Deep in the heart of (liberal) Texas

AUSTIN, TEXAS -- Liberals around the country took the reelection of George W. Bush hard, but nowhere was the pain more distinct and intimate than among liberals in Texas. This was, after all, the fourth time in a row they had yearned for Bush's defeat and lost: twice when he ran for governor, twice again for president. So when the comedian Jon Stewart appeared on a movie screen before a gathering of a few hundred Texas liberals on Dec. 4, he did what comes naturally to a satirist: He explored that pain.

The scene was the State Theater in downtown Austin. The Texas Observer, the gadfly magazine that has been home to such editors and writers as Ronnie Dugger, Willie Morris, and Molly Ivins, was celebrating its 50th anniversary with a series of panel discussions on the media, the elections, and the general state of things (in a word, dismal).

Stewart had agreed to send a "video tribute." Sitting at the familiar set he uses for "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central, he let out a greeting in the manner of a cartoon Texan bellowing "Yeeee-haw!" Except Stewart shouted "Shaaahhh-lom!" He then attempted to praise the Observer for all its fine work in making Texas what it is today -- the joke being that almost everything the Observer has stood for seems to have gone up in smoke.

"Here's to 50 more years of . . . observing," he said in signing off. "Because as Democrats, that's probably all you'll be doing."

It got a big roar from the crowd. Texas liberals, by necessity, long ago learned the importance of laughing to keep from crying.

But Stewart's gibe stung a little, too. The Observer was born in 1954 out of the determination of a small group of liberal Democratic activists to break the conservative hold on the state Democratic party, which at the time was the only party that mattered in Texas. They started a weekly newspaper (later to become a biweekly) that, under the editorship of Dugger (then only 24), soon disappointed most of the backers by proclaiming itself an independent voice that "will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it." Most funders pulled out. Its circulation never grew beyond 14,000 and more often has hovered around 5,000.

And as for that project of breaking the conservative grip?

"As we all know, when the Observer started, Texas was a one-party state," Ivins said to a crowd of 700 at the anniversary dinner that evening, "and. . . well, here we are again." Every statewide office and both chambers of the Texas legislature are controlled now by Republicans. And the contagion has spread across the country, and has seized Washington, D.C.

Facts are facts, and it helps to face them while surrounded by a few hundred friends. So the day's events were, oddly enough, perfectly uplifting. Any program featuring the likes of Molly Ivins, former Texas governor Ann Richards (who gave an uproarious talk about her irritation with airport security pat-downs), populist author and broadcaster Jim Hightower, and a performance by Willie Nelson is sure to be a good time. The question hanging over the event -- is history moving backwards? -- was answered with reminders of gains won and the importance of hope. If nothing else, people were in the mood to celebrate survival: "We're still here."

. . .

When I took a job at the Observer in 1984, in the year of the magazine's 30th anniversary, I got it in my head that the nation seemed to be trying to return to the complacence of the 1950s. Ronald Reagan had just been reelected and the specter of an amiable two-term Republican in the White House, along with general American contentment and liberal futility, called to mind the era of Dwight D. Eisenhower. When I looked back at the earliest issues of the Observer, though, I found the opposite of complacence: Dissent was bubbling up like oil, and Dugger and his writers were wildcatters.

We can see now that 1954 was, in fact, the beginning of a turning point. Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin was censured by his colleagues on Dec. 2 of that year. A liberal resistance was gathering. The journalist I.F. Stone started I.F. Stone's Weekly in 1953. Not just the Observer, but the radical magazine Dissent (conceived at Brandeis University by literary critic Irving Howe and sociologist Lewis Coser) was launched in 1954. (Hugh Hefner also founded Playboy, but that's a different story.) Critics such as C. Wright Mills ("The Power Elite") and William Whyte ("The Organization Man") wrote pointed critiques of American corporatism, conformism, and materialism. The Supreme Court had ruled in the spring of 1954 against school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. A civil rights movement was stirring.

And yet, just as liberals were getting busy in the mid-1950s, so was a new kind of conservative. It was in 1955 that a young William F. Buckley started his magazine, National Review. The prospects for a new ideological movement on the right weren't obvious, nor did they look promising when Barry Goldwater was crushed by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But the movement arrived with Reagan in 1980. The conservative mood of the 1950s was transformed into the conservative movement of today.

Where does that leave marginal, out-of-favor political magazines like The Texas Observer? Perhaps the best answers at the Dec. 4 event were presented in a short documentary made by Texas-based filmmaker Paul Stekler. "Every government needs a minister of irritance," said longtime Observer funder Bernard Rapoport (the state's only socialist-minded insurance magnate), who added that the Observer can be "the most irritating publication I know."

The film recalled the forays of founding editor Ronnie Dugger into deep East Texas in 1955 to write about a drive-by shooting that killed a 16-year-old black boy -- the kind of crime newspapers were accustomed to ignoring at the time. Recounted, as well, was an Observer investigation in 1999 of a roundup of dozens of blacks in Tulia, Texas, on trumped-up drug charges that turned out to be the work of one unscrupulous local police investigator. That story got little press attention until the Observer came along. (After a rash of national publicity, the faulty convictions were eventually overturned and the accused set free.)

Dugger, who is now an independent writer living in Somerville, is shown in the film saying that every blow against injustice is worth striking; it reduces the volume of injustice in the world. Later, I asked him if he were starting a magazine today whether he might prefer a name like "Dissent" (or even a magazine like Dissent) over the more reportorial "Observer." He thought not. Being an observer always meant, in his mind, "observing with a serious edge."

"It's active looking, and telling," he said. "That's different than the passive idea of being an observer."

Fifty more years of that kind of observing? Whether liberals are in or out of power, it will be necessary work, and we'll need more of it in more places, at higher journalistic levels, than we've been getting. Without active, critical observing, democracy withers. And when that happens, history really can move backwards.

Dave Denison was an editor at The Texas Observer from 1984 through 1989 and at CommonWealth magazine from 1995 through 1999.