TEXAS IN THE FIRMAMENT

4/28/2020

As Texas grows economically, it will also begin to attain more cultural cache. Texas is becoming important, and importance breeds art. 

It'll be fascinating to observe Texas grow up in this way, because so much of what it represents is unfashionable. It's a fairly conservative place, its cities are neither dense nor walkable, and it embraces fossil fuels to an extent the mainstream no longer does. 

Meanwhile, people on the coasts have very different values. They're incredibly unTexan. But the definition of being hip is you're in tune with the cultural center of gravity--which just so happens to be shifting towards the Lone Star State at the moment.

As a result, cool people and Texas are on a collision course. What will that look like? Some guesses:

1. The cool people transform Texas from within. With Austin as their beachhead, Texas will come to resemble coastal America more and more, making its rise more acceptable to the cultural pacesetters, who will still be mostly concentrated in Los Angeles and New York. 

2. Texas changes the cool people. Perhaps Texan values, being sufficiently against the grain, will cause trendy folks to rebel against the mores of coastal hipness. Young aesthetes are always looking for a way to be contrarian, and Texanness may actually become their vehicle. Perhaps we’ll see Texas become a net exporter of culture to the coasts for the first time.

3. There will be a schism within America’s trendy class mirroring our country’s larger political divide: Hipsters and Cowboys. Hipsters will be classic, legacy city urbanites with traditional coastal views. Cowboys will also be urbanites, but they'll be concentrated in the sunbelt, less interested in politics, and naturally more ideologically heterogenous. 

There might be one factor that constrains the rise of Texas's cache: the dreariness of its cities. The state suffers badly from excess strip malls and parking lots—California does too, but at least the weather and topography are good. 

When I lived in Dallas I would often joke that it felt like a lazy simulation of an American city. Unfortunately, most Texas metros feel that way, even Austin. It’s too early to tell if this will put a ceiling on the state’s cultural ascendence, but I suspect that it will.

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