Jen Gerson: Maybe America is going back to the good place?
It's still early days, but at least one race in Texas has me holding out a little hope.
By: Jen Gerson
As a non-citizen resident of the subject state of Canada under the Dunroe doctrine, I admit I comment on American politics with the same trepidation of a woman placing a burnt meatloaf before a terrible husband at dinnertime.
But, alas, I have been captured by last night’s Texas primary. The cast of characters is pitch perfect. I have invested entirely too much into the symbolic weight of a race for Senate that I have come to believe represents the fight for the soul of America. The race is the bellwether of all bellwethers. I don’t even care if this is reasonable. I am invested.
First, let’s set the stage. On Tuesday night, three states, Texas, North Carolina and Arkansas, held primaries to determine which Republicans and Democrats would stand for their respective parties ahead of the midterms in November. Only one of those races caught my attention — the Texas senate race — and that only because of Democrat James Talarico, who, as far as I can tell, is a human slice of apple pie.
He first came to my notice thanks to a bizarre attempt by the FCC to effectively censor an interview between the up-and-coming politician and late-night host Stephen Colbert. The FCC wouldn’t let CBS air Talarico, purportedly due to a violation of “equal time” rules that seem to be getting very aggressively enforced thanks to regulatory guidance from the Trump administration.
No matter. Colbert simply re-shot the interview and put it online, where it generated millions of views and dollars for Talarico’s campaign.
Talarico may have been chased off the broadcast airwaves, but he’s been all over the podcast circuit, conducting lengthy chats with hosts ranging from Joe Rogan to Ezra Klein. Podcasts in which he expounds, at length, about being a liberal Democrat who is uncommonly and openly motivated by his Christianity.
From that aforementioned Klein podcast: "Almost every debate Jesus is in is with the religious authorities of his time and challenging, directly challenging, orthodoxy. So, I do think this is, you know, Jesus was a religious reformer. Paul was a religious reformer. And so I think when we're at our best as Christians, we are challenging religious dogmas and religious supremacy."
But although Talarico was raised in a Texas Baptist church and is studying to become a Presbyterian minister, his faith is a far cry from the Christian Nationalism that has taken over the Republican Party. In fact, Talarico condemns that form of power worship, not only as an offence to the state, but also to his own faith tradition.
"When religion gets too cozy with power, we lose our prophetic voice, our ability to see beyond the current systems, the current era."
He’s also willing to go where few progressives dare, openly talking about the spiritual malaise that underpins America’s current political climate.
What I find fascinating is that while Talarico derives his own views from actual scripture and serious theological study — and my own beliefs are mostly just a pastiche cobbled together from drug experimentation and intensive meditation retreats — I don’t see much daylight between his faith and my own.
I can’t account for that. You can see how I got hooked.
I like this guy. If he’s imperfect or prone to human error, I can only hope he’s ordinarily so. And if his Faithful Democrat brand is just a cynical schtick, I am not sure I want to know. After too many years of watching extraordinarily terrible leaders and politicians, I just want one genuinely good person in public office. I think we’ve all earned that.
On Tuesday, Talarico defeated Jasmine Crockett, who represented the best and the worst of the pugnacious resistance branch of Democrat politics. It’s not hard to understand this impulse; the desire to meet the moral degeneracy of the Trump administration with tactics that are every bit as pointed, vicious — and, ultimately, divisive. But in the end, the primary voters went by a narrow margin for Talarico, a big-tent liberal grounded in a message of “radical love” that seeks to find a common set of values with political opponents.
By comparison, let’s turn to the other side of the aisle.
Neither long-time Republican senator John Cornyn, nor pro-MAGA insurgent Ken Paxton, won enough of the vote to carry the day, and both will soon head toward a runoff.
Cornyn is a reasonably moderate Republican who has held a senate seat since 2002 — an increasingly rare breed in the GOP.
Ken Paxton may be one of the worst politicians alive.
If one were to create a caricature of a Trump Republican in Texas in this godforsaken year of 2026, it would be hard to come up with a better offering than Paxton, a man so scandal-ridden that he was impeached by his own party in 2023 for allegations of bribery, retaliation against whistleblowers, and abuse of office.
He’s been charged with felony securities fraud and was perhaps made most famous by an investigation by the Texas state bar for attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
As Steve Bannon was quoted in Politico: “Ken Paxton is more than just an attorney general that’s been MAGA. He is a symbol of the heart of the grassroots MAGA movement.”
In other news in Texas, we also saw a Republican named Tony Gonzales heading into a runoff against a YouTuber known as the AK Guy. Gonzales is quasi-famous for allegations that he slept with an aide who later died by self-immolation.
This is the rot of the American political system and, no, it’s not just limited to the Republican Party. Though one side sure as hell is certainly putting on a much bigger, uglier and more dangerous show than the other, these are the types of candidates that get elected because they hijack the most broken and extreme elements of the polity for their own personal advancement. They are the embodiment of a mentality that will elect anything, no matter how morally degraded, as long as it’s willing to hit the other side harder.
Everyone is sick of it. Everyone should be sick of it.
A Talarico vs. Paxton race for the Senate seat come November would represent one of the starkest choices for voters: a direct question about who Americans are, and what they really want; a religion of political repression, or one of radical liberation. And it’s not a question about left or right, but rather about something else entirely. In a country that has normalized rampant presidential corruption, extrajudicial killing of citizens and non-citizens, and … letting every name in the Epstein files pass without charge or much comment … are there still common standards of conduct and morality that transcend tribalism, and are voters still willing to enforce those standards?
I think what we’re seeing in America — and in other countries like Canada, we’re not so innocent — is the long-term consequence of undermining moral language and norms under the fear that these structures were inherently judgmental and oppressive. But reducing statecraft to an art of stale metrics and technocratic achievements hasn’t produced a more egalitarian or balanced politics; quite the opposite. Eliminating the foundations of a shared moral standard has only left us without the bar required to hold the criminally sociopathic “leaders” among us in check. Without a line — and a community willing to hold that line — all that’s left is the raw exercise of personal power aligned with personal incentive. The body politic, anesthetized by wealth, submits to surgeons who will say the Hippocratic Oath, but not mean it.
And I think someone like Talarico — provided he’s as good as he appears to be, and here I do not hold out perfect hope — is an antidote. Regardless of whether one agrees with all of his policies, that guy can speak to a genuine hunger for a moral outlook that is neither righteous nor instrumentalized. If that becomes the norm, then the norms will follow, and we all might begin to hold out some hope for a recovery.
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Well said Jen!
Talarico appears to be a well spoken brilliant young man, who is not afraid to call out corruption. His religion is an interesting aspect to him, that I hope doesnt get in the way of good governance. I agree he's a breath of fresh air, and a strong contrast to the right wing evangelicals that consume a lot of the oxygen in the US and Canada.
Thank you Jen, these are almost exactly my thoughts on Talarico. His Christianity is key to his electability given his John Stuart Mill liberal views. He is articulate and tolerant and perceptive and seems to have a North Star of integrity and respect for the separation of church and state.
Fingers crossed.