I Lived in Texas for 35 Years. Here’s Why Alex Garland’s ‘Civil War’ Makes Perfect Sense

Sometimes a movie comes along that’s a controversy before anyone has even seen it. That appears to be the destiny of Alex Garland’s Civil War, a movie about a second civil war in America. Civil War is coming out on April 26, 2024, but the usual crop of right-wing grifters have already decided that the film’s release is some kind of ominous signaling from the woke deep state, foreshadowing events to come.

As with any dystopian media that eerily reflects our current late capitalist reality, online commentators are debating the believability of the film’s premise. In the film’s trailer, a three term president—played by Nick Offerman—goes to war with seceded states, including a Western Alliance of Texas and California. Many did not find this credible.

As a Texan whose family came from California, an alliance between the two states made immediate sense. When people think of Texas or California, they tend to take a narrow view of both places. Californians are hippies, liberal in the extreme, and fond of a nanny state. Texans are cowboys, horse riding libertarians who hate immigrants and love harsh christo-fascist politics. The truth is far more complicated. 

I lived in Texas for more than 30 years. My mother and her family are from the San Joaquin Valley in California, the land of Bakersfield, Fresno, and Stockton. Texas and California are enormous states with diverse and varied populations, climates, and cultures. Outside of the Bay Area and Austin, the politics align more closely than you’d think.

“Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento,” Joan Didion once said. I think about that quote every time I ruminate on holiday seasons spent with my grandmother in the shadow of the mountains. It was a small town of farm workers, trucks from the 1960s, and dust in the air in the middle of December. Huge swaths of California north of LA and San Francisco are like this. And farther north it becomes verdant. Vast forests and different communities with very different kinds of people.

California may have a reputation as a liberal bastion, but it’s the state that gave the 20th century two of the most consequential conservative American politicians—Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Nixon was born in Yorba Linda in Orange County. The OC is famous for its aerospace engineers, fat defense contracts, and conservative politics. It was a stronghold of the John Birch Society, a conspiracy-minded anti-communist group that boiled under the surface of conservative politics for decades. The death of “Nixonland” in Orange County has been predicted many times but it’s never quite come to pass.

Texas, like California, has vast tracts of farmland. Like California, it has enormous urban centers full of cosmopolitans speaking hundreds of languages. Like California, its local politics are largely dominated by one party that constantly fights with the federal government. Like California, it’s an enormous economic powerhouse with a GDP greater than a lot of individual countries. Like California, it has an enormous and historic tech sector that’s interwoven into the fabric of personal computing.

And people move between the two states constantly. Texans love to complain about all the Californians moving in. They were ruining the state, people said. Their politics would warp the place, they said. It’s not just high profile weirdos like Elon Musk and Joe Rogan. There’s tech workers chasing jobs in Silicon Prairie, people who want to purchase suburban homes outside of Dallas for a quarter of what they’d cost in California, and people fleeing wildfires. Throw a stone in Dallas and you’ll hit a recent California immigre. But the highways move both ways and, though a lot has been written about the exodus from California, lots of Texans move the other way. 

If it came down to war, two enormous states with similar economies, similar interests, and a beef with the federal government could easily find themselves aligned.