The message from Texas voters: We’re neighbors, not enemies

A volunteer for Taylor Rehmet, a Democratic candidate for the Texas Senate, grabs a stack of campaign postcards in Fort Worth, Texas, Jan. 14, 2026. (Desiree Ríos/The New York Times)

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

One of the biggest political lessons I learned covering the Middle East for four-plus decades is that there is only one good thing about extremists: They don’t know when to stop. As a result, they eventually go too far and drive themselves over a cliff.

That lesson came to my mind when I was reading about how a Texas Democrat, Taylor Rehmet, trounced his Republican opponent in a state legislative special election Saturday, prevailing in a historically conservative district around Fort Worth, which President Donald Trump won by more than 17 percentage points in 2024.

What struck me most was this paragraph in the Times story by our Texas bureau chief, J. David Goodman, about the result: Rehmet, “a machinist at a Lockheed Martin fighter jet plant in Fort Worth, said in an interview with The New York Times during the campaign that he did not like party labels and believed that voters were ‘really tired of the partisanship.’ He made his support for public education, including vocational programs, central to his campaign.”

I think those 10 words — “really tired of the partisanship” and “his support for public education” — are some of the most important words in American politics today.

I think many Americans are growing both exhausted and frightened by Trump’s scorched-earth, hyperpartisan, fire-ready-aim approach to the presidency, in which he’s been treating Democrats not as political opponents but as “traitors,” wiping out Democrats from previously bipartisan boards, slapping his name on the Kennedy Center ahead of JFK’s and lately even accusing President Barack Obama of “treason” — to name just a few of his inflammatory, divisive actions.

I think a lot of Americans are tired of being pitted against their neighbors and hunger to be brought together for a common purpose; they want common-sense solutions and to preserve our most cherished public institutions.

As the Times reported from Texas, Rehmet defeated the Trump-endorsed Leigh Wambsganss — a longtime conservative activist who “had helped propel a social conservative takeover of several school boards in and around the district in 2022.” Last year, Goodman wrote, “more moderate candidates ousted many social conservatives from the boards, suggesting an emerging backlash.” Wambsganss and her conservative compatriots focused on banning books about race, gender fluidity and LGBTQ+ issues.

But this Texas election outcome did not surprise me. A personal story: In October 2024, my lecture agent sent me a speaking offer from Pittsburg State University. As I live outside Washington, D.C., I knew I’d be able to get there easily if I got in a news crush, which is what happened. The week before the scheduled lecture the next spring, I had to go to Korea, and I returned just two days before the engagement. No problem, I thought. I can just hop over to Pittsburgh and maybe get back the same night.

But when I called my agent for my travel logistics, he quickly explained: “No, no, it’s Pittsburg without an H.”

“Where is Pittsburg without an H?” I asked.

“It’s in southern Kansas,” he said.

“You have got to be kidding,” I responded. “How do I get there?”

The fastest way, he said, was to fly to Chicago at 7 a.m., and then fly from there to Springfield, Missouri, and then drive an hour and a half to the Pittsburg State campus in Crawford County, in southeastern Kansas.

Oh my, I thought, did I get this wrong. …

Anyway, I made the trek. When I got there, I participated in a roundtable with students, an interview with campus and local journalists and a dinner with donors and faculty, and then I gave a talk, “An Examination of American Life.” The students were great, hungry to learn, and the audience — Trump won the county 62% to 37% — could not have been more welcoming. After I finished my formal lecture, I was interviewed onstage by professor Chris Childers, the dean of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences.

During the Q&A with Childers, he asked me a question — I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I do remember my answer, and the audience’s reaction. My answer was, to the best of my recollection: “President Trump says his favorite word is ‘tariffs.’ My favorite word is ‘public’ — public schools, public service, public parks, public universities, public libraries, public health, public transportation, public places. …”

Of all the things that I said that night, that line got the loudest applause. By the end of the day, I was exhausted and jet-lagged, but I was so glad that I had come to Pittsburg without an H.

And that is why I was not at all surprised at what happened in that special election in Fort Worth. I believe the most underappreciated political aspiration in America today is the hunger of many Americans — not all, but many — to be pulled together and not pulled apart.

I still believe that many Americans want to strengthen the public institutions and shared common interests that bind us, not to rename them all “Trump.” They want to see one another as neighbors again, not the enemy next door.

But — attention — progressive Democrats and the universities they dominate need to heed that message, too. They have not been blameless in generating our divides. As the Brown University economist Glenn Loury wisely observed in a recent essay: “For years, identity politics was treated — rightly — as a pathology of the left. It displaced the individual as the bearer of moral and political claims, and instead proposed group membership, defined by race, gender and sexuality, as the proper grounds for justice.”

Well, guess what happened, Loury added: The “right’s response to progressive identity politics has not chiefly taken the form of repudiation. It has taken the form of adoption. … What we are witnessing is not merely a backlash. It’s a convergence.” We no longer debate whether identity should be the battlefield, said Loury, only which identities deserve protection or priority — white, Black, brown, gay, straight, trans, Native American. We never talk about how our “shared citizenship could survive our grievances and differences.”

This is our collective race to the bottom. It is our collective race away from our national project — of making, out of many, one — and into a zero-sum national brawl over “Whose country is this, anyway?” And it is taking our great nation over a cliff. I am convinced that many Americans of all races, creeds and colors want it stopped before it really does tip into civil war.