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How West Texas Created American Conservatism
For the first Europeans to encounter it, the Llano Estacado was a portal to madness. It was a “worthless and terrifying hellscape,” as Jeff Roche describes it in The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right (University of Texas Press), a mostly affectionate account of West Texas’s distinct political traditions. These newcomers found an endless grassland with little surface water and weird weather—“sublime,” the explorer Albert Pike wrote in 1831. Roche reminds us that the word, during the Romantic Era, implied a certain degree of horror.At the end of the 1880s, when white settlers first started coming to West Texas in large numbers with modern technology and agricultural science, the woo-woo stuff started to seem a little silly. The weather was good…The post How West Texas Created American Conservatism appeared first on Texas Monthly.