>For more than a century, Texas was under Democratic rule. The state was always culturally conservative, religious, and militaristic, but a strain of pragmatism

>For more than a century, Texas was under Democratic rule. The state was always culturally conservative, religious, and militaristic, but a strain of pragmatism kept it from being fully swept up in racism and right-wing ideology. Before the Democratic Party and Republican Party swapped platforms in the 60s and 70s, the Democrats were the super racist ones. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas#Politics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas#Politics: >In the 1870s, white Democrats wrested power back in the state legislature from the biracial coalition at the end of Reconstruction. In the early 20th century, the legislature passed bills to impose poll taxes, followed by white primaries; these measures effectively disfranchised most blacks, poor whites and Mexican Americans. In the 1890s, 100,000 blacks voted in the state; by 1906, only 5,000 could vote. As a result, the Democratic Party dominated Texas politics from the turn of the century, imposing racial segregation and white supremacy. That sure sounds like "fully swept up in racism and right-wing ideology" to me.