Bill Clements Dead: Former Texas Gov. Dies

From the AP via the Huffington Post news wire:

Former Texas Gov. Bill Clements, who in 1979 became the state's first Republican elected governor since Reconstruction, has died at 94, his family said.

Clements, whose belief that state government should operate like a big business helped change the face of Texas politics, died Sunday after what his family said was a brief stay at a Dallas-area hospital.

And

Clements, a Texas oilman, saw his first term in office as a major change in the way the state operated.

"It is the largest business in Texas and yet we run it like it was a soda water shed – or a barbecue stand," Clements said shortly before turning over the chief executive's job to Democrat Mark White, a lawyer and part-owner of a barbecue firm who upset Clements' re-election bid in 1982.

Clements came back four years later to defeat White as governor and served until 1991.

More here.

This would be otherwise unremarkable. I mean, Clements was an old man, 94, and people die when they get old. Clements didn't do much as governor to really change how Texas functions, either--sure, he did sort of serve as John the Baptist to the GOP's Jesus in its ultimate takeover of the Lone Star State, but Clements dealt with a solidly Democratic state legislature for his two staggered terms, and necessarily played by their rules. As far as I can tell, he pretty much left the Governor's office as he found it. Unremarkable.

Except for the fact that he was the first politician I ever voted for.

I was eighteen, right out of high school, and in my freshman year at the University of Texas, right there in political town, Austin. I didn't know a goddamned thing about politics, or power, or economics. But I thought I did. Actually, I was certain I did. And that's why I voted Republican the first chance I got, November of 1986. And in extreme hindsight, that's not so bad. I mean, this was well before the GOP had collectively decided to go bat-shit crazy, you know, the way it is today. Clements was a conservative, to be sure, but pretty tame compared to our current bunch of psychotic Republican super stars. Really, he wasn't too far off the beaten path from the guy he lost to, and then beat, Mark White.

But there is something in extreme hindsight that is pretty bad: I voted for Clements, a Republican, out of tribal loyalty more than anything else. My family was Republican. My home town, Kingwood, was Republican. It was the Reagan era, Morning in America, and liberals were fools to be mocked, which they increasingly were on television and in movies. It couldn't have possibly been about any real grasp of the issues because I didn't understand them. I mean, I was all for shrinking the size of government, but I didn't really understand what that meant, what the "big government" actually did that made it a valuable institution. I understood foreign policy in terms of WWII movies, which are, needless to say, fiction set against a factual backdrop, not any real explanation of how national governments ought to interact with each other. My heart swelled when I saw the stars and stripes, which was for real Americans, who never questioned our nation's greatness.

In short, I voted Republican because it felt good to do so.

Within a few short years, after encountering actual liberals who could actually defend themselves, I made it a point to never lose any debates with them. So I started looking at the liberal construction of reality, and eventually found that liberals were able to answer numerous questions that conservatives couldn't--I mean sure, conservatives had responses, but they were unsatisfying, not real answers. Like CS Lewis who went on an intellectual mission to disprove Christianity, but instead became a believer, I tried to arm myself against snotty elitist liberals, only to come over to their side.

I look at conservatives today, twenty five years after my first trip to the voting booth, and, for the most part, I see people who aren't too terribly different from the guy I was back in 1986. There are notable exceptions, of course, but for the most part I get the sense that conservatives in 2011 are people who don't really get the issues in an intellectually fair way, but don't realize it, and can therefore never admit it, to themselves or anybody else. Actually, liberals are like this, too, but at least their moral sense of fairness and compassion guides them, roughly, in an ideological direction that I can side with in a debate.

The long and short of all this is that American politics in the 21st century is far more about identity, about what kinds of people we think we are, than it is about rational consideration of numerous issues. I got lucky in that I hate losing an argument, so I forced myself to think it all out, forced myself to confront ideas and topics I didn't want to consider. I mean, it is, of course, much more complicated than that--I had close friends come out of the closet; I decided to be an artist, which put me in a tough place as far as conservative ideology and free market fundamentalism go; I hung out with arm chair radicals and socialists. But, for whatever reasons, I ended up taking a long hard look at my own ideology and saw that it couldn't stand on its own two feet. This is unusual for most Americans. I'm definitely not saying I'm better than anybody or anything along those lines: I just got lucky.

But ideology is serious business. We really ought not to leave it up to luck. I'm not fool enough to believe that conservatives would naturally agree with me on most issues if they, too, submitted themselves to some politically harsh introspection, but I do know that I can have honest discussions with such people.

Right now, honest discussion is impossible.

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