Editor’s Letter: Introducing Our May/June 2025 Issue

Texas Observer readers,

Three months into a second Trump administration, nearly a decade into the Trump era, more than a decade into the Greg Abbott era, and 22 harrowingly long years into the GOP’s unilateral control of Texas government, the forces of political progress in our state find themselves somewhere between stasis, retrenchment, and the abyss. 

There just isn’t much right now to prop up either cheap short-term optimism (backlash midterm) or grander narratives (demographic destiny). One may say the game has been rigged, but a critical mass of the state’s voters have simply continued to empower a party that’s been in control so long that its abandoned principles have abandoned principles, so long that charges of hypocrisy have no stable ground on which to land. 

School vouchers, the political crisis du jour as I write this (and most likely when you read it), are a “handout.” They are an “entitlement.” They are both more government bureaucracy and waste, and, if passed, will likely lead to more fraud and corruption (surely, DOGE will get right on it). But most Texas Republicans are unmoved by their own party’s erstwhile rhetoric. Politics is a game for power; they have it, and they’ll find new ways to wield it so long as they do. And logical contradictions mean little so long as you’re helping the right people (families with kids already in private schools) and hurting the right targets (unionized teachers, families who could never afford private tuition, the idea of public education as a social equalizer). 

Even if vouchers were to fall victim (again) to internecine GOP conflict, the general march toward privatization, toward turning public goods into auctioned goods, toward turning the machinery of state into little more than a high rollers’ pay-to-play game, is set to continue apace. 

And yet, people are funny creatures.

Look around, and you’ll always find those who stare down long, even unbeatable, odds and choose to fight anyway. Or, if not fight, at least find a way to live lives that quietly disprove the dominant political narrative about them, to “prefigure,” as the anarchists say, a society at ease with its own diversity and unsettled hierarchies. I think this emerges, in this Observer issue, as a subtle theme—through the story of a man off death row, becoming something the state claims he can never be; an uncle in Uvalde channeling irrecoverable loss into public office; Afghan refugee wrestlers succeeding in the country’s Mexican-American metropolis; and the everyday acts of small-“d” democracy at the state Capitol.

From this springtime issue, I hope you’ll come away not with erudite despair, but a grounded, tempered hope. 

Solidarity,

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