Alright, Alright, All Wrong

"Everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure."— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America”

I got tired very quickly of Jim Hightower’s line about “there’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” It was clever the first 500 times I heard it but offered diminishing yucks through the years. Besides, he forgot to mention the movie stars, who stand on the center line in good boots, wave both ways, and step clear just before the trucks hit.

On Sunday, sixteen days before Texans vote in the most competitive governor’s race Greg Abbott has ever faced, Matthew McConaughey posted a six-minute video asking Americans to give up on the two parties and embrace independents. “I am not here today to endorse a candidate or party,” he said. “I am here endorsing two things: fairness and reality.”

Clearly, this is a man of great political courage. Fairness and reality aren’t on the ballot. Greg Abbott is. Gina Hinojosa is. Ken Paxton, a man who has spent more time with defense lawyers than most defendants, and hangs out with fugitives from American justice in foreign countries, is running for the United States Senate. Texans are voting on actual people with knowable records. Endorsing “fairness and reality” two weeks before that election is like a lifeguard shouting his support for buoyancy as a child goes under.

The Book of Matthew

That video plays like a Lincoln commercial that wandered into a civics class and the script hits the same notes, which include the road, the fight, and the original American spirit.

“Independent is the original road,” he says. “Before there was ever a Republican or a Democrat, there was an American.” True, and before there was a highway there was a cattle trail or a wagon path, but nobody is volunteering to drive the old dirt routes to Houston. The original road was also open only to white men who owned property, so maybe we don’t romanticize the original road, eh, bruh?

“A fair fight,” he says, “is when the fighters who oughta be represented in the fight are actually in the fight!” Matthew, you were invited to the fight. Texas held the fight in your living room. It’s ongoing, and instead of suiting up and putting on gloves, you decided to sell popcorn.

He asks the people who keep voting for one of the two major parties, “How’s that ‘unwasted’ vote been working out for you?” If he would listen, I’d let him know it has been working out about as well as you’d expect for a woman in Texas who is miscarrying and can’t get care until she’s sick enough to satisfy a prosecutor. Or for a family in a district carved up last summer because a president asked the governor for five more seats. Or for a public-school teacher watching a billion dollars in voucher money head off to the academies where the wealthy were already sending their children. Or for the parents of a child who is among the 1.1 million kids without health care in Matthew’s home state. Those voters know exactly how it’s working out. The man asking the question is the one who doesn’t.

Then comes the line that should go on a T-shirt sold at a gas station near the Capitol: “The extreme stuff can’t pay the toll.” In Texas, the extreme stuff doesn’t pay the toll. The extreme stuff owns the toll road, sets the rates, and passed a law making it a crime to ask where the money goes. And people like McConaughey just watch it happen and say they are “independent” from the extreme stuff.

Matthew’s model of independent virtue is Joe Manchin. “Joe Manchin knows the math,” he says. “He lived it.” Manchin did live it. He spent years as a one-man tollbooth in the United States Senate, enriched himself and his coal companies, and then registered as an independent on his way out the door. If that’s the template, McConaughey is telling us exactly what kind of politician he plans to be and he’s already performing in the role. His character is the guy who holds everybody hostage and calls it balance.

It’s Only Words

This might be unforgivable rather than merely silly and slightly dangerous if we didn’t know the man knows how to find a podium and use it.

In June 2022, McConaughey stood in the White House briefing room and talked about Uvalde, his hometown, where nineteen children and two teachers had been murdered. He was specific and talked about background checks and age limits for assault rifles. I consider it the best thing he has ever done in public, which includes all his movies, and it proved he understands that words from a famous Texan carry weight.

Then he went quiet. In the years since, the state he loves has gone through:

• a near-total abortion ban, with doctors afraid to treat women in crisis
• a grid that failed and left hundreds of Texans dead in their homes
• mid-decade redistricting done at Donald Trump’s request by a servile governor
• the gutting of public education funding by people who’d never set foot in a public school
• floods and fires and border theater

Through all of it, our folk-singin’ philosopher-poet-statesman (his phrase, not mine) had nothing to say about the people in charge of those devastating outcomes.

He did have something to say to them, though, when it came time to benefit Matthew. In the spring of 2025, he went to the Capitol with Woody Harrelson and testified for a state film incentive package. “We are immediately at the bargaining table for shooting more films and television and commercials,” he told senators. Unsurprisingly, the legislature passed $1.5 billion in incentives and it became law. A man who can’t find his voice on a dying woman in an emergency room found it on production tax credits. That’s a business plan that has nothing to do with independence.

There is also the photograph, if you want one. October 19, 2024, Darrell K. Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium, Georgia at Texas: Greg Abbott and Matthew McConaughey side by side, throwing the Hook ’em Horns. It’s a nice picture and the most honest statement of political affiliation he has ever made.

So independent he never made a choice

When McConaughey first flirted with running for governor in 2021, the Texas Tribune looked up his voting history. He hadn’t voted in a Texas primary since at least 2012. Asked whether he’d run as a Democrat or a Republican, he said he hadn’t “gotten that far yet.” He called party labels “small thinking.”

I think most of us understand what that means in Texas. For a generation, the Republican primary has been the real election in Texas. That’s where moderate Republicans were run off by the very extremists McConaughey now claims “can’t pay the toll.” A man who skipped those primaries for a decade didn’t stay above the fray. He handed his vote to the fray and then complained about the result.

He once said politics is “a bag of rats,” which is the kind of thing you say when you’d like credit for being too good for something you’ve never had the nerve to try. “Independent,” as he uses the word, isn’t a philosophy. I consider it a hiding place for a man who has never told us what he thinks about property taxes, Medicaid expansion, water rights, the grid, the border, or whether a fifteen-year-old rape victim should be forced to give birth. “I’m in the middle” is what you say when you haven’t done the reading and you’re hoping nobody gives a quiz. The man has no clue about policy.

None of what has been done to Texas will ever touch Matthew McConaughey. His family won’t be turned away from an emergency room. His kids’ schools won’t lose a dollar to vouchers. When the grid goes down, his generators come on. The wealthy are always comfortable in the middle, because the center line runs right past their gated driveways.

That’s obviously why his neutrality has a price, and he isn’t the one paying it. Matthew is arguably the most popular man in Texas. If he had looked into a camera at any point in the last four years and said, “Enough. What they’re doing to this state is wrong,” he could have moved votes, and maybe this election. Instead, he looked into a camera sixteen days before the vote and told Texans that picking a side is the problem.

That, to me, is a predicate, not independence. You don’t make a six-minute video about the virtues of independent candidates, who don’t exist in Texas, two weeks before a midterm unless you’re picturing the independent candidate in the mirror. He even said the video wasn’t about him “right now.” Not right now. Some other time, maybe 2030, after Abbott is gone and there’s none of his wealthy, influential friends left to offend.

He wants to run as the man who loves y’all, every one of y’all, and never made one of y’all mad. Not one. McConaughey is not a statesman and looks to me more like a natural-born politician, which is the one thing he keeps telling us he isn’t.

Just when his home state has needed him the most, Matthew McConaughey went out to stand in the middle of the road to smell the dead armadillos and putrefying skunks. Let’s hope he makes some choices before he gets run over by all his fellow Texans who have opinions and courage to do the right thing.