The Post-Trump Populist Revolution Will Begin in Texas—and It Won’t Look Like Anything Before

I want to be there when it happens.

Texans gather for an event. This is the real face of the state. Not the media stereotype.

History does not move in neat, orderly cycles dictated by the parties in power. It is shaped by struggle—by the poor, the workers, the women, the immigrants, the ones left out of the grand American narrative. And if we are looking for the next real populist movement—one that is not manufactured in the back rooms of corporate-funded think tanks by either of the dominant political parties in the United States, but one that rises from the ground, from those who have the most to gain and the least to lose regardless of party affiliation—then we must look to Texas.

This is not the story the ruling class tells us. They say that Texas is a conservative stronghold, that it is dominated by oil billionaires and cowboy capitalism, that it is an enemy of progress. But if history has taught us anything, it is that real revolutions do not come from the places the elites expect. Texas is not the enemy of progress most democrats seem to think it is—it is, in truth, the greatest threat to the ruling class.

The Lie of Left and Right: How Power Uses Division to Maintain Itself

If the ruling class has learned anything from history, it is that as long as they can divide the poor, they will stay rich. They pit rural workers against urban workers, white against Black against Latino, women against men, immigrants against native-born, all while they consolidate wealth and power at historic levels. Both major parties in the US are doing this, and the only winners are the wealthy elites.

The Democratic Party, once the party of labor, abandoned the working class decades ago. It sold its soul to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, AIPAC, and billionaires who donate just enough to maintain a facade of progressivism while ensuring that nothing fundamentally changes. Consider Biden’s Cuba policy, which was virtually identical to Trump’s, keeping in place harsh economic restrictions that hurt everyday Cubans and prevent families from reuniting—despite promises of a more diplomatic approach. Or take Biden’s immigration policies, where his administration literally expanded Trump's use of Title 42, continuing a policy that rapidly deports asylum seekers under the guise of public health, disproportionately harming Latino and Black migrants. Even on public health, Biden’s handling of Long Covid mirrored Trump’s denialism; despite millions disabled by post-viral illness (including me), he falsely declared that “Covid is over” in 2022 while dismantling pandemic-era social safety nets, including expanded unemployment and eviction protections that disproportionately benefited working-class Americans.

The Republican Party, once the party of small government and personal liberty, has become a tool of corporate America—not for the people, but for the billionaires who hoard wealth and distract the poor with culture wars while handing trillions to defense contractors, oil companies, and pharmaceutical giants. Under Trump’s last term, the GOP passed a $1.9 trillion tax cut in 2017, which overwhelmingly benefited the ultra-wealthy and corporations while doing nothing for working-class Americans, exploding the deficit they claim to care about. Meanwhile, defense spending has reached historic highs under Republican leadership, with Trump increasing the Pentagon budget to $738 billion in 2020, a figure that only continued rising under Biden, with full bipartisan approval—all while Americans struggle to afford healthcare and housing. The party of "free markets" has also backed massive government subsidies for Big Oil, including Trump’s $50 billion giveaway to fossil fuel companies in 2020 disguised as pandemic relief, ensuring that corporate polluters continue profiting while working people bear the brunt of climate disasters. Even as Republicans attack Big Pharma on TV, they refused to back legislation to lower insulin prices and prevent drug price gouging, protecting pharmaceutical monopolies at the expense of their own voters. At the same time, rather than address stagnant wages, skyrocketing rent, or the erosion of workers’ rights, the GOP keeps its base distracted with manufactured culture wars—banning books, targeting LGBTQ+ people, and passing abortion bans that disproportionately harm working-class women. This is not a party of personal freedom; it is a party of corporate feudalism, ensuring the rich get richer while the rest are left fighting over scraps.

Neither party serves the people. Neither party speaks for the majority. The United States is ruled not by democracy, but by an oligarchy of the ultra-rich. And yet, rather than organize against the billionaire class that exploits them, Americans are locked in partisan tribal warfare that benefits only the ruling elite. This is most evident in the strongholds of each party’s most loyal voters—places that will never birth a real populist movement because they are too deeply entrenched in their own culture war distractions.

In deep blue enclaves like New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., the so-called progressive movement is often nothing more than elite liberals policing language and aesthetics rather than fighting for material change. A perfect example of this is Suzanne Lambert, a Democratic social media influencer and self-described former Republican mean girl who has built a following among urban liberals by advocating that Democrats should "bully Republican women right back"—mocking their makeup, their hair, their accents, their clothes. This performative cruelty is mistaken for activism, while the actual systems of oppression—corporate monopolies, predatory landlords, and the billionaire class siphoning wealth from the poor—remain untouched. Rather than uniting people around economic justice, labor rights, or healthcare access, these coastal Democratic strongholds encourage more division, more outrage, and more “bad othering,” as Tara Brach calls it—deepening the belief that political opponents are not just wrong, but subhuman. Culture wars have degenerated to mascara wars.

Meanwhile, in deep red strongholds like Alabama, Mississippi, West Virginia, and the rural Midwest, Republican voters are kept distracted by a never-ending cycle of cultural grievances—drag shows, pronouns, book bans—while their wages stagnate and their life expectancy declines. These communities are fed a steady diet of resentment politics, weaponizing race, gender, and immigration to turn poor and working-class people against each other instead of against their true oppressors: corporate overlords, war profiteers, and Wall Street executives who fund both parties.

As long as these entrenched political bubbles continue fueling partisan outrage, no true populist movement will emerge from them. A real populist uprising—one that unites the working class across racial, gender, and political lines—can only come from a place where people still have to live, work, and coexist with different kinds of people every day.

That movement must, and will, begin in Texas.

Why Texas is the Ground Zero for a True Populist Movement

The history of true populist uprisings in America has never come from the Ivy League halls of Harvard or the gated neighborhoods of Silicon Valley or the gilden private golf course clubs like Mar-a-Lago. It has come from the fields, the factories, the sweatshops, and the union halls. It has come from people with nothing left to lose and everything to gain.

Texas is ripe for revolt for three reasons:

1. It is majority working-class and majority nonwhite. Unlike the coastal cities where elite liberalism thrives, Texas is a place where the working class still holds power in numbers.

2. It has no singular ethnic or political majority. The ruling class relies on division to survive, but in Texas, the reality is that people must coexist. Latinos, Black Texans, white Texans, immigrants—they all share more struggles than differences.

3. It has a deep anti-establishment ethos. Texans do not trust the government—not because they are radical right-wingers, but because the government has failed them, time and time again. The pandemic response. The energy grid collapse. The corrupt criminal justice system. The endless cycle of economic boom and bust, where the rich are bailed out and the poor are left to fend for themselves.

This is not a state that will be "saved" by the Democratic Party swooping in with billionaire-backed candidates and condescending campaign ads once Maga realize Trump and Musk have screwed them over and lied to them (it’s already happening). This is a state that will have to save itself, by building something entirely new, and by so doing, save the nation.

Texas Has Been Here Before: The Forgotten Populist History of the Lone Star State

Texas has a radical past that has been erased from history books precisely because it threatens the ruling order. The working people of Texas have fought back before, and they can again.

In the late 1800s, the Texas People’s Party—an alliance of poor white and Black farmers—fought against the corporate stranglehold of railroads and banks, advocating for fair wages, public ownership of key industries, and an end to monopolistic control over the economy.

In 1938, Mexican-American pecan shellers in San Antonio launched a massive labor strike led by Emma Tenayuca, a communist activist and granddaughter of immigrants. The strike—one of the largest in U.S. history at the time—was violently suppressed, but it inspired future labor movements across the Southwest, proving that workers, especially immigrant women, could organize against exploitation.

In the 1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs were rooted in Texas populism—the belief that government should serve the many, not the few. While LBJ’s legacy remains complicated, his policies expanded Medicare, education access, and voting rights, laying the groundwork for future battles over economic and racial justice.

In 2003, when demographic shifts began threatening GOP dominance, Republican lawmakers executed an unprecedented mid-decade redistricting to weaken Democratic representation. This gerrymandering scheme diluted working-class votes, targeted minority communities, and secured Republican strongholds, manipulating democracy itself to block Texas’s populist revival. The Supreme Court later ruled parts of the redistricting unconstitutional racial gerrymandering, but by then, the damage was done.

In 2021, following record-breaking Latino and Black population growth in Texas, another round of extreme redistricting was deployed to diminish the political power of nonwhite voters. Despite Texas adding two new congressional seats due to population gains, the new maps ensured no additional districts were created to empower communities of color. Lawsuits are still ongoing, challenging the blatant suppression of a potential progressive populist movement.

Texas’s history of economic justice movements, multiracial coalitions, and anti-corporate organizing has repeatedly been crushed—not because it failed, but because it worked. The question is not whether Texas will rise again—but when.

The lesson is clear: Texas is not conservative—it is controlled. And control does not last forever.

What Must Happen for the Movement to Take Hold

For Texas to ignite a real populist revolt, it must reject the manufactured culture war distractions that keep the working class divided. It must build a movement not around left or right, but around fairness, economic justice, and democracy.

1. Break the Power of the Corporate Elite

Both parties serve billionaires, not people. Texans must demand a government that serves workers, not corporations. That means breaking the real power structure: banks, hedge funds, developers, fossil fuel executives, and defense contractors.

2. End the System of Rigged Elections

Texas is not a red state—it is an anti-democratic state. If voting truly reflected the people, Texas would be a pluralistic, economically progressive, socially moderate state. Instead, it is gerrymandered, suppressed, and controlled.

3. Build a Cross-Racial, Cross-Class Coalition

If poor white Texans, Latino workers, Black communities, and urban progressives unite under one movement, the billionaire class loses control. The only thing keeping them in power is the illusion that these groups have nothing in common.

4. Free the Press from Corporate Propaganda

A true populist movement cannot succeed without a free and independent press—not one owned by the same corporate oligarchs who control both political parties. Texans need to wake up to the fakeness of not just Fox News, but also MSNBC, CNN, and every other so-called “news” outlet owned by massive conglomerates.

For decades, the media industry has been consolidating into the hands of fewer and fewer billionaires, shaping public opinion not to inform, but to manufacture consent for the status quo. Legacy outlets frame political debates in false binaries—left vs. right, blue vs. red—while ignoring the real fight: people vs. power.

Instead, Texans must embrace truly free journalism—nonprofit, independent news outlets and real indie journalists on social media, newsletters, and podcasts that challenge corporate narratives. From worker-owned news cooperatives to Substack newsletters run by citizen reporters, the future of honest journalism lies outside the grip of billionaire media moguls.

Most importantly, Texans must begin the hard work of deprogramming themselves from the 24/7 outrage cycle designed to keep them angry at each other, rather than at the ruling class. So long as working-class people remain locked in an us-vs-them war fueled by CNN and Fox alike, the elites continue to plunder them with impunity. Breaking free of this manufactured division is essential to building real power.

Final Thought: Texas is the Key to America’s Future

The next American revolution will not come from New York. It will not come from California. It will come from Texas.

Because power is never given. It is taken.

And Texas—the real Texas—is ready to take it back. And when it does, I want to be there.