What is wrong with Texas?

[chicken]

moominpapa posted this first on our staff list ...

Texas housewife busted for hawking erotic toys Sales rep for Brisbane firm sold vibrator to undercover agents.

What -- I repeat WHAT -- the bleep is wrong with Texas?

Comments

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

I think that if we went to Texas (god no) we would run into some actual crazies among conservatives. New England/coastal republicans may be more liberal than their mid-country cousins. They indeed may not be able to convince one another of anything.

Jerry Falwell was the one who made the comment abouts queers and the aclu being responsible for Sept. 11. What an ass.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The way to find them is to go south. In my youth I thought of conservatives as cultural fundamentalist types because in Virginia many of them were. Around here they're more likely to be laissez-faire quasi-libertarians who are just pissed off at real or perceived excesses of the local liberals.

Nationally, the Republican Party has always been walking this tightrope, pandering to category I while not doing so sufficiently to scare off category II. Of course, major American political parties have to be so broad that they're going to have to do this to some extent. The Republicans have been better at the game for the past 20 years or so than the Democrats have been at balancing the interests of their various factions. But I think that speaks more to the mistakes of Democratic political strategists; the game is inherently more difficult for the Republicans, because the cultural reactionaries are so important (even increasingly so) in regional politics in the Southeast. Every so often they scare people enough that the Republicans lose some mainstream support because of it; I think that happened in 1992, and part of the 1994 House Contract with America insurgency was an effort to keep them quieter than usual.

So I've been expecting this big split to happen in the Republican Party for ages, but it never quite does. The party leadership is really good at constructing messages that bind the factions together, in part by demonizing liberals (and post-Sept. 11 they've got an ironclad one having to do with external enemies). The small-government libertarian conservatives never quite regard the cultural conservatives as enough of a threat to bolt (or they're more freaked out by the antics of extreme campus lefties, who are smaller in number and far less powerful but live closer to them); and the Democratic Party hasn't been an ideologically appropriate place for them to go anyway.