Germane to my post yesterday, paleoconservative blogger Christopher Roach has written a smashing article entitled “Perry’s Rapid Decline“. It confirms my suspicions in regards to Texan perfidy on the illegal immigration issue – the Lone Star State elite, as represented by the Republican Party and Rick Perry, are welcoming the Mexican invasion because they’re nouveau riche degenerates with aristocratic pretensions. Their xenophilia (as exemplified by Perry’s now infamous “you don’t have a heart” rejoinder) is nothing but a fig leaf to hide their Gone with the Wind fantasies:
Texas is a genial, wealthy, successful, and mostly capitalist state. It also has a long history of white coexistence with highly assimilated Mexicans. Starting 15 years or so ago, the state became completely inundated with Mexican coolie laborers. But the leadership of Texas–mostly white and Republican–doesn’t mind this for a number of reasons. For starters, a great many rich Texans aspire not to work but to play. They have gotten rich by having land in the right part of the ugly-as-sin Permian Basin. And these folks, not much liking hard work, have a very patrician attitude about Mexicans. They can’t think of this demographic without thinking of their loyal and hardworking servants. They believe just a little magnanimity will make them all successful, assimilated, and inclined to vote Republican. The Mexicans’ native political traditions and liberal-leaning domestic politics are completely ignored.
Second, Texas’ mostly white middle class, like the white middle class nationwide, is also finding manual laborer increasingly distasteful, so they are happy to have armies of Mexicans to mow their lawns, clean their homes, etc. Since these workers are illegal, they don’t make too much of a fuss and don’t qualify for a great number of social welfare programs. It’s not uncommon to hear Mexicans compared favorably to blacks, who are considered more dysfunctional and less hardworking as a group. Of course, the false dilemma ignores that Mexicans in America have higher social problems across the board, as represented by their epicenters in the Rio Grande Valley or East LA.
Finally, because of the higher rates of assimilation of earlier generations of Texans of Mexican descent, particularly in El Paso and San Antonio, the leadership is sanguine about the prospects of assimilating the latest batch. Facts don’t count. While there are some signs of unease among the working class and even assimilated Hispanics, these people are not part of the power structure of the place. Plus, money coming out of the ground, as it does in Texas, tends to make everyone happy enough with their lot.
When I was debating G.L. Piggy on illegal immigration last week, his argument of Texans wanting to “play nice” with Latinos smacked of a lame excuse, considering it belies Texas’ entire reason for existing – its white American settlers were so resistant to the idea of being beholden to Latinos that they started a revolution to free themselves from Mexican control. How ironic then that the descendants of Sam Houston and Davy Crockett are submitting to Mexican domination.
To put it simply, the Texan plutocracy is on the forefront of the Brazilification of America – our transformation into a land with a fabulously wealthy white elite living in walled enclaves, a mass of poor brown serfs scrambling for servant jobs and engaged in organized crime, and a tiny middle class struggling to hold on. They are enemies of the American people. Fortunately, despite their “Don’t Mess with Texas” macho posturing, these pick-up cowboys have a knack for being on the losing side of history. Just like how they surrendered to the Union during the Civil War with barely a shot being fired, the Texan elite and Rick Perry are surrendering to the onslaught of populist outrage against their indefensible positions.
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Another supurb example of why Texas remains a cancer on our poor nation, dragging it down into aw shucks barbarism. The Texas elite is very much like their actual and spiritual ancestors, the Antebellum Slaveocracy, who were cosmpolitan and for open borders (ongoing African slave trade) in their own exploitative, hypocritical way. The noblise oblige aspect of this is something the left seems to not fully understand.
The Texans surrended to the Union because the Comanche, despite overwhelming numerical superiority of the Anglo-Texans, were kicking the latter’s arses. These cowboys were no different than their coon-skin capped KY militia ancestors who ran like scared rabbits from the Shawnees and the supposedly limp-wristed Canadians at the Battle of the Wabash. In both instances, they need the Federal Government to save their sorry hides. Ain’t much changed, witness how Perry talked big before the hurricanes struck.
Please note, this commentator holds no sorrow over what ultimately happened to the Comanches. They were blood-thirsty bullies who got as good as they gave. Just, regarding the Comanches vs. the Texans, it’s one of those wars you want both sides to lose.
Fortunately as he was saying “you don’t have a heart”, all his constituents were hearing is “I don’t have a brain”.
Yes, but without little brown people, who’s gonna staff the food court at the mall??
OMG, I broke a nail!
I use to live in California and now live in Texas. I think politically Texas of 2012 is more liberal than California 1980s early 90s. California was against illegals and had open carry for firearms. Texas will not allow open carry like California did. Saying that if Texas had a referendum system I think that the majority of people here would vote to ban illegals in college and such. The supposed Texas elected leaders are more liberal than their constituents for some reason. I think a lot of it is the collapse of the Democratic Party here has allowed people to blindly vote for whoever the Republican is on the ballot.
It’s impossible to understate what a vicious and dehumanizing thing it is to say “you don’t have a heart” in the context that Perry did.
I am a paleo from Louisiana living in TN, who loves this country, but does not love it blindly, and I can say with much certainty that Rick Perry and TX politics in general make me sick. They have hijacked a once snooty, but very rational and practical political party and helped mold it into this low IQ guns and god, we’re basically democrats except we hate blacks party. I’m sick of Perry and Romney’s face.
It’s so bad that even a twitchy old libertarian has looked palatable to me for the past few years. I voted for Pat Buchanan my first election. I have been mildly sick voting for anyone since. Romney, Obama?? I wouldn’t elect them to lead the local PTA, much less the last viable superpower of the West. Spot on Ferd and I’m glad people on the right are slowly starting to realize the fractured nature of our side of the spectrum.
Been living in Texas for close to a year now. Outside of a few beautiful areas like Austin and certain parts of Dallas, this is a truly dismal state. Cheap bastards don’t even have streetlights here, because Heaven forfend anyone be expected to pay taxes.
During the American Civil War, Texans volunteered to fight for the CSA in large numbers and collectively suffered causality rates as high as any society has ever endured. But all in fighting in the East.
The “frontier line” with the Commanches did get pushed back many miles in some places during the war. But consider that Texas Ranger companies had been pushing the Commanches steadily westward beforehand.
Proph
In one year you have surveyed a State as large and diverse as France? Wow, dude, you must have put some miles on your pick up truck. Actually, your claim that Texas lacks streetlights gives a major hint about all sorts of things.
As I said before: Except for Ron paul, no good Prseident has come out of Texas, and most likely vever will either. Presidents from the Democratic party Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Republican Party both named George Bush have been a disaster for the country. The Bushes were better than Johnson, but not by much. Obama has been a disaster too, and this is why we don’t need to continue the disaster in different form by supporting Perry.
Great article. I’ll note that mean and cheap as hell attitude permeates other states too.
Colorado Springs had a decline in tax revenues a few years ago and rather than suffer a small tax increase to clean up trash in the tourist friendly city parks and keep the streetlights on, they decided to keep the cash, pack out the trash (allegedly) and forgo streetlights cause ya know they have flashlights and concealed handguns.
Now I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on calling the cities bluff but come on , I used to live there and know these guys. These people are well to right of Pat Buchanan and they aren’t wasting every penny.
Its a matter of people not having any trust whatsoever an attitude that as cruddy as Government can be at times is not remotely justified.
I am a very well off 5th generation Texan who owns a lot of guns. I had a 37mm M3 US anti-tank gun once but I sold it. My hearing is worth preserving and the neighbors were starting to panic. Anyway…I also own a ranch and raise Long Horn Steers who sometimes get up to 2,000 lbs and carry 7 foot horns; tip to tip. Just for the Fuck of it.
Sooner or later guys like me are going to say – Eat Shit & die, you basement dwelling generation Z pizza-eating, man-boob-wearing losers.
Love of servants accounts for a great deal of rich liberals love of blacks, and less obviously of gays. But gays have been servants of the rich as florists, interior decorators, dressmakers, and various kinds of artists for centuries.
Bush and McCain thought shaming the conservative base on illegal immigration would work, but it didn’t. McCain got the nomination anyway, based on the war hero thing, but neither Perry nor anyone else can play that again.
Are middle-class Texan’s getting done over by their elites like the rest of us in the West or are they on board with Mexican invasion?
Confederate losses by states, in dead and wounded only, and with many records missing (especially those of Alabama):
North Carolina 20,602<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<goddamm
Virginia 6,947
Mississippi 6,807
South Carolina 4,760
Arkansas 3,782
Georgia 3,702
Tennessee 3,425
Louisiana 3,059
Texas 1,260 <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<Texas
Florida 1,047
Alabama 724
Nothing compared to New York though:
New York 46,534
http://www.civilwarhome.com/casualties.htm
http://www.civil-war.net/pages/troops_furnished_losses.html
50% of the soldiers participating in the famous Pickett’s charge chickened out the last moment.
@Rum
Wait, is there something wrong with eating pizza?
I don’t think a lot of Texans are aware of conditions down in the border cities of the Rio Grande Valley. And to be honest, there’s not much reason for people in Dallas or Houston to spend time in cities like Laredo or Brownsville.
Anyhow, the level of poverty down there is quite astonishing. There is a town south of Laredo called El Cenizo that got into the news a while ago for conducting city council meetings in Spanish. In a way, it typifies the grimmest aspects of the border. It’s not so much a town as it is a warren of dirt streets and beat-down hovels.
After visiting that place, I actually felt kind of sympathetic toward their attempts to make Spanish their legal lingua franca. After this, this place had basically been ceded by “mainland” Texas, and the US at large. Why not make it official, and perhaps bring some attention to the situation?
Some might claim it has “always” been that way along the border, and in any case, McAllen or El Paso is no El Cenizo, and all of that is true, but… this is one of the reasons I feel very uncomfortable with the idea of trying to export Texas “prosperity” to the rest of the nation. Parts of Texas are basically run like the old Latin American latifundia system, where a small cadre of landowners basically lords it over everyone else, and prosperity is lineal, handed down from parents to children without any hint of “meritocracy” along the way, and few opportunities for the peons to crack into the elite.
The level of sheer hucksterism down in the RGV is correspondingly high. Since traditional American channels of self-advancement don’t seem to apply, people turn their attentions to scams and petty bribery and various other double-dealings. The McAllen-Harlingen, for example, is a notorious Medicare fraud hotspot on par per capita with southern Florida.
The weird thing about all this is the Protestant, Max Weber-inflected bootstrapper rhetorical gloss slapped on top of all this by Texan political elites like Rick Perry. In Latin America itself, peons accepted their roles as peons partly due to the influence of what I called “Fuck You Catholicism,” which basically informs poor people that they are poor because it is a part of God’s plan for them, and that the best course is acceptance.
In Texas, the “programming” is even better – the peons are instructed to believe that prosperity is a function of one’s moral worth. The wealthy latifundistos are successful because they have better souls and because they work harder, and God has granted them benediction. The peons are peons because of personal moral failings, and if you are a peon, then criticizing the latifundistos is actually a type of sin – you are calling God’s own judgment into question.
The question, I suppose, is whether or not this rhetorical model will actually continue to appeal to the bulk of Americans as they become poorer.
Lifestyles,
The quasi-calvinist, Jebus gave me a McMansion, mow my yard, peon, keep your gubmint hands off’n my Medicare and Dept of Defense pension, Texas Christianity is meaner spirited than old-school Catholicism. In Catholicism you have the great chain of being, linking everyone. People’s position in society wasn’t their fault, it was God’s will. So while a hildago might screw you over, while he forcibly screwed your women folk literally, he’d probably think, ‘poor schmuck, there but for the Grace of God…”
And Rum,
if Texas, hopefully, goes 3rd world-ified and one day, years from now some angry hombres machete-fy your beloved long-horns before going Che on your ranch, I’ll raise my beer-snob brew, from the comparative comfort of my mom’s basement, and say good riddance.
I’ve been to the 3rd world, buddy. Good luck having all that cash when you got to start hiring body guards and worry about your kids getting kidnapped. And get to work breaking bottles with your fire-arm toys. You’ll need the broken glass for the top of your cement-block compound walls.
And, on the Comache front. You Texans only reached a parity with them thanks to the repeating rifle, the Colt revolver, the fact that you outbred them, cholera and smallpox, not to mention said blue-belly assistance. The Comanche nation totalled something like 20,000 people in the mid-19th century. I repeat, 20,000 people at the height of their power, including old people and kids. Not the same as bossing around Mexican peasants.
And on the firearms, like primitive societies elsewhere, you guys benefited from technology imported from abroad that you spent no mental energy in developing. If it weren’t for that outside help, you’d still be back in the Piney Woods with your muzzle loaders, eyeing that Texas Hill Country.
Lifestyles,
McAllen-Harlingen was also an epicenter for the subprime thing. Personally, I wasn’t surprised. Some years back I was working down on the border, and nobody could offer me an explanation for where the money was coming from for all the construction and outsized trucks and suvs. The Medical Industry was everywhere down there. What I saw was a bilingual society, largely overweight, seemingly very cancer-ridden, living in hastily constructed, large houses, driving in suvs. And I’m not over-stating my argument on the obese thing. In Pharr, there is a large, multi-room, multi-themed bar called Graham Central Station. Not a bad place, but even the girls they had dancing were fatties.
Disillusioned
Apart from a few industrial centers, firearms were not massed produced anywhere in 19th America. Singling out Texas in this regard seems a little odd.
To call those ACW casualty figures incomplete is a bit of an understatement. Texan units were involved in the fighting from the beginning to the end. Good estimates put overall loss rates in the 30-40 percent range – which is about what France suffered in WW1. Nothing about this should be hard to believe. There is no basis for thinking that Texan units avoided losses better than others given the nature and duration of that war and considering how they were deployed.
FWIW, in the 20th century, from which good records do exist, Texas took combat losses roughly 50% higher per capita than the National average.
The only reason Mexico invited Anglos into their province of Texas in the first place was to push the warlike tribes away from their population centers.
“They are enemies of the American people.”
Word.
What else do you need to know?
And what else will spur White Americans to action?!
Rick Perry is TEXAN for “Charlie Crist”
Rick Perry revealed his treasonous colors in the debate when he said that those who refused his DREAM Act hispandering did not “have a heart.”
What about the children who,through no fault of their own,were born to African American parents?
What about the children who,through no fault of their own,were born to white parents?
What about the children who,through no fault of their own,were born to American parents?
Who is heartbroken about a kid from Oklahoma having to pay out of state tuition to go to school in Texas?
Why are our elites ONLY worried about the children of illiterates who illegally come to America to take advantage of free benefits?
Is Rick Perry and the Mexican government racist against native born American children?
Perry’s DREAM Act: Stealth Jihad
Radical Islam is terrible. Those who practice it and promote must NEVER be allowed into the USA.
Rick Perry would grant them citizenship and give their children special DREAM Act advantages over Jewish and Christian children of US Citizens- all they need to do is enter ILLEGALLY
Why no media indictment of Perry and Obama’s Open Borders TREASON?
Open Borders ALLOWS TERRORISTS into America
The 9/11 terrorists were ALL ILLEGAL ALIENS
The DREAM Act can not legally be limited to just illegal aliens from Mexico,Guatemala and others who our media seem to believe will behave in a passive manner and assimilate into English speaking culture.The DREAM Act,by law,must extend to the offspring of anyone who comes into our country illegally.
It is a magnet to jihadis from Pakistan and Iran who easily sneak across the Rio Grande .
A US citizen can be killed fighting muslim terrorists in Iraq or Afghanistan and the children of muslim who killed him will receive preference over the American’s children.
This is the inescapable logic of Obama,Rick Perry and California Governor Jerry Brown’s DREAM Act treachery.
The main problem I have with the discussions around this is that it’s always about putting these young Illegals in the back of the line, never about cutting them out of line. They are here illegally, they are performing a racial/ethnic cleansing of American kids on behalf of people like Perry. They should have no benefits and they should have _no access_ to a job. They can then deport themselves to their parents’ country or be deported, either way works. What doesn’t work is keeping them here and putting them at the back of lines. If you’re going to allow them to stay, then Perry is right, you might as well give them the best of everything. By their continued presence here, you are giving them your future anyway.
@Bruce
Amen- may as well change Texas to “Tejas” and Cali to “Mexifornia” or “aztlan”
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