What does "self-government" really mean here?

It means the people who live under a government are the ones who get to choose and shape it. For Texas, self-government means Texans, not a distant capital, making the decisions that govern Texas. That is the whole idea, and it is older than the country itself.

The people are the source of the power

Self-government starts from a simple premise: political power belongs to the people, and a government is just an instrument they create to serve them. The Texas Constitution puts it plainly in Article 1, Section 2. All political power is inherent in the people. Governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their benefit. And the people have at all times the inalienable right to alter or reform their government as they think best. Self-government is the people exercising that right.

Distance is the enemy of accountability

Government works best when the governed can reach the people who govern them. The closer a decision is made to the people it affects, the more those people can scrutinize it, influence it, and throw out whoever gets it wrong. A decision made fifteen hundred miles away, by people most Texans cannot name and will never meet, is a decision Texans cannot truly hold to account. Self-government is about closing that distance so accountability is real.

It is the right to be wrong on your own terms

Self-government does not mean every decision will be perfect. It means the decisions are yours. If a policy fails, Texans can change it, scrap it, and try something else, without asking permission from forty-nine other states or a federal bureaucracy. The freedom to make your own choices, and to correct your own mistakes, is the heart of governing yourself. Right now, Texans do not fully have that. Independence gives it to them.

It is the oldest American idea, applied to Texas

This is not a radical concept. It is the consent of the governed, the principle the founders staked everything on. Free peoples around the world have claimed it, in Britain, in Scotland's process, across the former Soviet bloc, more than a hundred and forty new nations since 1945. Texas asserting self-government is Texas joining that company, and honoring an idea Texas already wrote into its own founding documents.

What it is not

Self-government is not one party ruling forever, and it is not government for only the people who agreed. It is government by and for all the people who live here, winners and losers of any given vote alike. The point is not which side wins. The point is that Texans, together, get to decide.

The bottom line

Self-government here means one thing: Texans decide Texas. The power is the people's, the decisions are made close to home, and the responsibility comes home with them. That is what independence restores.