The blue dot
Political ideology must be one of the most controversial topics of our era. The violence that characterized the political dispute in the last centuries now has change. People may still hate each other because of political reasons, but at least don´t kill each other (of course this depends where).
Having said this, now let’s begin with the principal theme of this paper. What people think when they hear the word “Texas”? Probably most Argentinians (and why not most north-American citizens) would answer something like: republican cowboys shooting people. Ok, that may be true (I will try to not piss off anybody just in case), but what I´m seeing in Austin is that here people tend to be pretty liberal. Almost all the locals which whom I have talked where against the policy that allows people to carry guns with them, judged very severely the United States´ foreign policy and, most importantly, didn´t like the Bush family (that’s sounds unbelievable, after all this politicians build their political career in Texas). Is Austin the black sheep of the state? Is this city the blue dot on the red map? For me it is. There may be several reasons for this, but in my opinion the most important one is that being a city with such an important university and having so many international students and others from different parts of the United States results in a society more open to new ideas and more prone to incorporate a liberal ideology. Many political theorists have remark that only when people deliberate there is a tendency to develop more moderate ideas, and in cities such as Austin where the deliberation is encourage (something inherent in universities) the foreign people brings new ways of seeing the reality. I haven´t still travel outside Austin, but I bet that the other cities of Texas are very different.
Having said this, now let’s begin with the principal theme of this paper. What people think when they hear the word “Texas”? Probably most Argentinians (and why not most north-American citizens) would answer something like: republican cowboys shooting people. Ok, that may be true (I will try to not piss off anybody just in case), but what I´m seeing in Austin is that here people tend to be pretty liberal. Almost all the locals which whom I have talked where against the policy that allows people to carry guns with them, judged very severely the United States´ foreign policy and, most importantly, didn´t like the Bush family (that’s sounds unbelievable, after all this politicians build their political career in Texas). Is Austin the black sheep of the state? Is this city the blue dot on the red map? For me it is. There may be several reasons for this, but in my opinion the most important one is that being a city with such an important university and having so many international students and others from different parts of the United States results in a society more open to new ideas and more prone to incorporate a liberal ideology. Many political theorists have remark that only when people deliberate there is a tendency to develop more moderate ideas, and in cities such as Austin where the deliberation is encourage (something inherent in universities) the foreign people brings new ways of seeing the reality. I haven´t still travel outside Austin, but I bet that the other cities of Texas are very different.
The interesting aspect about this is that despite that the Texas´ capital seems to have this democrat spirit (at least for what I have seen so far), this state has been (and still is) famous because of its conservative policies and republican politicians. This may be explained by the ideology that people from other cities have; something that I should check in the next days. What is more surprising, in Austin there exists a socialist party (yes, that’s right, there is a left party in the capital of Texas; if Argentinian socialists see this their brains would blow up). I´m not making a normative argument; what I am saying is not that one ideology is worst that other or that the north-American society should be like this or that, but that having the chance to travel to another culture has the effect of destroying all the myths that exist about it. And this is the perfect example: someone can think that all Texans are republicans or that this is a conservative society, but the truth is that if you have the chance to come here you can observe that this is a very complex community, that there is not a unique ideology and that the diversity you can find here is pretty amazing.
