Houston functions in the book as a charged political location rather than a neutral setting. Its significance comes from the contrast between the city’s honored namesake, Sam Houston, and the libertarian culture the text associates with modern Houston: the same place is made to represent both resistance to the Confederacy and the later triumph of anti-government ideology.

Historical Association

Houston’s name is linked to Sam Houston, the politician and soldier whose career connected Texas to the United States. He supported annexation by the United States, became a U.S. senator when annexation was achieved in 1845, and later became governor of Texas in 1859. The city therefore carries the memory of a figure identified with Unionist statecraft rather than separatist defiance.

Sam Houston’s opposition became decisive when Texas seceded from the Union in 1861. He refused to swear allegiance to the Confederacy and was removed from office by the secession convention. He also rejected an offer of a Union army to suppress the rebellion because he wished to avoid bloodshed, retiring instead to Huntsville, Texas, where he died before the end of the American Civil War. Houston thus signifies a political choice in which loyalty to the Union and opposition to secession outweighed the preservation of office.

The Modern Political Contrast

The book sharply contrasts this historical association with its portrait of contemporary Houston. It describes Houston as full of libertarians who oppose everything Sam Houston stood for, treating that condition as a betrayal of the city’s namesake. Sam Houston is characterized as a strong statist who hated separatists and secessionists and remained loyal to the Union against the racist, white-supremacist Confederacy.

This contrast is part of a larger argument about the American right. The text associates right-wing politics with hostility toward government, collective responsibility, and the state’s capacity to restrain concentrated wealth. It describes the modern Republican movement as a “New Confederacy” and argues that the same political forces defend unrestrained predatory capitalism, even presenting capitalist employment as a modern form of slavery. Houston becomes a local emblem of that historical reversal: the place named for a Unionist is said to have embraced an ideology opposed to his commitments.

Houston as a Rhetorical Symbol

Houston also serves as evidence in the book’s broader struggle over historical memory. The text frames the American Civil War as a conflict over the permissible nature of capitalism, especially whether slavery could be accepted as a means of maximizing profit. It places contemporary right-wing resistance to taxation and government regulation in continuity with Confederate hostility to state interference, while invoking Abraham Lincoln’s argument that a house divided between slavery and freedom could not permanently endure.

Within this rhetorical structure, Houston is not developed through ordinary urban description. No streets, buildings, neighborhoods, or daily civic life are supplied. Instead, the city is used as a symbolic location where two political histories collide: Sam Houston’s Unionism and the libertarian, anti-statist culture attributed to the present-day city. The location’s narrative force lies in that contradiction rather than in physical geography.

Judgment and Narrative Function

The narrator’s treatment of Houston is openly polemical. It calls the city’s alleged political transformation shameful and generalizes from Houston to Texans, claiming that people from the city predictably reproduce the far-right culture in which they were raised and are incapable of independent thought. This is not a balanced sociological account of Houston; it is an aggressive denunciation that turns the location into a shorthand for ideological conditioning.

That denunciation echoes the book’s recurring claim that political subjects are manipulated by an Ownership Class whose power depends on making the 99 percent serve the interests of the 1 percent. The same interpretive pattern appears in the discussion of Donald Trump, whose insurgency is described as a return of Confederate-style rule, and in the analysis of They Live, where hidden signals conceal an elite system of domination. Houston is therefore folded into a national allegory: a city associated with a Unionist dissenter is recast as a site where the ideology of the New Confederacy has become culturally dominant.