Until about a decade ago, the Texas GOP epitomized traditional small-government conservatism. It championed tort reform, deregulation, and a laissez-faire, business-friendly atmosphere that politicians would often contrast to the oppressive regime of California. In the early 2010s, former Gov. Rick Perry even led “business recruitment trips” in California aimed at luring away companies into Texas.
But the election of Donald Trump has led to a peculiar phenomenon: the “Californi-fication” of Texas and the adoption of California-style tactics to impose a right-wing agenda. In this episode of the Washington Monthly podcast, journalist Christopher Hooks discusses his recent article for Texas Monthly chronicling this shift.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Anne Kim: Your article in Texas Monthly argues that Texas—the so-called “Lone Star” State, the beacon of small government conservatism, and the number one hater of nanny-state California—has actually become more like California than California itself. Can you explain the thesis of your piece?
Christopher Hooks: If you really want to step back, the big picture for Republicans in Texas is that there have been three stages as they’ve taken power.
First, when Texas was briefly a two-party state transitioning from Democratic to Republican dominance, Republicans played very nice. They emphasized their bipartisan credentials. There was a big part of the party that was pro-choice in the 1990s. It’s easy to forget now. George W. Bush, who was the governor, worked with Democrats in the legislature and emphasized that he was a “compassionate conservative.”
And that lasted until 2002 or 2003 when Republicans took control of the Texas House and solidified their dominance. And all of a sudden they didn’t have a general election to worry about. They didn’t really need to be chasing independent voters for the most part. And a lot of the bipartisanship went away, but the party was dominated by figures who had been conservative Democrats earlier in their life, among them Rick Perry. And they were emphasizing a kind of political tradition which was familiar to a lot of Texans. It emphasized economic development. It emphasized doing away with regulation in favor of small government. And in that period of time, the bête-noir for Texas—which they really loved to hate and talk about—was California. California was the nanny state. California tried to control what its people did, and it used its market power to control what other Americans did.
It set rules like the CAFE standards and warnings about cancer and these other things that forced companies to comply with California law across the United States. And Texas set apart itself apart from that. It liked to judge how well Texas was doing by how many Californians were moving to Texas.
And I think it may be too early to put an end date on that stage. But sometime in the last 10 years, coinciding with Trump taking over the national level, there has been kind of a generational change in the Texas Republican Party where they don’t really come from the conservative Democratic tradition. They’re much more eager to use the state to crack down on their enemies, to control what Texans do, and to do this California-style thing where they set laws in Texas that compel companies—whether they’re banks in the Northeast or tech companies in California or food producers in the Midwest—to follow Texas law across the country.
And having covered Texas politics for the last 15 years or so, it’s remarkable. The legislature is now passing a lot of laws that would not have even been considered 10 years ago.
Anne Kim: You have this really striking passage in your piece where you write, “The new generation of Republicans doesn’t want to be the negation of California so much as a conservative version of it.” So I want to ask about three phenomena in particular that you write about that had their origins in California but that Texans have embraced in their own Texan kind of way: Number one, suing people; number two, the nanny state warning labels you talked about; and three, embracing Hollywood.
So let’s take each of those in turn, beginning with the lawsuits. You write that traditionally conservative Texans didn’t like trial lawyers and so-called “frivolous” litigation, but these new conservative Texans really love lawsuits. Can you explain what’s going on here?
Christopher Hooks: Well, you might not be able to judge from the name, but this group called Texans for Lawsuit Reform is one of the biggest and most important Republican organizations in Texas. They were formed in the ‘90s, and they became a really big part of how the Republican coalition ran and financed candidates and organized itself. And the big achievement of the early Republican years in Texas was tort reform.
Texas was a very good state to be a trial lawyer—arguably sometimes too good. And what exacerbated Republicans’ feeling about this was that those trial lawyers were often turning around and giving their money to Democratic candidates. So there was a big effort that lasted for 10 years to make Texas a very hard state to sue in. And that was part of the religion of the Republican coalition for many years. When Republicans were contrasting Texas and California, they would always point to the fact that California is a very good state to be a trial lawyer, which they said was an impediment on business and economic activity.
What changed in Texas is SB8, the abortion law from a few years back. It was passed before Dobbs(the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade), and they felt like they needed a novel legal mechanism to enforce an abortion prohibition. What they came up with was this “bounty hunter” provision—the idea that you could sue somebody who facilitated an abortion even if you were not party to it or had any connection to what was actually going on.
At the time this was seen as kind of a freakish legal provision, which would surely be struck down in the courts, but it wasn’t. And then what you saw was lawmakers turning to their pet issues and realizing, “I can attach a bounty hunter provision to this,” or “I can create a new way to sue somebody.”
In this recent session, which concluded in June, there were over a thousand bills filed in the legislature that created a new way to sue somebody or for the Attorney General to fine somebody. And they were for very strange issues. I think my favorite was a bill that gave the Attorney General the authority to pursue a half million dollar fine for any museum that contained “obscene” material, like a nude or something. But lawmakers really took to this idea that they could use private lawsuits as a way of social control. And it marks a real break from what Republicans thought about the proper role of government.
Anne Kim: I want to turn to another means of social control, and that’s over people’s diets—not just in Texas, it turns out, but nationally. You write that Texas has gone full MAHA, and they’re outdoing RFK Jr. on the food labeling issue. In particular, there’s newly passed legislation that would slap warning labels on foods containing one of 44 different ingredients, and that’s going to include everything from M&Ms to Doritos to granola bars. Can you explain a little bit more about this legislation and how it’s going to affect the rest of us nationwide?
Christopher Hooks: This was something I did not see coming a year or two ago. If you buy a bag of Doritos in the state after this fall, it will come with a little warning label on the back of it that says this product contains ingredients that have been flagged or not approved by the regulators of the European Union, of Canada, Australia.
And everything about this as a long time watcher of Texas politics was strange. It was strange that Republicans in the legislature were farming out their authority to the European Union, which, for example, bans Texas beef that has been given growth hormones.
But this also struck me as a very California thing to do. California has a lot of labeling requirements, and people may be familiar with the Proposition 65 warning label that says a Hostess Twinkie contains ingredients known to cause cancer. And 10 or 15 years ago, this would have been seen as the most extreme manifestation of the “nanny state.”
But the Texas bill had wide Republican buy-in and was passed by bipartisan majority in the legislature. Democrats voted for it too. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seemed to see it as a big part of his agenda. He lauded this and worked with the drafters of this bill, and he is using it as a backdoor way to ensure that these warnings are everywhere in the country because food producers who sell products in Texas will need to put these warning labels on everything they sell throughout the country.
Anne Kim: And they’ll have to do that because the Texas market is so big, like the California market is so big, that they really don’t want to have to create two separate labels, one for Texas and then one for the rest of the country. It’s just not practical from a cost standpoint.
Christopher Hooks: Yes, absolutely. I don’t think anyone has a real view of whether the ingredients that have been included in this list are bad for you or not. But the mechanism of this law is an innovation and it represents, again, a kind of change in how Texas Republicans think government is supposed to work.
Anne Kim: Let’s turn to the third way in which Texas has embraced a California mechanism, if not necessarily in the same way that California has done, and that’s embracing Hollywood. You write about some very large new incentives that Texas is offering to people if they make their movies in Texas. However, it seems that there are some pretty big caveats attached to all this funding that Texas is doling out to movie producers.
Christopher Hooks: Texas, like most states, has had a film incentive program for many years, and they’ve tried to encourage the production of films here since the ‘70s. The film incentive program has sort of been an elite project here in the sense that they tried not to talk about it. And they tried to not do a large amount of money every year because it was somewhat controversial. There are a lot of conservatives who said that we should not be funding film production. We should not be funding Hollywood.
What’s changed in the last few years is that the amount of money that Texas has been allocating to film incentives has spiked dramatically. At one point the legislature was proposing spending $500 million every two years on film incentives. They cut that back a little bit, but at a time when Hollywood is squeezed because of AI and the streaming revolution, this is a huge pot of money.
And there are some visible strings and some invisible strings attached to this. The visible string is the “Texas Heritage Film Incentive Program.” The Heritage Film Program is supposed to incentivize the production of TV and movies that promote “family values” and “Texas values,” and those are decided by the agency which is controlled by the governor. So he decides what “Texas values” are to promote a positive vision of Texas.
I suspect in reality that a lot of what’s going to come out of this program will not be very good and won’t have major impact on American cultural discourse. But it is a little eyebrow-raising to think of Greg Abbott having a little pot of money to produce movies that have a message that he likes about Texas.
The invisible string, which I think is more important, is that there have already been some fights between the legislature and film producers about content that they think is politically objectionable. Some years ago, a director named Robert Rodriguez produced a movie called Machete, which got Texas incentives, and it had Danny Trejo and it was kind of like a Chicano grindhouse movie. I actually haven’t seen it. But the legislature thought that it had a racially and politically poisonous message and that it had a bad message about Texas. And so they clawed back the film incentives, which was a major hit to the producers.
In the future, if you’re making a movie in Texas, the business of film production being what it is, you are going to think carefully about whether there is something in this movie that the Texas legislature is not going to like because they’re very loud about their opinions. And maybe in the future, you shy away from making a movie that is negative about Texas or is likely to get unwanted attention.
Anne Kim: How are Texans feeling about all of this? And where do you see all this headed? Are the legislature and the governor going to continue to ratchet up these kinds of social controls or is there an endpoint?
Christopher Hooks: Texas for many years has been a state where 40-45 percent regularly vote Democratic, and sometimes it gets closer. They’ve been very mad for a long time, and they’re going to stay very mad. I think what folks here are looking at more closely is the question of whether the business groups splinter from what they see the Republican Party doing. What are the Republicans who gave money to Texans for Lawsuit Reform doing now that their political project is falling apart?
This is something I ask people whenever I can. And my sense is that they’re nowhere close from splintering and saying, “Well, can we make the Democratic Party the pro-business party?”—which would be a significant shift.
As for voters, the Texas economy is doing very well. And there are a lot of things to be said in favor of the Texas model—relatively cheap housing, a lot of people coming into the state. I think to see a really pronounced political shift in Texas, you would need to see a very deep recession of some kind.
But there is a possibility that there is kind of an invisible tipping point where the right-wing faction of the Republican Party goes too far. It’s just hard to predict what that would be.
Anne Kim: What does the Texas example tell you about the national Republican Party and how its philosophy is evolving over time? You say this all happened as Trump came into power, but which is the dog and which is the tail?
Christopher Hooks: Trump was an interesting thing to watch from Texas because he did seem very out of step with what Texas conservatism had been, and Texas obviously had a very long-standing and deeply entrenched conservative tradition.
And this idea that we’re going to replace international trade with autarkic manufacturing, that’s not something that Texas does or has ever done. Texas has a little bit of manufacturing, but it depends on Canadian and Mexican trade flows and always have. And Texas also depends on cheap labor. So this idea of sweeping immigration enforcement and deporting everybody is very bad for Texas.
So it is possible that there is a tipping point coming. But as a longtime observer here, I’ll believe it when I see it, I guess.
Anne Kim: Is there any chance that the tipping point is the redistricting mess that’s going on right now in Texas?
Christopher Hooks: Well, it’s interesting. Republicans should remember the example of 2006 and 2008 when George W. Bush was very unpopular, and the Democrats made big gains here. And also, of course, 2018, when Beto O’Rourke came within two and a half points of beating Ted Cruz, which would have been not the end of the Republican Party but a very significant blow. We’ll have to see.
They’re clearly doing this because Trump wants them to. It’s not clear that it’s in the interest of Texas. But we have not yet seen the really big blowback that Democrats here would hope for. But over the next year and a half, who knows what that holds for the country and for the state?
Anne Kim: It looks like this is a one-way ratchet unless one of two things happen: One, there’s a blowout in 2026 of the GOP, and that forces a rethinking of all the strategies that are happening right now; or two, the economy craters, and the Trump economic plan really doesn’t work out for Texas. It sounds like those might be the two things that could cause a reversal of some of this heavy-handedness from the Texas government at the moment. Does that sound about right or is there another possibility for how things could shift back in the state?
Christopher Hooks: No, I think that’s generally right. You’re looking for some kind of a national collapse of the Republican Party. And Texas is so integrated into the North American economy and the global economy that I think the tariffs, if they ever really go into effect in a meaningful way here, have the potential to really hurt people here and hurt powerful and interested parties.
Texas is a free trade, cheap labor state, and Trump is attacking the two pillars of the Texas economy in a way that is strange. It’s strange to see the Republican president doing this to his richest base state. And at the same time, you know, it has been pointed out to me that he has offered a lot of policies that are very favorable to California companies—tech companies and banks and this crypto “strategic reserve,” which shows a level of consideration for a very screwed-up industry that no Texas industry has gotten. Privately, people in industry are talking about this, but it has not come to the level of a public break with the president. It would have to get a lot worse for that to happen.
Anne Kim: Very interesting. Thank you, Chris. Really appreciate your insights, and look forward to talking to you again in the future.
The post How Texas Became a Right-Wing California appeared first on Washington Monthly.
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