As embarrassing as it is for Texans to admit to outsiders, who know him mostly for his comically inept 2012 presidential run, Mr. Perry outwitted pretty much everyone in the state for about 16 years. He was a masterful politician, selected to be Gov. George W. Bush’s second-in-command in 1998 under the misapprehension he would be pliable.

In a sense he was our Tito, as in Josip Broz, the dictator who ruled Yugoslavia from World War II to his death in 1980. Yugoslavia was a powder keg, a hopelessly complex patchwork held together by Tito. The Republican Party of Texas, too, was a patchwork. When it became truly dominant, it grew to encompass a variety of seemingly contradictory political tendencies: good-ol’-boy rural conservatives, big-city chambers of commerce, fire-breathing evangelical warriors, white-shoe professionals, white-pride populists and a surprising number of nonwhite voters. On top of that, Texas encompasses a bewildering political environment that consists of five of the nation’s 20 largest cities, each its own planet, and vast rural areas that have little in common with one another.

How do you keep that together? Just as Tito did: nationalism and flexible political principles. Republicans waved the Texas flag harder than Democrats did. Mr. Perry’s first decade was taken up, in the true manner of an Eastern Bloc dictator, with expansive infrastructure projects — his own 10-year plan — until that became unpopular and he became a Tea Party guy. He could be pro-immigrant, a border hawk, a warrior for Christ, whatever you needed.

His long tenure froze the Republican hierarchy and the ambitions of its apparatchiks under him. When he left, the lieutenant governor and attorney general had all been in place for over a decade, and many of the state’s Republican members of Congress were hardened vets, too (with the notable exception of Ted Cruz).

Then Mr. Perry stepped down. The succession appeared to go flawlessly — but it was harder than ever to say what exactly the Republican Party of Texas was about. The new governor, Greg Abbott, didn’t appear to want to do anything. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, an eccentric suburban Christian soldier who unnerved many in his own party, immediately went to war with House Speaker Joe Straus, a moderate Jewish Republican from the leafier parts of San Antonio. Attorney General Ken Paxton was quickly indicted on a charge of felony securities fraud.