Oklahoma was once a center of left-populism. Could it be that again?
Overcoming this roadblock would be a perfect task not just for the teachers, but for the parents and children we met. The Parkland kids have shown the power of involvement by young people. The same power can be marshaled in Oklahoma as well.
The key question is why voters in Oklahoma have not turned against politicians who refuse to raise the oil and gas tax. Some of them may have been convinced by the oil and gas interests that raising taxes would be bad for business.
More frequently, the anti-tax right has wrapped itself in the cultural right (if they raise your taxes, next they will take away your guns). Since Oral Roberts gained popularity in the 1940s, a coalition of extreme, self-reliant, anti-government evangelicals have supported limited government. They are the ones who choose to home-school their kids, therefore directly undermining public education, which they equate with “secularism.” Oklahoma has a very high percentage of evangelicals, and evangelical pastors played a prominent role in delivering the state to Trump in 2016 by stressing wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage.
But our impression was that most Oklahoma residents we talked with understood that the state is perfectly capable of collecting more revenue without driving away oil and gas interests, and that cultural issues were not as important as bread-and-butter ones. A revolt against the entrenched interests is brewing.
From Woody Guthrie on, Oklahoma was once a center of left populism. As recently the 1970s, Oklahoma had one of the most radical left-populists in the Senate with Fred Harris, the last living member of the 1968 Kerner Commission. It was the reddest state in the country in 2016 (not a single county voted for Clinton), but the teachers’ strike has the potential to transform political understandings and alignments in Oklahoma more broadly.
We interviewed more than a dozen Republicans there, and they all emphasized that the right kind of Democratic candidate (one who ran as a populist and did not stress cultural issues, like Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania) had a chance. Yes, Oklahoma is still deeply red, but the GOP experiment with cutting taxes on the backs of kids may have backfired. Even in Oklahoma, change is coming.
http://prospect.org/article/whats-matter-oklahoma
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