On Texas

Back in the aphorisms from 2015 on the archive, there's a kind of bitter comment about Texas being an Anglo-Mestizo state with a Yankee millennarian soul.  I'm not sure that's true anymore, having studied more about where America's hearth cultures originated.  Texas is, like many other states, a hybrid.  The Anglo subcultures were the Greater Appalachian and Deep Southern, both with their own rather primitive and looked down upon strains of religiosity (from the perspective of mainline Yankees, but also the wider Western world, being that they're closer in mindset to them).  And on the Hispanic side of things, the Texan type comes from the Northern New Spain type, which was always distinct from the rest of Mexico.  This was a place of desperadoes, revolutionaries, ranchers, religious cranks and con artists.  So Texas comes from a rather odd context on all sides.

The western part of the state is most influenced by New Spain, but of the eastern part, the cities Dallas and Austin would be Greater Appalachian, and Houston and eastward would be Deep Southern.  San Antonio is where some of each of the cultures meet.  There's one thing that seems to unite Texans and that's the love of money and they do graft on a grand scale.  Deep Southern culture originates from Barbadian slave plantations.  They love them some cheap labor and that explains why they eventually welcomed the invasion from Mexico (or, more recently, from all over the world).  The Greater Appalachian type seems to have faded into the background in favor of the Deep South, at least from the Anglo point of view.  Vestiges of the former remain in the countryside, but it turns out the Deep Southern type adapted well to giant metropolises as much, or better, than it did to plantations.  There's probably something to be learned from that.

Graft is the heart and soul of Texas.  You can take a look at the cities there to get a feeling for what motivates them.  Oftentimes, dissidents on the internet talk about "bugmen" as the dominant type of mankind in cities today.  These are generally soul-sucked husks of humans with bizarre or degenerated physiognomy, no internal monologue because they have had their senses (including subtle ones like intuition) dulled from birth, and generally unhinged political and social beliefs which reflect being oversocialized and living in a high anxiety social and economic context.  This most often is used to describe the kind of people you'd find in a city like New York, Boston, San Francisco, or Seattle.  But they exist down south too, in a different form.  And Texas is full of them.  Texas has some of the worst urban development I've ever seen.  Along with California and Florida, it looks like a third worlders' conception of what the first world should be.  Despite Texas having abundant space, houses are crammed together in a claustrophobic way and barely even have any room for a lawn, and this goes on for hundreds of square miles.  I don't know how they can stand to live that way, but stand it they do.  It has profound psychic and physical effects to live that way.  Texans don't strike me as a terribly balanced people; they have the reputation of being loud, fat, rude, arrogant and venal.

People generally think of Texas as conservative.  I wonder what that term means anymore.  Big business in Texas is all about the graft.  If they could find a way to make left-wing ideology into graft, they would.  As a matter of fact, they have.  Texan businesses have realized that the government (and so, ultimately, the taxpayers) are the bestower of manna in our time.  And so they have embraced the ways of big government, just as they embraced big everything else.  If you want a recent example of this, look no further than the ERCOT ice storm/renewable energy disaster of 2021.  They got on the "green energy" gravy train and it bit them in the rear, big time.  But that's OK, Texans are used to it.  Their whole economy is built on this sort of thing.  The housing pattern I described above exists because developers realized they could make mega bucks by cramming as many people, citizen or alien, into these cramped 'hoods, and well, people have bought them so it's not as if there isn't demand for this way of life.  Of course, you as an individual pay, and pay plenty, for this kind of thing to go on, should you choose to dwell there.  Texas is known for its exorbitant property assessments and high cost of living generally, and in the urban areas (where most Texans live) in particular.

It's funny to think about California, Texas and Florida and how they represent the Unholy Trinity of American development in the 21st century, each with their own spin on it.  While northern states like Minnesota or Illinois or New York/New Jersey just decline from poor leadership, 2 of these 3 states have found a viral recipe for growth in an age of general decline.  It seems that these 3 former Spanish colonies are the place where the Anglo soul went to die.  Something else quite mutated, but with a sort of memetic vitality emerged in the sunnier climes of the southern part of the 48.  But Texas stands out even from this odd bunch.  It's sui generis.  Truthfully, a lot more could be written about it, and I think it's worth thinking about, because I get the feeling Texas is going to be more, not less, important to American affairs in the coming years as the old states which used to dominate America (e.g. on the coasts or in Yankeedom) continue inexorably on the path of decline.