Welcome to Utopia, TX
This small town was envisioned as a socialist paradise. Now it’s Trump country.
Photography by Josh Huskin.
On the road to Utopia, Texas, I turn on the radio to hear some country music. I’m not even certain I’ve got a country station at first. The songs sound just like all other songs now, pickled in the same studio brine.
When I was a kid living out here, country music was key to our sense of self. Who were we? Simple: we were “Amarillo by Morning,” the 1982 version by Texas native George Strait. Songs like that made us feel like Texans, but they also bonded us to every patch of flyover country from Tallahassee to Spokane. You’d never mistake them for another genre — just as, we felt, you’d never mistake us for people who hadn’t watched a farm animal give birth.
Today’s deracinated mass culture isn’t as useful for compressing endless formative experiences into a single token of identity. But a TRUMP 2024 sign can make up some of the difference.
I’m headed to Utopia because I’ve just learned that the land I lived on as a child was once owned by the French utopian socialist Victor Considerant, who planned to build a commune there. I was raised on the site of an unrealized socialist dream. This is too surreal, too discordant with what I know about the Texas Hill Country today, to leave uninvestigated.
In the town of Bandera, I pass a building stamped with the words TRUMP STORE. Its facade is plastered with a massive portrait of Donald Trump sporting a cowboy hat and a rifle, his face twisted in spite.
When I lived here in the 1990s, grown-ups regarded politics as a personal preference and an impolite topic of conversation. Most were conservative, but I don’t remember the fire burning this hot. How did Utopia, Texas, go from prospective socialist paradise in the mid–nineteenth century to sleepy apolitical hamlet in the postwar decades to the beating heart of Trump country today?
I lose my depressing country station and settle for Christian talk radio, which warns of the perils of “filthiness and foolish talking.” The hills unfurl to infinity. When I was five, I thought that the undulating blue-green horizon was the ocean swelling with waves. It’s the peak of spring now, the air shimmering with butterflies, the ground covered in wildflowers. The town of Utopia was built on land bought directly from Considerant, but the name is a coincidence. It was given by an admiring settler twenty years later who observed in the twisting oaks and aquamarine Sabinal River the same qualities that moved Considerant to declare this place “a real little paradise.”
Considerant chose the location for its human aspect as much as its natural one. In his letters, he relayed with excitement that the Hill Country’s eclectic immigrant population had “none of the strict and often narrow uniformity of the pure American element.” Outside of Dallas, Considerant’s first Texas commune experiment, La Réunion, had met with hostility from religious and pro-slavery elements. When the Texas State Gazette caught wind of the project, it published an op-ed stating, “We note this advent of socialism in Texas as foreboding us no good; and we wish them to have a fair understanding before they reach our soil, that as a political sect our whole people are against them.”
But it wasn’t true that all of Texas was hostile to socialists. In the Hill Country, Considerant saw that people were “much freer socially,” with a cultural fluidity that evaded capture by reactionary politics. The region was popular with French and German immigrants, a considerable number of whom were, like Considerant, “Forty-Eighters,” veterans of Europe’s failed 1848 revolutions. Owing partly to their presence, slavery was far less common in the Texas Hill Country than elsewhere in the state, and Considerant believed a second colony would fare better there.
Considerant was not the first or only European radical to set his sights on the Hill Country. Among the Forty-Eighters were several outright socialists. In 1853, a group of Germans established Die Freie Verein (the Free Society) to advocate for higher wages, a public school system, and the abolition of slavery; its periodical, published out of San Antonio, is considered one of the first weekly socialist newspapers in the country. Others also tried their hand at intentional communities in the Hill Country, including one, Sisterdale, that was home to Karl Marx’s brother-in-law. Years later, Confederate soldiers executed a contingent of thirty-four dissenters, led by a German socialist, for refusing to fight for the cause of slavery.
Nonsocialist experiments were also underway: a cadre of disfellowshipped abolitionist Mormons, a group of religious women who divorced their husbands en masse and opened a brothel. Ideologically, this wasn’t the Bible Belt. It was the Wild West. This history cuts against the notion that there was something in the Hill Country innately unaccommodating to Considerant’s vision.
When I get to Utopia, I spot a sign posted on the general store denouncing Republican congressman Tony Gonzales for betraying Trump by endorsing the January 6 commission. Moderate conservatism isn’t even guaranteed a warm welcome here now. What happened?
A digital sign on Main Street shuffles through a sequence of messages:
WELCOME TO UTOPIA
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS
THE CRAWFISH BOIL WAS A HUGE SUCCESS. THANK YOU!!
Around 230 people live here, mostly in a small residential grid on either side of the main road. Beyond their tin-roofed houses and screened-in wood porches stretch open fields stippled with livestock and prickly pear cactuses. You can drive the town’s main strip in about thirty seconds, past the general store, a diner, a smattering of realtors and antique shops, a history museum, the school, and a gun store called Huntin’ Stuff with a Let’s Go Brandon flag flying outside. The town is plastered with announcements about the upcoming rodeo, advertised with a photo of a cowboy clinging to a bucking bronco in a halo of leather fringe.
The proprietor of Huntin’ Stuff, John Walts, was the local school superintendent when I lived here. I ask John how far America is from a real utopia today. He answers decisively that the country’s going straight to hell. When I ask him what a utopia would look like, he replies, “Most of us would really like for Texas to secede from the union — be our own state, our own country.”
At first blush, John is a boilerplate MAGA guy: he despises taxes, opposes abortion, describes himself as “pretty much against gays,” has some choice words for Mexican immigrants, and thinks there might be an armed revolution from the right if Joe Biden is reelected. For John, the horrific school shooting in nearby Uvalde, Texas, in 2022 only proved that firearms in schools are necessary to defend children. He describes the guns that he personally placed throughout my own elementary school while I was enrolled: a rifle in the principal’s office, one in his own office, one in a safe in the gym, and a pistol on his hip at all times.
But John also bristles at political disciplehood. Sometimes he speaks about Trump in glowing terms, as an outsider and a necessary disruptor. But other times he expresses reservations, denigrating him lightly as “just a New York City businessman.” John’s favorite thing about Trump is the ex-president’s refusal to be a follower, which puts John in an uncomfortable position, his admiration for Trump clashing with a perhaps deeper aversion to authority.
The son of a farmworker, John grew up poor in the Hill Country with six siblings. “I don’t know who they voted for,” he says of his parents. “We didn’t talk politics.” The first time he was eligible to vote was in 1970, and he voted Democrat without thinking too hard about it. It was just what everyone did. But that was the last Democrat John ever voted for. His defection was right on cue: between 1968 and 1972, vast swaths of rural Texas abandoned the party.
In the nineteenth century, the Democratic Party maintained a resolute grip on the Texas electorate, just as it did on most of the white South. But when Democrats began to embrace more redistributionist priorities during the New Deal era, wealthy Texas oilmen saw an opportunity for a counterweight in the stagnant GOP. They began molding it into a party that could both serve their interests and appeal to the electorate. From the mid–twentieth century onward, the Texas Republican Party was fundamentally socially conservative and pro-business, transformed by the oil barons into a vehicle for free-market ideology and opposition to civil rights.
However, for much of the same time, Texas was still dominated by “lever-pulling” Democrats who had remained loyal to the party. For these voters, the meaning of the party evolved over the years, a mishmash of “commonsense” liberalism and conservatism. Whatever reservations they might have had about the social changes of the postwar era, their lives had been undeniably transformed by initiatives like the rural electrification program championed during the New Deal by then congressman Lyndon B. Johnson, a native son of the Hill Country.
Texas conservatives faced a unique challenge in the form of the state’s enduring populist tradition, which had sturdier roots in Texas than in the Deep South. Formations like the Farmers’ Alliance and the Populist Party had a significant presence in the Lone Star State; in fact, LBJ’s father had served as a Populist Party politician. But even run-of-the-mill Texas Democrats often understood their partisan allegiance as partly a rebuke to the country’s largely Republican ruling class.
White rural Texans, hardly strangers to the seductions of racism, were certainly swayed by fearmongering about civil rights. But white supremacy alone didn’t persuade them to abandon the party that had literally illuminated their homes. One major tipping point came in 1971 with the Sharpstown fraud scandal, which implicated numerous high-ranking Texas Democrats in a scheme to manipulate stock prices for personal gain. The Sharpstown scandal unambiguously tied the Democrats to the worst excesses of big business, undermining the party’s New Deal credibility and inflicting lasting damage to its brand.
Many elected Democrats seized the opportunity to switch parties. As newly minted Republicans, they quickly adopted a faux-populist stance, framing their opposition to civil rights as a defense of poor rural whites against the looming destruction of their communities at the hands of corrupt urban elites. The electorate followed suit, simultaneously answering the siren song of racism and rejecting the entrenched power of the Democratic machine.
John cast his final vote for a Democrat just one year before the Sharpstown scandal. Thousands of other white rural Texans can say the same. In 1964, Uvalde County voted 55 percent Democrat. In 1972, that number was 27 percent. The Texas Democratic Party’s steep and rapid decline had begun. And the party of the oil magnates had managed to pull it all off while preserving the electorate’s populist sensibilities in denuded form, directed now at big government rather than big business.
John’s talk bears the markers of an inherited populism, his chief complaints centering on self-interested elites conspiring against ordinary people. Mostly the scenarios he mentions fall along typical right-wing lines. But he surprises me by slamming George W. Bush’s education reform program, having personally witnessed the implementation of No Child Left Behind as a public-school employee. “We felt in the schools that the whole purpose of the testing was to make us look bad,” says John. “They thought, ‘We need to make schools look bad, so they won’t keep asking us for more money.’”
I express my agreement, privately wondering if his skepticism of elites, his general mistrust and contempt for the crooks in power, is more politically flexible than it seems. At the very least, it occurs to me that no political alternative to Trumpism will succeed here without appealing to it.
When Victor Considerant arrived in Texas, he was still nursing his political wounds after participating in the failed revolutions of 1848. Charismatic and given to poetic, almost mystical flights of symbolic expression, he’d been a luminary in European socialist circles. His pamphlet Principles of Socialism: Manifesto of Nineteenth-Century Democracy had been received with great fanfare. He is sometimes credited with coining the term “direct democracy.”
Marxism, a form of “scientific socialism” that generally eschewed prefigurative experimentation with utopian alternatives, had not yet made its ascent. Many European socialists, Considerant included, were chiefly influenced by Charles Fourier, who advocated for small, democratic, and collectively run communities that would ensure harmony and a good standard of living, proving socialism’s viability to the masses and eventually supplanting capitalism.
For Considerant, Texas represented a new chance at social enlightenment and transformation. His letters to comrades in Paris have the breathless quality of a man staving off disillusionment. “My friends,” he wrote, “I tell you that the future which we have been pursuing for twenty-five years, the glorious transformation of the world … is now within our grasp.” In a state of apparent rapture, Considerant described Texas as “the flower of the United States, the pearl of the world, blessed ground.”
In 1854, Considerant convinced the European-American Colonization Society in Paris, dedicated to funding Fourierist communes, to support and organize the La Réunion settlement outside Dallas. It faltered quickly. Poor planning, the ill preparation of settlers who were unused to harsh frontier conditions (and quite disturbed by all the snakes), antagonism from reactionary political forces, and financial difficulties spelled disaster. Stung by the colony’s collapse and chastened by factional struggles, an embittered Considerant left after only two years, declaring that his former comrades at La Réunion should act “as if I were dead.” They didn’t stick around long to mourn his departure.
The prospective community at Uvalde Canyon, the site of modern-day Utopia, was a last-ditch effort at world-building. In Considerant’s vision, socialist settlers would be entitled to individual property, but the society would also encourage the development and maintenance of shared resources. Farmers would cooperatively invest in fencing, irrigation, and product sales, splitting the costs of expensive equipment among members. The society would also establish a general store to provide credit and streamline transactions for farmers and artisans, serving as a starting point for Fourier’s cooperative vision.
Considerant made the long journey to Paris to convince the European-American Colonization Society, which had funded the Uvalde Canyon land purchases in 1856, to pony up more resources for development. Fourierism was falling out of fashion in Europe, however, and the society’s resources were stretched thin. Ultimately unconvinced, it remorsefully pulled the plug. Dejected, Considerant returned to Texas and began selling off plots of Hill Country land in 1859. Over a decade later, when he participated in the debates leading up to the Paris Commune, his allies remembered him as a legend of ’48, while his opponents insulted him as an “old ghost from Texas.”
When I reintroduce myself to Morris “Mo” Killough, the owner of the Utopia General Store, he holds his hand halfway down his thigh to show me how little I am in his memory. Like John, Mo grew up “poor as hell.” He worked in the General Store starting at age fourteen, serving coffee to local farmers and ranchers at 5:30 in the morning. If anyone knows how the town has changed, it’s him.
Mo has never heard of Victor Considerant; no one I speak to has, including the history buffs at the Sabinal Canyon Museum. He wrinkles his nose at my mention of socialism. Still, unlike John, who has transferred most of his animus to the government, Mo also reserves a special hatred for corporate elites. “Big business and government are tied very close together,” he says, shaking his head, adding that he sees this collusion in the Democratic and Republican parties alike. “I’m not gonna sit here and take one side on which is the most corrupt,” he says. I ask him if he’ll vote for Trump. He answers, “Yeah, I probably will. But to me he’s as crooked as Joe Biden.”
Mo hasn’t been to the store the last couple of days, and he seems surprised when I tell him about the Tony Gonzales sign. “My wife might have stuck something on there,” he says, shaking his head. Mo’s wife is a die-hard Trump supporter and a frequent attendee of MAGA rallies. “I wouldn’t cross the street for any of them,” he says. Mo seems genuinely disgusted by both parties. He lashes out at George W. Bush, painting him as a war profiteer lining the pockets of his corporate cronies. In the next breath, he excoriates the Democrats, accusing them of cloaking their own corruption in the veil of identity politics.
I ask Mo if he remembers so much heated rhetoric when I was growing up, and he confirms my sense that it’s a recent phenomenon. “Everybody was pretty like-minded as far as politics goes,” he says, but politics were a private and trivial matter. All were assumed to be Republicans unless otherwise stated, but they were lever-pulling Republicans, just as their Democrat parents had been. After a brief flash of political consciousness fueling realignment in the early ’70s, things seemed to have returned to room temperature. As for the chatter at the store, “it was mostly about the weather.”
And then, in the mid-1990s, the men down at Mo’s store started talking politics again. I ask Mo what changed, and he answers definitively: “It was the television.” I immediately catch his drift. Our house up the road got Pegasus, a satellite television provider that targeted rural households, installed in 1992. “What shaped politics from then on was CNN news,” he says.
As the satellite dish became a fixture in every household, so did twenty-four-hour national political programming. Across America, rural people were abruptly thrust into a new virtual reality, their brains plugged into a mass media spectacle. And they weren’t just spectators; they were being asked to choose sides. The very nature of cable news, with its focus on conflict and controversy, demanded alignment.
The O. J. Simpson trial, war in the Balkans, the pugilism of Crossfire — suddenly there was a lot more to discuss over coffee than the weather. The siege at Waco, a few hours away, was particularly animating. “If people want to go and hole up in the hills with their guns, that’s their ride,” Mo says with a shrug. As for the government’s response, “I think it was one of the sickest things that’s ever happened in our country.” For Mo, the event called to mind that ’60s protest song by Buffalo Springfield: “Step out of line, the man come and take you away.”
The political realignment of the 1970s had prepared the Hill Country to metabolize modern conservatism. But it was the combination of emerging mass media and growing rural discontent in the 1990s that sealed the deal. As the ’90s rolled into the early 2000s, a new political subjectivity was cohering. Soon it was shaped chiefly by Fox News, which offered frightening glimpses of the outside world, a world of violence and chaos that loomed at rural America’s doorstep. The same government that would “come and take you away” was also seemingly entirely permissive of crime and social degradation in the urban environment.
On a similar timeline, the economy of Utopia started to change. In the 1990s, rural communities across America experienced a sharp decline in traditional industries brought on by globalization, trade liberalization, land consolidation, and automation. The result was typically population loss and economic free fall. But unlike many other small towns, the Hill Country experienced the economic changes without depopulation. Instead, it absorbed newcomers from gentrifying Texas cities, a mix of suburban conservatives who wanted to hunt, liberal professionals who wanted to hike, and priced-out workers who wanted an affordable place to live.
The influx sent land prices through the roof, making it increasingly difficult for local farmers and ranchers to afford their smallholder lifestyles. “The poverty is really setting in now because of the cost of living,” Mo says. Some of the poor are “meth heads,” whom I take to be younger people struggling with unemployment and drug addiction, while others are “elderly people, just grew up on a little ranch and never had any money, raising a few cows, sheep, and goats.” Today an increasing number of jobs in the region are tourism-oriented, usually poorly paid and seasonal. And there are plenty of urbanites milling around now, making them easy to blame for all the chaos — not to mention MAGA politics on hand to make sense of the transformation. It all seems to come down to one fact, per Mo: “Rural America and the inner cities are like two different mindsets.”
Before I go, I ask Mo what his vision of a real utopia is. He says that despite its problems, the town itself is not far off, and he tells me a story illustrating his point. Local kids were playing for seven different Little League teams all over the Hill Country, he says, signaling a need for Utopia to build a baseball diamond of its own. And so Mo and others canvassed town leaders, raised the money, and built the field. For him, this is a parable about community self-sufficiency and independence from outside assistance, which he considers a Trojan horse for subjugation to people who couldn’t possibly understand Utopia’s needs or ways. It sounds similar, in spirit at least, to Considerant’s original hopes for the town, a community where all invested for the benefit of all, where resources were pooled and the results enjoyed in common.
Of course, anything that smacks of democratic socialism is a nonstarter for Mo. Still, when he describes his own preferred candidate, Donald Trump, as “a typical frigging rich guy that takes advantage of people,” I can’t help but think that he sounds a little bit like a certain senator from Vermont.
After talking to John and Mo, I’m not sure this is the beating heart of Trump country. Trumpism has made major headway, but it seems more like an invasion of a foreign body, a superimposition of values from elsewhere hijacking local concerns and filling a vacuum.
My idealism is dampened the moment I set foot in Bandera’s Trump Store. The inside is like a Spencer Gifts for the MAGA set, full of cheap trinkets and minimally clever slogans radiating misanthropy. There’s one other customer in the store, a man in his late thirties. He chuckles at an item and mumbles “Hell yeah” under his breath. I slide over to see what struck his fancy: a bumper sticker that reads “Even my dog hates Joe Biden.”
I approach a woman in her seventies behind the counter, introduce myself as a journalist, and ask if I can interview her about supporting Trump for a story about the presidential election. She eyeballs me with suspicion and declines. I turn to the lone customer and ask if he’s up for a chat. He rejects me with a sharp chortle.
I linger over the merchandise: a hat that reads “Joe and the Hoe Gotta Go,” another reading “I Could Shit a Better President,” gag credit cards with the words “Race Card, Trumps Everything,” Confederate-flag folding knives. I sense the customer pacing near me, engaging in an internal debate. Finally he screws up the courage. He stands wide-legged and addresses me sternly. “If you support this, then this is the store for you. And if not . . .”
His unfinished sentence hangs in the air. Mounted on the wall is a portrait of Trump as Rambo, a bazooka in his bodybuilder arms. Below it is a T-shirt featuring a smug-looking Ronald Reagan accompanied by the words “I Smell Commies.” Maybe so. I certainly seem to have been detected.
Perhaps journalists are simply unwelcome in Bandera’s Trump Store on principle, or maybe something about me stuck out — some dead giveaway that, even though I’m from here, in a more meaningful sense, I’m not really from here. One thing about the projection of superficial political tribalism onto every aspect of culture is that the practitioner becomes incredibly adept at sniffing out a likely enemy. Hyperpoliticization turns us all into bloodhounds.
The episode jolts me back to reality. For a moment, I’d been toying with the notion that I’d uncovered some elemental disdain for elites that had been waylaid and could be recovered, perhaps even easily. I’d forgotten about the irresistible rancor at the heart of the MAGA movement. The middle finger is taken, and it’s pointed at us. I catch an unflattering glimpse of myself, a millennial socialist treading water in the post–Bernie Sanders years. Suddenly I feel like an “old ghost from Texas” in the making, running on revolutionary fumes, hallucinating opportunities that aren’t there. But then again, we’re now living in a post-2020 society in which hyperpolitics and hyperpartisanship dominate everyone and everything. How would an unannounced visit to an anarchist bookstore from even the most conciliatory Daily Wire reporter have gone down?
Driving back from my visit to the Hill Country, I call my friend Alex Birnel, a socialist organizer in San Antonio, for a second opinion. Alex has a convincingly practical take. The prospects for a realignment along more progressive lines in the Hill Country are dim at the moment, he says, but theoretically possible. Dramatic political recompositions are not unheard of, and new people and fresh perspectives are still circulating in the region. Left politics have regained a foothold in the neighboring cities of Austin and San Antonio, injecting radical ideas into the atmosphere. “The land doesn’t have politics,” Alex says. “The land has a story.” And now, at the very least, the plot is thickening.
In Considerant’s enthusiasm over Texas’s revolutionary potential, he wrote feverishly, “The redeeming idea is slumbering in its Egyptian captivity. Let it awaken. Believe in it, and the Land of Realization, the sacred ground, is yours.” His faith in Texas as the site of that awakening was egregiously misplaced. In 1980, La Réunion’s name was repurposed for Reunion Arena, home of the Dallas Mavericks — a heavy-handed reminder of capitalism’s triumph over the dream of Texas socialism.
But who knows what the future holds? Extreme political polarization can feel like gridlock, but perhaps it’s just history in mid-churn. The tension is mounting and will likely break in directions we can’t foresee. Despite their laughably pronounced differences, Utopians today share certain core values with the utopians of old: a desire for social harmony and stability, a mistrust of elites, a rejection of illegitimate authority. When history lurches forward again, perhaps some new political force will have an opportunity to speak to those commonalities.