Texas Conservatives and Puritans

Once a Texas conservative told a government official, “You are supposed to be working for me.”

My response: You and 300 million other people.

I have seen a problematic attitude in Texas conservatives. They think that they are the real America and that nobody else is. America is a vast and diverse country that owes to all sorts of people who are not Texas conservatives. The blacks staffed its plantations; the Chinese built its railroads; the Hindus dominate its computer industry. America owes to Jews who have a vast presence in science, finance and entertainment; to blacks who form the majority of America’s athletes and many of its actors, musicians and poets; to liberals in academia, schools and the press; to union labor in the Great Lakes states. Nobody denies that Texas conservatives are Americans. They however are not the only Americans, and most working law-abiding Americans are not them.

Similarly we see people claiming America’s Puritan heritage to be its traditional values. That is also incorrect. Most Americans are not descended from the Puritans. They are descended from the immigrants all around the world, who all had their own traditions. “Family values” precede America by millennia, and they are more advanced in most of the world.  Are “family values” the root of America’s greatness? They are also practiced in Zambia, Bolivia and Iran. As for the Puritans, they compose a miniscule portion of America’s population, and it is completely wrong for them to be seen as embodying the values of America.

Why do these people get away with their false claims? Probably because nobody is challenging them. These kinds of cognitions need to be challenged in American public debate. Wrong beliefs actualize in wrong action, and for as long as people have these beliefs they are going to do wrong. And it becomes one’s patriotic duty before America to confront such things.