Texans Fighting the Keystone Pipeline

Here's a nice look at a fracture in the Republican coalition: Texans trying to block the Keystone Pipeline. From the AP:

"We've fought wars for it. We stood our ground at the Alamo for it. There's a lot of reasons that Texans are very proud of their land and proud when you own land that you are the master of that land and you control that land," said Julia Trigg Crawford, who is fighting the condemnation of a parcel of her family's 650-acre Red'Arc Farm in Sumner, about 115 miles northeast of Dallas.

I wondered, back when the courts held that the pipeline could use eminent domain to seize land, if there would be conservative backlash against a foreign company's taking land from good American taxpayers. And there is!

As I like to point out, if what you want is for life in your little community to go on the way it always has, big business is not your friend; it is capitalism, not the government, that is constantly transforming the American landscape. One day all the small-town or exurban Christian conservatives may wake up and realize that the Republican Party hasn't been representing them very well. We could see a new movement of conservative populism that is built less around fighting the government and more around using the government to keep things the way they are. Come to think of it, that's already the way things have gone with immigration policy, and it could well end up moving the Republicans toward other less business-friendly policies.