Kudos to the Texas GOP
Although I now live in Chicagoland, I have deep roots in the state of Texas. My mother’s ancestors settled in communities like Lockhart, Longview, and Yoakum sometime between Texas’s victory in its war of independence and the time it joined with the Confederacy to split with the United States. And although I grew up in New York — Mom married a “Yankee,” as my grandfather liked to say — I spent several weeks every summer of my youth with relatives under the hot Texas sun. I continued to feel a gravitational pull toward Texas after I finished high school, such that I got my bachelor’s degree from TCU and then my master’s and doctorate from UT. So even though I no longer live in Texas, I continue to follow its happenings and its politics with great interest.
As such, I was very pleased recently to learn that the Texas GOP has decided to emphasize some important themes in its proposed 2024 platform. Although the party has offered food for thought on many issues, I am an educator and want to focus on those related directly to education.
First, I commend the party for emphasizing the need to return the Bible to its schools (plank #18). Too many students have forgotten the beauty, cultural impact, and contemporary relevance of the Bible these days. In particular, I think the Bible has a great deal to teach about economic issues, such as its teachings regarding Sabbatical and Jubilee years. As all careful readers of the Bible already know, Moses’s laws required that all debts be forgiven once every seven years (Deuteronomy, 15:1) and that all property be distributed equitably once every 50 years (Leviticus, 25:10). Biblical enthusiasts also know that Jesus specifically called for enforcing these laws in his own ministry, as recorded in the Gospel of Luke (Luke, 4:18–19). Of course, the Gospel of Luke is full of important lessons concerning the maldistribution of wealth, such as when Jesus warns rich people they have almost no chance of entering God’s kingdom and when in Mary’s song of praise emphasizes that the poor will receive “good things” while the rich will be sent away “empty” (Luke, 1:53). Finally, of course, Bible lovers will want to share the Book of James, that warns, “Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you” (James, 5:1). It is important for students, when weighing the fate of their souls, to understand the soteriological consequences of excessive wealth.
Second, I’m gratified to learn that the GOP is urging that all Texas schools be required to create a comprehensive program of instruction in Western Civilization” (plank #104). I agree that Western Civilization is full of profound wisdom — and that it would be an intellectual crime to deprive Texas students from all the lessons its classic texts convey. I would recommend starting with the Ancient Athenian, Plato, Socrates’s most celebrated student and arguably the first systemic philosopher of the West. I first read Plato’s Republic in my own undergraduate philosophy course at TCU, where I learned that the Athenian cautioned against economic inequality because it divides a single republic into “two [cities] . . . which are at war with one another: the city of the poor and that of the rich (Republic, 422e-423a). This is likely why Plato pursued the matter further in his Laws, in which he insisted that the ideal state was one in which the wealthiest citizens had no more than four times the property of its poorest. Students will enjoy learning about this.
But as members of the Texas GOP know well, the Western tradition extends out for more than two millennia. So they will want to save time in their lesson plans for Aristotle, who condemned the rich as “wantonly aggressive and arrogant” (Rhetoric), Thomas Hobbes, who warned against wealth being “gathered in too much abundance in one or a few private men” (Leviathan), Rousseau, who worried that inequality disunites citizens and sows the “seeds of real division” (Discourse on Inequality), and John Stuart Mill, who emphasized, “I certainly think it fair and reasonable that the general policy of the State should favour the diffusion rather than the concentration of wealth” (Income and Property). These are all important lessons the Western canon can teach tender young Texan minds.
In this spirit, third, I also want to applaud the Texas GOP for emphasizing the importance of “free market principles” (plank #104d). As the GOP knows very well, free market theory was born in Adam Smith’s celebrated 1776 treatise, the Wealth of Nations. Drawing on their knowledge of this text, the GOP knows about Smith’s concerns that “wherever there is great property there is great inequality,” and that along with that inequality comes “indignation,” “envy,” and political instability. These are important lessons that every Texas student deserves to learn about the birth of free market principles.
Finally, I congratulate the Texas GOP for its rejection of “Marxist ideology” (plank 91) and its insistence upon an account of “American history that is heavily weighted toward the study of original founding documents,” including the works of Thomas Jefferson (plank 90), who wrote in a 1785 letter to fellow founder, James Madison, that “the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, [is such that] legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property.” But I’d also encourage Texas schoolteachers to consider the important writings of Frederick Douglass, who cautioned, “Wherever the palaces tower highest, and enclose within their walls the greatest accumulations of luxury and wealth, there does the peasant grovel lowest in ignorance and misery; there is tyranny most secure and freedom most hopeless.”
I entirely agree with the Texas GOP that students ought to be reading the Bible, the treasures of the Western canon, and the American founders, all of which still have much to teach us, if only we have the courage to read them with the care and attention these texts demand.
David Lay Williams is Professor of Political Science at DePaul University and the author of the forthcoming The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx (Princeton University Press, 2024).