re: The west is the south

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Yep, it is a sad reality. Even in Texas which is where I have always lived the southern influence has waned in my short lifetime. I am sure it was a lot more southern when my father was growing up.

I would like to live somewhere that I can be proud to be a southerner, where the confederacy isn’t shamed, and where people get along and it is a nice place to live. I know there are many out there but they are diminishing. Always have been I guess.

Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana make up a different kinda south than states like Virginia, the Carolina’s, Georgia. And then Alabama and Mississippi and Tennessee are sort of the middle ground. But we are all more or less the same people, and we have more in common than we do w/ the rest of the country.

And it seems that where we come from plays a big part in who we are. We are fundamentally a different people than northerners in a way. The puritans, their descendants, and then all of the European immigrants they brought in and in a way washed a lot of their culture away. The south never got so many immigrants, except in certain places, and they still kind of blended in rather than making a completely new thing.

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If Texas and Oklahoma are the south, and not saying they ain't, at least half of Indiana, Ohio and Illinois is. This is especially true if Missouri is the south and it certainly is sort of the south....

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It is no accident that the most famous Western novel, written by a Pennsylvanian, Owen Wister, and set in Wyoming, was called The Virginian;

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I take umbarge to that opinion, sir.

Lonesome Dove says hold my beer, and my Spencer rifle.

you're (perhaps deliberately?) omitting the 4 million+ forced immigrants to the south

The Pattons came to California from Virginia.

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California was a Republican state until pretty recently.

Ronald Reagan was the governor.

Los Angeles was not that long ago a pretty small place. It became a colony of northeastern and midwestern people.

It is likely there are now more WASP Anglos that descend from puritans out west than there are in the northeast. The northeast got invaded by European immigrants.

(We southerners do not descend from puritans)

But it wasn’t always like that. California used to be western frontier, and was settled by many southerners, the first ones took rich Hispanic wives to marry into the local hispanic elite

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A lot to unpack here.

1) California being Republican until recently makes it "less Southern". Whether you think highly of the South or not, its connection with Republicans is less than 20 years old.

2) Most African-Americans in California are descended from those who left Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, etc. during the Depression.

3) Not many other connections to draw between West Coast and the old South.

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They are also southern.

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they were african, mostly west african. they became "southern" merely due to the fact that they were residents of the south, and yes their culture greatly influenced what (much later) became "southern" culture. your assertion that the south is somehow more culturally intact due to fewer immigrants that the north is patently absurd.

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I’m not sure what your point is.

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back at you

By recently I just meant from the 60s to the 80s, which is when the south was also becoming Republican.

They were Republican before the south, which does show it was likely settled by a lot of non southerners a long time ago. But many still came there, and parts of the state were certainly more southern as others. As a whole it probably was never really southern in the same way New Mexico and Texas and Oklahoma were.

I actually don’t think Arizona was ever really southern like those places either!


And even in Texas it depends. The anglo people who settled the Rio grande valley, for instance, were mostly Midwest, so they have a less southern feel than even Laredo does.

Have you ever heard of the Oakies?

Merle haggard was from California.

The south got less immigrants from the mid 19th century on than the rest of the country. Just Google it. This is a well known fact that everybody should know.

It is why the south has the highest percentage of British ancestry as a whole, even more than New England does.


We are descended from colonial Americans at a much higher rate than northerners and westerners.


People from the “true south” even more so than Texas but what I have found is that most Texans seem to descend from confederates. If they are generational Texans.

How is the southern strategy a lie? All of our ancestors were democrats until the 1960s.