Replies

The Puerto Ricans are products of a different cultural tradition--Spanish-speaking and Catholic.

The same was true of Florida when it became a state. Louisiana was largely French and Catholic. So what?

As for the flag, we could either keep it at 50 stars and require Vermont to become a province of Canada

Do you realize that a generation ago Vermont had NEVER elected a Democrat to statewide office? Even more recently Texas was a reliably Democrat state. Things change. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

I was talking about the political culture. France and Spain were quite different in the colonial era even if both were Catholic countries. After 1700 Spain had a Bourbon king but the patterns of colonial government were set in the 1500s.

Florida, Texas, and California all belonged to Spain but had small populations when the Americans from the US began to flood those places, and the political institutions and legal institutions were imported from the older states of the US, going back to the English experience and English common law. I don't know about New Mexico--it could be a partial exception since there was a larger Spanish population there in 1848.

The Louisiana Purchase territory had been under Spanish rule for about 40 years but I think the traditions there were mostly French.