Have trouble with 2 things right off the bat before I go any farther:
(1)
I hardly remember anything else about Texas back then—it didn’t seem like the scenery started catching my eye until we were already halfway through New Mexico—but the heat and the bugs and the raucous country music seemed quintessentially Texan.
I am presuming he didn't go through the hill country to make a statement like that.
(2)
My subsequent trips through Texas—and they’re almost always through, never with the intent of staying an hour longer than I needed to—give me the impression it’s the world’s most overdeveloped shopping mall. The endless parking lot that is Dallas-Fort Worth is possibly the nation’s ugliest metro area, maybe even worse than Phoenix.
To say places like Grapevine and downtown Fort Worth are worse than Phoenix tells me this guy got off a plane, onto a freeway, and back on a plane again.
Now that he's offended my delicate sensibilities, 
I don't think he's intelligent/ambitious enough to spend the time to research what he is talking about.
Fair enough, I won't be wasting my time reading the rest of the article.
To be fair, it takes a while to get around Texas. I have been from top to houston once, across into Louisiana, and flew into Midland to drive out to Andrews and an oil rig near Patricia.
No more than crossing one part of Maryland and claiming to know the state can you cross one part of Texas and do the same.
I see Texas having the same problem we see elsewhere, where the urban vote balances or outvotes the rest of the state. If the people coming in aren't out in the countryside working, they are going to cities, and changing the demographics there. In general, those tend to be more liberal (even in Texas), and slide toward Democrat with those policies. It's part of where they are, where the problems are different because the 'solutions' that have been applied (often at the Federal level) create more problems, which is what they were designed to do (LBJ knew that). Such is city life, and the larger a city gets, the more it swings that way, partly because of the type of people who tend to be attracted to that life.
Things are rough all over, with more flavors of 'refugees' than Baskin Robbins' has of ice cream being distributed all over the country, but with the electoral votes Texas has, it is a prime target of the asymmetrical warfare tactic of demographic shifting. It is one of the most desirable cultures to break by invading and changing and rendering the history moot.
One of the dangers is that with the situation ethics and moral relativism that now seems to dominate political discourse, the term "conservative", too, has a different meaning depending on where it is used. A "Conservative" in San Francisco just might be someone with a job who is opposed to crapping on the sidewalk. A "conservative" in New York (the city), might be someone who thinks you should be able to get a gun permit.
Contrast that with a flyover country Conservative, and you're likely to see them call the bicoastal versions knee jerk liberals.
(
A permit for what??? )
This is where evolving away from the concept of principles is leading the whole country, the first principle of which should be that there are definite, fixed, moral and philosophical concepts that form the backbone of Conservatism, that are immutable, and without which any other philosophy falls short. Not the 'exceptional' Conservatism of 'I'm a conservative, except ________ (fill in the blank)', but more on the order of
either you are or you aren't.
Because anything less is a step further out onto the slippery slope of Communist slavery.
We have a Constitution, written in plain enough English, supported by the contemporaneous documentation of the debates in public fora in print; of the Federalist and the Anti Federalist, laying out further the logic and thinking behind the words of the Constitution, supported by the philosophy laid forth in the Declaration of Independence, all in historical context--there's a lot to go on, and the principles laid forth in those documents are the very essence of Conservatism.
While they do not mention a specific deity, the intent of the Founders is clear enough, just in the idea that it is a government for a moral and just people.
Deviation from that plan, past honing off some of the warts and mending the rare logical flaw (as in ending slavery, granting those who lived here first citizenship,and a couple other things) is to walk away from that pinnacle of Governmental design, and as you walk away from that peak, the inevitable direction is downhill.
