1950s and there would be poker games every night. And if you were a good boy during the day, you won the poker pot that night. So there was kind of a system that affected some people and enough to affect legislation. But what fundamentally has happened is that in the 1980s, my party, the Democratic Party, quit being little D Democrats. They decided the powers that be within the party decided that they could get some of that corporate money too, and not just let the Republicans have it all. We could get money from those corporations because those corporations have no ideology except money.
And so they shifted their policy from grassroots politics to money politics and began to solicit those corporate checks. And I can tell you from my own political life in office here in Texas, I’ve seen it happen that when you get one of those corporate checks, written on the back is the corporate agenda and they’re cashing the check, not you. And you are the cash that they’re buying. And that led to an abdication by our Democratic leadership, national as well as state of grassroots politics and workaday people and dirt farmers, environmentalists, regular working stiffs to turn to the money interest. And so the Democratic Party began to support corporate policies. And then the regular people out in the countryside were saying what happened? They no longer saw a political campaign of the old time Democratic style that Ralph Yarborough had and that Molly Ivans, as you mentioned, supported editorially and that I campaigned for, and others, that began to disappear because Democrats decided we can take the money, put it on TV, and we’ll win the elections.
Well, that didn’t work out because we don’t have enough money to compete on TV with the Republicans and with the corporate power interest. And so what resulted was not that Texas turned right wing, it quit voting. We have had the lowest voter turnout in Texas consistently in the last 20, 30 years of any state in the country. And it’s not going to get better until we put together that grassroots politics again that appeals on the issues of economic fairness, social justice, equal opportunity that the Democratic Party was built on. And if we get back to that, then we will begin to regain power because the Republican powers and the corporate powers are a minority in the state. So they fear the majority. We are the majority, but we have to rally it.
Marc Steiner: So I want to circle back to this, what you just said. I think it’s really important to lay into this and get into this. Texas is now facing this House bill 2127, that Death Star Bill. Workers are being denied on days like this and hotter days than this water breaks, which is absolute insanity. You can’t imagine it. I mean, how you could even do that. When I was a young guy, I worked construction, I worked in the fields, I worked for farmer, not take a water break? How do you survive? That’s crazy. So it’s gotten to that point though. And even though the last election was just… I mean, what was it? It was maybe 200,000 votes between Beto and the clown who’s in office now. But they were able to do it. So talk… Because they have clearly seized power and they’ve created this bill, what that bill really means and how you organize against it and for something different.
Jim Hightower: So the bill known as the Death Star Bill, it is not just about the fact that the state has usurped the power of every city and county in our state to be self-governing, to set their own regulations about environmental impacts, about corporate money in politics, about loan sharking, et cetera. But it’s fundamentally a bill that usurps democracy. It takes away your right to be a self-governing people. We are a constitutionally a home rule state, meaning that cities have the right and the preference to be the first source of legislation, the primary source of legislation, because this government is closer to the people than go to try to find your state senator or something or other. So that’s why this bill is loved by the corporate powers and by the lobbyists because it concentrates power in just a few people.
If you only have to talk to the governor, then you’re doing fine. But if you’ve got to talk to city councils and county commissioners all around the state, then you’ve got to a problem. You’ve got to make sense to them. And this legislation makes no sense whatsoever. The people are overwhelmingly against it. And I don’t mean just the progressives are against it, the conservative mayors and city council people are wildly against this in fighting it, filing suit against it.
Marc Steiner: Yeah. This great quote that you said, that the delusional is no longer marginal. It’s come in from the fringe to sit in the seat of power. And that’s where we find ourselves. And my thought when I read that quote, thinking about coming here today was that you’ve spent your life fighting for a kind of world that is economically, racially, politically, environmentally, just even as agricultural commissioner, you fought hard as agricultural commissioner to make that a reality in Texas. And now, well, you’d be sitting on your porch. You’re 80, I’m 77, and you watch this go on around you. So what are your thoughts about that and the struggle that has been fought from the populist party on to this moment to see that happen and how we work together to influence other people to fight back and make that change?
Jim Hightower: Well, the struggle is what matters. And we’ve been through this in Texas, the populist movement, as we indicated, 1870s basically was crushed by the banks and the railroad corporations and others by 1900. But then came the progressive movement out of that fighting Bob [inaudible 00:17:06] out of Wisconsin, a terrific movement. The labor movement then rose up, Civil Rights Movement came forward, the women’s movement came forward, environmental movement came forward. So we’ve always had the struggle and bringing that to fore. We’ve had times when I ran in 1980 to be the agriculture commissioner, ’82.
Marc Steiner: And you won.
Jim Hightower: Yeah. Yes, I won. Anne Richards ran as treasurer, she won. Jimmy Maddox, attorney general, he won. Gary Morrow, land commissioner, he won. We were all young people with our own individual constituencies to add to the mix. And then we ran together, we campaign saying, it’s not just elect me, elect a government, and we’ll put this government on your side. And we did that. And then again, the money came in, in the late 1980s, and the corporate money began to dominate all of our politics. So grassroots organizing went aside. Now, the good news is that organizing continues. The most encouraging thing to me in America and my travels around the country and here in Texas, are the grassroots progressive movements. The environmental justice movement for example, a woman named Diane Wilson down on the Gulf Coast, shrimper, fourth generation fisher-woman, fought this huge plastics conglomerate out of Taiwan for 40 years. 40 years she battled and battled and battled, losing, and even progressives gave up on her some of them. Environmental groups even said, “Well, maybe she’s too loopy. She just keeps fighting.” And then suddenly she won. Two years ago, she won a court case that she had filed that brought this Formosa Plastics Corporation to their knees, and they had to give in to the demands of the fisher community down there, and they began to make change.
And the judge put the compliance focus, not on some government, but on the local grassroots people. And so they were in a position to enforce it and make it happen. That’s a tremendous victory. Family farmers are doing the same thing right now, reviving, revitalizing, and we’re electing people. Greg Casar got elected here in the Austin San Antonio district, young Latino worker advocate, major, major change, who’s become a force already in his first term in Congress, become a force within the Democratic caucus saying, “Stop talking bullshit. Start doing something.” And that has changed. That is what produces the change when the people get riled up and then begin to organize and create their own networks of power. And that is what is happening.
Marc Steiner: As you’re speaking, I thought of two things. One was, yes, you have so many great quotes. I could be here all day and just throw them out and we can talk about them. But you said, and I’m not sure what you’re referring to, but you said, “Makes me happier than a mosquito in a nudist colony.”
Jim Hightower: Yeah, right. Well, that is those groups that are out there. I use that line at the opening of any talk that I give that just to be in the presence of people who are making this kind of difference. And these are not the political… Within the Democratic party political powers or within the progressive community, the political powers. They’re ordinary working day people, and they have the most common sense and the most ability, and they recognize what’s happening in the state legislature just a few blocks down the street. Benjamin Franklin said that the destiny of America is not power, it’s light. And he meant the light of our democratic ideals, economic fairness, social justice, equal opportunity for all people.
And yet we’ve got too many five watt bulbs sitting in a hundred watt sockets down here in the legislature and in Congress, and not even caring about the light, but the people care about that light. They still have those values within them. And so to build a progressive politics, you have to tap those values again and again and again saying, this is what we stand for. And it’s not this particular bill or that particular bill. It’s that sense of everybody does better when everybody does better.
Marc Steiner: So clearly, I mean, everything you’ve been writing and our conversation here today on your porch, you have maintained a commitment to the struggle to make it better, but you’ve also maintained an optimism. You do not sound like a man who sees defeat at the door because they’ve pushed this bill through 2127 because they have so much power in Texas. You don’t seem like a man who is saying, “No, we’re done. We’re defeated. They got us.”
Jim Hightower: No, no, they don’t have us. Again, there’s so much ebb and flow to politics. When I lost my race as Ag Commissioner for a third term in my concession speech, I said, “In Texas politics, one day you’re a peacock, and the next day you’re a feather duster.” So it ebbs and flows, but you keep building. And if you’re getting your information just from the media, establishment media, or you’re just paying attention to Washington and the legislature here in Austin, you’re going to be depressed. But if you go out in the countryside and see what people are doing and have conversations with people at a bar or at a coffee shop, or at the feedlot, you find you have so much more in common than you do difference. The politics of the right wing is playing, is to find the difference and to just grind that into nothing. And they have nowhere to go with that, because that’s depressing. The American people are not a depressed people. We get depressed every now and then. But again, we have always re-surged.
In the 1950s, late 50s, early 60s, there was a progressive movement here in Texas. Texas had become a corporate state, and the progressives were almost like in a phone booth together, “Oh, we can’t do anything.” But then people began to realize, wait a minute, maybe we could do something. For example, they had in the 1950s, the establishment media, which at the time were the major newspapers, Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, et cetera. They paid no attention to progressive going ons. So people didn’t hear, wait a minute, there’s a success over here. Ralph Yarborough, the great fighting liberal Democrat here in Texas, US Senator, he could have a rally in Dallas, 5,000 people would turn out. Next day, nothing in the Dallas Morning News, not a mention of it. And so they came up with a slogan, the progressives did, for the Dallas News said, “We’re the Dallas Morning News. If it happens in Dallas, it’s news to us.”
And so you’ve got to use humor and rally people around. And so they created the Texas Observer to be a medium for progressive ideas. And then they organized particularly in East Texas, in the African-American communities over there, because you had to pay to vote back in those days, poll tax. Cost about $25 in today’s money. Now it’s hard enough to get people to vote anyway, but you’re going to charge them $25. So unions organized, progressive groups organized and went out and organized to pay the poll tax of people over there so that they could vote and understood what it meant to vote. So that kind of organizing, that’s the infrastructure that I’m talking about that reaches out to people. And so that created a movement that elected Ralph Yarborough, elected Barbara Jordan to Congress, Bob Eckhart, to Congress, Henry B. Gonzalez, out of San Antonio, the first Mexican American to go to Congress from Texas. Again it created a movement.
And again, here came the money powers. They always come back, and they changed things. They began to take power back. They took on John Connally, the governor of our state, and Connally got fed up with being accused of being non-progressive. So he switched parties to Republican and Ralph Yarborough, the US Senator who hated Connally and Connally hated him. Ralph Yarborough said that when Connally switched parties said, “It’s the first time in history that a rat has swam toward a sinking ship.” So that enlivens people and gives them hope. And then we came along, Ann Richards, me and Maddox, and Morrow and et cetera, and we created a new progressive moment that was really dynamic. And now that’s faded away with the big money. It’s coming back, but it’s coming back the other way too because we’re organizing and we’re building that infrastructure.
Marc Steiner: Let’s talk about that for a minute. Because I mean, one of the things that struck me in my time here over this last bunch of days in Austin and San Antonio, and interviewing people from unions and other places across is that people are on the move to push back. So, how do you see that… You are in it, you observe it, you’re not done. I mean, when we came to your house today, you were in the middle of a meeting, so you’re not finished at all about what you’re doing, right?
Jim Hightower: No, no. Yeah, right.
Marc Steiner: So, how do you see the resistance from places like Austin and San Antonio and Houston and East Texas, how do you see that coming together to be the opposition to stop the right from actually taking over everything in this state? Which is also going to push the country right.
Jim Hightower: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, it has to come together with a cohesive politics. We have the elements out there, but they’re not together. And we don’t have the party structure that pulls it together yet. We have the progressive instinct. We have the demographics of people of color in particular, and I don’t mean just Mexican American and African American, but Houston School District teaches 165 languages in their school. So, there’s a whole new world. Texas, they can do all the anti-woke stuff that they want, but the truth is this is a woke state. And when those people began to come together, and it takes the organizational structure. And we’re making progress on that, we’re not there. Again, we have too many counties with no Democratic Party structure. We-
Marc Steiner: Not that everybody who’s a Democrat is progressive or on the left or pushing. There’s a lot of moderate conservatives as well. But how does it happen in a state like this that all those counties are almost like, “I give up. We can’t do it anymore. We’re done.”
Jim Hightower: Yeah, it’s because there’s no support system. Presidential candidates come through here all the time, Democratic Party presidential candidates, but they don’t go to East Austin. They don’t go to Caldwell County. They don’t go out to Brownsville, Lubbock, Amarillo, Tyler, Texarkana. They come to the money centers and they get money and they leave. And our party chair used say, “Leave 10%. Tip us. Leave 10%, and we can do something with that money. We can help organize.” So, you’re out there in a rural area, a red area that has been taken over by these party interests, by these right-wing interests. And you get to feeling alone.
In 2016 when Hillary Clinton ran for president to get a Hillary yard sign, you had to pay $5.
Marc Steiner: What?
Jim Hightower: It’s hard to get people to put a yard sign up and you’re charging them $5, like that’s going to make a difference in your campaign. And a yard sign in a red area sends a signal to other progressives in that area, “You’re not alone. I’m here.” And they put a sign up, and another sign goes up and you begin to connect. And then you say, “Wait a minute, we don’t even have a Democratic committee here. Why don’t we organize a Democratic committee?” All you have to do is have 10 people come together, and you are the Democratic Party in that county. So, it’s as simple and as difficult as that.
Marc Steiner: So, when you look at the roots of things like the Texas Populist Party, when you look at roots of the progressive movement, the roots of the union movement in the state, the struggles of Black and Mexican people in the state, one of the things that all that’s centered around was a word you keep talking about and alluding to, which is organizing. I mean, that is-
Jim Hightower: Yeah, and by organizing… And this is really important. Too much of our politics has become meetings. “Let’s form a committee. Let’s have a meeting. Let’s discuss. Let’s have a task force.” No, no, no. The populous movement built in Texas, 1870s rural areas, people were illiterate. They weren’t stupid, but they were not educated and they were disparate. You were miles from your neighbor. To bring them together, they formed a cultural movement. So, they had parties, they had bands, they put on plays, they had fun and that brought people together. And as a group up in Wisconsin, I’ve been associated with fighting La Follette festival up there, Ed Garvey, who started that used to say, “Let’s put the party back in politics,” and that’s exactly what we need to do.
A friend of mine in Washington, he lives in Maryland actually, and he keeps getting invited to Democratic Party functions. And he finally said to them, “If you’d pour a little red wine every now and then, I might come to one of your meetings.” So I mean, it ought to be fun to be in politics and not just tedious drudgery. And so, getting back to that, and there are movements to do that. For example, here in Texas, there’s a great movement of young Latina teenagers, really. And they have quinceaneras where you become of age as a Latina girl, I think it’s 15, and you have this party. And people come and bring gifts and it’s a celebration.
But this group started organizing instead of bringing gifts, give money to organize, and you have to register to vote to come into the room. I mean, understanding the culture and then using that culture as a medium to connect to people. And that’s why musicians are important. I never had a political event without… I mean a couple with Willie Nelson even, but Steve Fromholz, Joe Ely, and Butch Hancock, and Marcia Ball, and these great musicians who are around here.
People will come for music and they want to have a beer when they’re doing that. Well, that’s good politics and put that together. I think of Butch Hancock. He’s a great singer. He and Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Joe Ely formed a group called The Flatlanders. They’re all out of Lubbock. And Butch Hancock was on a radio show I did for a while, and he explained how tough it was to grow up out there in that Pentecostal right wing world. And he said, “They’re saying to us, ‘Stay away from sex. Sex is the filthiest, it is the most ungodly, it is just nasty.'” And then he said, “They said, ‘Save it for someone you love.'” So, you got to use the culture, and you got to use the humor, and you got to tell stories. That’s a political movement.
Marc Steiner: Jim, this has really been a pleasure. It’s wonderful to see you again. It is really been a pleasure-
Jim Hightower: Same here.
Marc Steiner: … to be invited to your home to have this conversation on your porch.
Jim Hightower: Great. Thank you.
Marc Steiner: Thank you. Thank you all for joining us today. I want to thank Dave Hebdon for running the show and editing the work to make me sound good. Kayla Rivara, making it all work behind the scenes. And Max Alvarez for wanting to make this journey to Texas and tell this story. And Laura Ehrlich, who heads up Hightower’s sprawling research operation and made all this possible as well. Please let me know what you’ve thought about what you’ve heard today and what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll write you right back. And stay tuned for more on the rise of the right and more about Texas. So, for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
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