Det finns två visioner för framtidens USA. Den ena representeras av Kalifornien med sin tolerans, sina invandrare, sin IT-industri, Hollywood och ledande universitet som Stanford och Berkeley och sin miljöpolitik.
I andra hörnet har vi Texas, med sin kristna höger, sitt högerextrema republikanska parti, sina vapengalningar, sin fobi mot HBTQ-människor och i allmänhet en kopia på Dantes Inferno, inte minst vädermässigt.
David Siders skriver i Politico om konflikten mellan de båda visionerna för framtidens USA: Trump fuels Texas and California feud. The two biggest states in the country are trading punches again.
The renewed animus between the nation’s first- and second-most populous states picked up recently in Texas, when state Attorney General Ken Paxton lit into California’s insurance commissioner for requiring insurance companies to disclose investments in fossil fuels.
Two days later, Paxton’s counterpart in California added Texas and three other states to its list of places to which California prohibits state-sponsored travel. Lawmakers in Austin floated the possibility of retaliating with a ban of their own, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott met California with a sneer.
“California may be able to stop their state employees,” Abbott spokesman John Wittman said in an email. “But they can’t stop all the businesses that are fleeing over taxation and regulation and relocating to Texas.”
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Now each state is its party’s bulwark, the largest source of electoral votes for either Hillary Clinton or Trump last year. .
Lawrence Wright skriver insiktsfullt och utförligt om Alt-RIGHT-rörelsen i New Yorker, obs inte för de minsta: America’s Future Is Texas. With right-wing zealots taking over the legislature even as the state’s demographics shift leftward, Texas has become the nation’s bellwether.