Jim Hightower on Texas Politics and What’s Next for the Country

He’s also been an editor of The Texas Observer, president of the Texas Consumer Association, national radio commentator, columnist, and bestselling author. He currently publishes Jim Hightower’s Lowdown on Substack. Today, at 83, Hightower is still on the campaign trail, throwing his support behind the next generation of Texas populists like Clayton Tucker, who is running as a Democrat for Texas Agriculture Commissioner in November.

Here is how he put it at the Texas Democratic Party Convention in June:

This November fight is a landmark populist battle, pitting the greedheads and boneheads who are the powers that be against the powers that ought to be, the ordinary workaday people of our state. Who are the powers that be? Well, I call ’em the six Bs. They are the bosses, the bankers, the billionaires, the big shots, bastards and bullshitters.

On the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Barn Raiser sat down with Hightower to get his thoughts on the political landscape of rural America today and the populist strain of American life that he believes is central to preserving our democracy. Hightower continues to make us laugh instead of cry, fight instead of surrender and demand more instead of give in.

You were elected Texas agricultural commissioner in 1982 in the middle of the farm crisis. Some people would say we are in the middle of another farm crisis, or that the farm crisis never ended, with the increasing monopolization of our food systems. What do you think?

It’s one of the biggest issues that both parties essentially try to ignore in rural America. You do not have to explain monopoly to farmers because they live it. Everything that they buy to produce their crops—their seed, their machinery, their fertilizer—is controlled by monopolies.

And then when they go to market, they’re faced by another form of monopolies. Monopsonies, they’re called, where a single buyer controls the market, but let’s not get into detailed rhetoric here.

It’s the same thing. It is a concentrated form of corporate power that sets the prices on both sides of the farmer and then charges high prices to consumers. Wonderful system if you’re a monopolist.

What has changed and what has remained the same in Texas politics in the 54 years since you were elected agricultural commissioner?

Well, Texas politics, like elsewhere, is a continuum. And we have ups and we have downs. We’re presently in a deep down, but we’ve periodically been extraordinarily progressive.

The Populist movement itself started in Lampasas County, Texas, about 130 miles from where I sit right now, a rural area that was settled by tenant farmers out of the South who came to Texas thinking that they could make a go of it here. But they couldn’t get the good land. It was already bought, already controlled by previous residents and aristocrats.

So they bought land out there and nobody told them that, by the way, you have already crossed west of the 30-inch rain line that it takes to make a crop in our state. So four farmers in Lampasas County, meeting in a farmer’s home said, “You know, we’re going bankrupt. The bankers overcharge us, gouge us, and the railroad monopolies control our market.”

They were faced with these very powerful monopolies, but they were smart people. Most of them were not educated, but they were highly intelligent and very aggressive.

And so they were not going to take it. In 1875, they organized what became the Farmers Alliance. And that alliance later merged with the industrial unions in our state. As Stump Ashby, one of the progressive populist leaders, referring to the plight of white and black farmers, said at the time, “They’re in the ditch just like we are.”

It was a multiracial movement of ordinary people battling enormous and totally repressive corporate power. And they adopted a process that they called the cooperative commonwealth, where they could control the seeds and the fertilizer and materials that they needed and where they could also then control the marketing of the crops.

They could build cooperative silos and that sort of thing to store crops and to get a better price down the road. And then they became political through the People’s Party, as they called the Populist Party, which became a powerful movement that spread all across the country. Forty-three states from New York to California had the populist movement within it, and they were electing state legislators and members to Congress.

Even United States senators were responsive to it, as well as presidential candidates. And it created a people’s movement that was the most progressive in our political history in America. They were the first party to support women’s suffrage, the first to oppose monopolies, the first to outlaw lobbying, etc., right down the line.

And as a result, of course, the bankers and the monopolists conspired with both political parties to squeeze out the People’s Party. And they crushed the party, but they could not crush the idea.

That’s the important thing to remember, not just about Texas politics, but our nation’s politics, is that the idea of populism has persevered through thick and thin. And the central thought of populism that motivates populism is that too few people control too much of the money and power, and they use that control to get more for themselves at our expense.

After the populist party got squashed then came the progressive movement led by finding “Fighting Bob” La Follette up in Wisconsin. When that got squashed, then came the New Deal. And then came, you know, in the 1950s, Joe McCarthy and the right-wing movement that was after the New Deal.

But the idea persevered. The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, all of this was centered around that central thought that too few people control too much of the money and power. And that is an enormously motivating political thought in our history. I think it’s the dominant political thought.

It’s not theory, it’s very much real life. Populism has a political theory attached to it. But fundamentally, it’s your zip code where you live, and that tells you who you are and what you’ve got to do, and who you’ve got to unite with to battle the bastards.

The party of the New Deal and Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the Democratic Party. How do you think the party has misstepped in rural America since you were agriculture commissioner? And what can Democrats do to win back voters in small town and rural Texas?

It’s pretty straightforward. For one, you have got to get on their side.

And the truth is the Democratic Party, during much of the time that I’ve been in politics, has been on the side of the monopolists. We have an anti-monopoly law, the Robinson-Patman Act. The Patman in that act was Wright Patman, a Democratic member of Congress up in Texarkana, Texas.

And that outlawed the conspiracy of supermarkets to purchase farmers’ commodities at lower prices than small retailers and sell it for a greater profit to consumers. That act, passed in 1936, is still on the books. But the Democratic Party, following along with the Republican Party, has in the last 40 years refused to enforce that law at all. And so that’s why food prices skyrocket, even as farm prices plummet.

It’s a matter of the old labor song, “Which Side Are You On?” The Democratic Party largely left rural America—physically left.

It’s not a matter of going to the right or going to the left politically to win votes of rural people. It’s a matter of going to the people themselves. And it can’t literally be in the last three weeks of an election with a get-out-the-vote program. It’s about living there and recruiting organizers from there and showing up, just being present.

It’s the same as anywhere else, if you’re not there, then you’re not there. And people notice that. You don’t know them anymore and they don’t know you. And that’s what happened to the Democratic Party.

Looking at Texas today, you have Clayton Tucker, a 35-year-old organizer from central Texas, running for agriculture commissioner. What do you think his candidacy signifies?

He’s a bright hope for the whole Democratic Party. But certainly for agriculture and rural people generally.

 Clayton Tucker—sounds like a country song, doesn’t it? But he’s the genuine thing. He’s a rancher from up in Lampasas County, Texas, of all things. He raises goats and cattle and a little bit of everything there, which is what you have to do in agriculture today. You’ve got to piece together a living.

And Clayton is a very bright young guy. He was an organizer for Our Revolution, and a big backer of Bernie Sanders. And Sanders is a big backer of his now.

Clayton became active in the Texas Democratic Party, which was a sham, basically. And he formed the Progressive Caucus in the state party, which is now under his leadership and has helped elect many other progressive Democrats over the last few years.

It is now the largest caucus in the state party. And he has become a  true leader of saying, “Here’s what we have to do to take a stand.” And among the stands he’s taking, for example, is against the data centers that are sprawling and crawling all across our country.

These monstrous, industrial creations owned by literally a handful of billionaires exist to provide the physical power for artificial intelligence that will bless us with supplanting our jobs. The American people are discovering data centers in their own communities, and they are outraged about it.

Clayton has been very important in spreading the word about data centers and suggesting what to do about it. That has earned him support of people across party lines. He’s getting substantial support, including from the current agriculture commissioner of our state, Sid Miller, who is a diehard right-wing Republican, who was defeated in the primary by another right-wing contender Nate Sheets.

It turns out that most rural people don’t like data centers coming in because they’re taking the water in this water-short state. They’re taking the electric power and raising people’s utility rates.

But they’re doing something else, too. They’re taking political power because they’re buying off the county commissioners to get taxpayer subsidies to put these intrusive institutions on our land and over our people. It’s controlled by an oligarchy: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and these titans of God-like corporations who think that they are entitled to do this, who think they’re doing us a favor, wanting us to applaud them.

Well, people are not applauding them. And its building a new moment in politics in our state and all across the country of people who are rethinking that maybe we don’t hate our neighbors, maybe we need our neighbors and maybe we need to come together across stupid ideological lines and see what it is that we do have in common and join together and beat the bastards.

You have another candidate in Texas, James Talarico, who’s literally campaigning on the issue of not hating your neighbors. How is his race against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton shaping the political discourse in Texas these days?

It’s completely remaking it. Talarico’s strength is not only that he’s taking unabashedly progressive positions on what we need to do as a state and as a country to really rebuild “little d” democracy, but he is couching it in his religious belief.

He graduated seminary and studied to be a Presbyterian minister. So this isn’t a new, political thing. He emerged in a red county north of Austin to become state representative in District 50 where he stood up for workaday people.

And that led him to build support to run for the U.S. Senate, and dared to run, I would say, because the Republicans are a money juggernaut in Texas. Gov. Greg Abbott has, I don’t know, more than $100 million set aside for his election. Paxton is getting millions and millions of dollars from special interests to send his corrupt soul to the U.S. Senate.

And so Talarico is confronting that by quoting the New Testament, saying, the love of money is the root of all evil. And so he’s getting support from across the political spectrum all over the country, as is Clayton, because of his stance.

But then also we have Gina Hinojosa running for governor here, another state representative, a terrific state representative in District 49 and a progressive leader. She began her political career on the school board in Austin, Texas.

In the state legislature where she carried a bill to create health care for all in our state, making Texas the first state legislature to actually even have a hearing on universal health care. She’s a tiger and she comes out of the Rio Grande Valley originally. And so she’s going to energize a lot of votes in that area.

So this coalition is coming together. It’s a coalition that we had, for example, when I ran in 1982 for agriculture commissioner. I didn’t just run for myself. Ann Richards was running for state treasurer at that time. Jimmy Maddox, a member of Congress from Dallas, ran for attorney general. Garry Mauro ran for land commissioner in our state.

So we combined in a unity ticket—not unity for big money. But unity around the idea that we raise more money together than we could separately, as a form of political organization. So I could go into Waco, Texas, and say, by the way, let’s not only elect this guy named Hightower to be agriculture commissioner, but let’s also elect Maddox and elect Richards and get Mauro in there, too. We’re going to elect a government, not just one or two people.

And that conveys a real message to people that things could change. It’s not one person against the whole establishment. It’s at least four. And we might have others. And if the four of us get elected, that means there’s a constituency electing us.

And we can build on that and help other people get elected, too. That’s the way you build a government. Too many people in the Democratic Party, and nearly all of them in the other party, run for their own good.

They don’t even know why they’re running. They say, “Well, I want to hold the office.” Well, it’s not yours to hold. You’re supposed to use the office, put it to work for the ordinary people of our state. And that is a powerful, longtime populist political message deep within the ethic of the people of Texas. And so I think it’s going to be successful again.

It sounds like you can envision a blue Texas?

A blue Texas, but also a populist Texas.

A Texas that really does unite the workaday people, which is what Texans are. And, by the way, we’re not a right-wing state. We’re not a Republican state.

What we are is a non-voting state. Even today. We consistently rank either first or second to last in voter turnout. And that is because the Democratic Party quit being a Democratic Party. People were left with a party they didn’t want to be a part of. And so they quit voting.

As we approach the United States’ 250th anniversary, how are you reflecting on that anniversary, the state of our democracy and what it means for rural people across the country?

Well, the anniversary has been hijacked by Trump into a partisan show for himself—essentially his whole presidency is that. And so the anniversary as a physical event is almost unimportant. But it is extremely important in terms of what America is.

Because, again, you go back to the founding itself. The revolution of 1776 was not, despite what the little cartoonish history books tell us, a rebellion against tea from England. It was, in fact, a rebellion against the British East India Company, which was the monopolistic corporation of the British empire. And so the rebellion was against monopoly power.

Most governments at the time were autocratic, monarchical for the most part. But we had thinkers at that time, including particularly Thomas Paine, who said that the people are able to govern themselves. And by the people, he didn’t just mean, as John Adams did, that rich elites should be the governing party. In fact, they were appalled at the idea ordinary working stiffs could have a say in government.

So there was Thomas Paine and others, including, eventually, Thomas Jefferson, who said, “Yes, we need an actual democracy, and it needs to include the pursuit of happiness as our goal.” You don’t hear many people running for office today asking: “Are you happy? Could you be happy? What would it take? Maybe we should work for that.”

Talarico represents a return to that thinking, that all people should be the governing authorities, as opposed to those today in the Republican Party, with the acquiescence of the Democratic Party leaders, who want to exclude people. We have an electoral policy today that is driven by a desire to keep people from voting, which is a strange concept for a country that prides itself, at least rhetorically, on the fact that all people matter.

Oligarchs like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etc., are saying overtly they don’t believe in democracy, that democracy is against the human norm. And that those of us who are extraordinarily rich should be the ones to determine public policy.

Speaking of public policy, the farm bill is up for debate again. What would you say to Members of Congress who claim to be supporting the interest of farmers, but are really, through the farm, supporting a system of industrialized agriculture? What do you see as the best chance for rural people to fight back against this system that has crippled rural communities?

Well, those legislators, including Democrats who support the industrial model, are just simply on the wrong side of history.

The people themselves in the countryside, in small towns, in rural counties, and on farms and ranches want an honest system of democratic agriculture. And, first of all, that means taking on the monopolies. And then it means uniting with the workers in meatpacking factories who are horribly exploited, uniting with the environmental interests and the communities being poisoned by the runoff of synthetic fertilizers and then demanding accountability for the anti-environmental actions of the corporate powers who don’t live anywhere near these huge concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

The biggest landholder in rural America is Bill Gates. I don’t think he has any dirt under his fingernails, but he has more to say about making agriculture policy than all the farmers in the country lined up. But those farmers, if they join with those workers, as used to happen in the Populist Movement, and if they join with the environmentalists, and if they join with the rural communities and Main Street businesses, and if they join with the consumers, and if they join with people of color, then you have a majority movement going in the country.

So that is our challenge, is to pull it all back together again. We did that when I ran for agriculture commissioner. That was our goal.

And by we, I mean not just me, but the people around me and then the larger coalition that we brought together. We had the power to help form cooperatives to where they could take over their local economies and run it in a way that was little-d democratic. And we did that.

We had the authority to be able to focus. I was actually the pesticide supervisor of the state of Texas, a state that had more pesticides produced here and more pesticides used here than any other state. It was, and is, an enormously powerful economic entity, a corporate entity. We took them on and we enacted the most progressive pesticide rules in the country at that time.

And of course, that pissed off the pesticide corporations and their lobbyists. Nationally, as well as statewide. And so they came after us.

One of my aides told me, “I’m afraid the odds are against us on this fight.” And I said, “Some of the evens are against us, too. So we’ve got to rally the evens and the odds to a progressive program.”

The industry responded by getting Bill Clements, the Republican governor at the time, to endorse two bills, one that would make my office appointed by the governor rather than elected by the people, and a second that would move pesticide authority out of the agriculture department. But we beat them. And we beat them because we did not do the usual liberal thing, which is to fight inside, saying, “Let us reason together here and come up with a sensible policy that everybody can agree on.”

No, we went to the countryside, and we organized people, farmers, workers, consumers and labor together. And we took these outsiders inside. And when they held their hearing, their first hearing to pass these two bills, it was to be held in a small hearing room in the capitol complex.

But they had to move it to the House chamber, the biggest room in the Texas capitol building. And they had to do that because my lead off witness was Willie Nelson. My second witness was Barbara Jordan. And my third witness was the chairwoman of the Dallas Republican Women’s Organization, because it turns out Republican women don’t want their babies eating pesticides either.

We rallied a coalition, brought the people inside, huge turnout of people at that hearing, so much so that none of the members of the committee would make a motion to adopt the two bills that the governor was pushing. And that’s how you fight.

What words of inspiration do you have for people organizing today who are facing similar long odds?

Persevere.

You don’t win the first time out. You certainly don’t win every fight. But even well, again, Willie Nelson said to me once that the early bird might get the worm, but it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese.

You have to ponder that a little bit, but that’s what it takes is a long-term vision and a long-term organizing theory and principle, and a willingness to stick with it and keep expanding.

Even when you lose a political race, you win because you create organization and you create new people to run for office on your program, on your progressive ideas. You build, you lose, you build some more, you win. You build on that win to win some more.

But the powers that be always come back and they keep fighting and then they find ways to divide your movement. So that’s what you have to fight. But you have to realize that in the long term, the people are on your side and the progressive movement is what the people want because it’s not an ideology.

It’s results. It’s health care for all. It’s affordable housing. It’s having our community work together again.

And, by the way, it’s also a cultural movement. The original Populist Movement had bands, marching bands, and they held festivals all the time. They held dances. They had picnics constantly because people were isolated. They were not together. And so to get them together, you started with music and food culture.

Just to drop a name, Pete Seeger told me once that when he was young, he went to the Chautauquas in Chautauqua, New York, and his parents were active in progressive politics. He said, “I went for the girls and for the music. But then I got to listen to the speeches.” And so that changed him and that he changed other people with the power of his music.

To me, that is what a movement is. It’s not committee meetings. Spare me. It’s getting together and getting to know each other.

That’s what won the civil rights movement. I grew up in a totally segregated school system all the way through high school. And then I went to the University of North Texas that had integrated in 1954.

And there I met black kids from Denison, Texas, where I was raised in a segregated school. But North Texas was integrated. And so I got to know people, and you can’t hate somebody you know.

What’s the role of independent media in bringing people together?

Well, it’s essential what Barn Raiser does, what I do on Hightower Lowdown on Substack and on radio programs, what Judd Legum does on his Popular Information Substack, etc.

There’s a thousand flowers blooming. I know that’s an old hippie phrase, but they are. The legacy media has been eaten up by the monopolists and the MAGA crowd, but you can’t suppress independent voices. The original media of our democracy were the pamphleteers, like Thomas Paine, but there were many more than Thomas Paine.

The Populist Movement itself had their own publications, all very local. They had a speaker’s bureau, called lecturers. On any given night, 42,000 people could go out and give the message of the day. Just like you can’t suppress the Progressive Movement itself, because it’s based on ideas and ideals and passion, you can’t suppress the media, the progressive media, because it is that media of compassion and passion and ideas and ideals.

And so that kind of thinking about media is part and parcel of the progressive movement we’re trying to create.

What gives you hope these days?

What gives me hope is hope.

The people themselves. If I was stuck in a senatorial or congressional office or something like that, I would be despairing. And if I got all my information from the nightly news and big web media, then I would be depressed. But if you go anywhere in America, as you all do with Barn Raiser, you find people who are tenacious and thoughtful and creative and fun.

And that is what a movement is. And a movement is not a word. It’s not an organization. It’s not an ideology. It is a people ordinary people trying to figure things out. And you can’t stop that.

Again, four farmers sitting around a kitchen table in Lampasas County, Texas, launched an incredibly progressive, powerful movement. Those components are still out there, and I believe are coming together today to do it again.

Joel BleifussMore by this author →

Joel Bleifuss is Barn Raiser Editor & Publisher and Board President of Barn Raising Media Inc. He is a descendent of German and Scottish farmers who immigrated to Wisconsin and South Dakota in the 19th Century. Bleifuss was born and raised in Fulton, Mo., a town on the edge of the Ozarks. He graduated from the University of Missouri in 1978 and got his start in journalism in 1983 at his hometown daily, the Fulton Sun. Bleifuss joined the staff of In These Times magazine in October 1986, stepping down as Editor & Publisher in April 2022, to join his fellow barn raisers in getting Barn Raiser off the ground.

Justin PerkinsMore by this author →

Justin Perkins is Barn Raiser Deputy Editor & Publisher and Board Clerk of Barn Raising Media Inc. He received his Master of Divinity degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School. The son of a hog farmer, he grew up in Papillion, Neb., and got his start as a writer with his hometown newspaper the Papillion Times, The Daily Nebraskan, Rural America In These Times and In These Times. He has previous editorial experience at Prairie Schooner and Image.