What does that say about me?
I wrote this almost exactly two years ago, but it came up in a NYT podcast ‘The Highbrow and Lowbrow of the Trump Era’, and the same contrast between Yellowstone and Succession was made, so I thought I’d share my two cents. As I recall,
The shows are very similar in that they are both about two powerful American overlords and their families. What's different about them is more interesting and significant. To understand why is to understand a lot about the clash between Red and Blue America.
John Dutton is a ruthless Montanan rancher with massive landholdings. He’s nasty, and you never want to get on his wrong side. But at least there are some things--the land and its traditions--that are sacred to him. And he's willing to sacrifice his fortune to preserve and protect them in what he knows is a losing cause. This romance of the “lost cause” is partly what makes him a hero for viewers in Red America. But is there anything analogously sacred for the Logan Roy and his kids?
I have never lived in America's rural heartland, but I've always had a soft spot for Wendell Berry's vision for America, and it leads me to appreciate John Dutton in a way I could never appreciate Logan Roy. I'm not saying Wendell Berry would approve of John Dutton, but it wouldn't surprise me if a character like John Dutton (or his creator Taylor Sheridan) has read and approves of Wendell Berry. What thinker might Logan Roy approve of--anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard or the goddess of the market, Ayn Rand?
So the difference between the shows lies in the difference between what the two families care or don’t care about. The principal characters in Yellowstone are bad people by any standard of decency, but the 'good' is a possibility in the Yellowstone world in a way it's not in the Succession world. The principal characters in Yellowstone --particularly John, Beth, Rip, and Jamie--are cruel, terrible people when we first meet them. But we gradually learn their backstories, and you find yourself, despite the horrible things they've done, hoping for their redemption. At least I do. Maybe not Jamie. Jamie would be a better fit in the Roy family.
I don't find myself hoping anything for the characters in Succession. These characters are written as soulless appetites. Repentance and redemption are never a question for any of them--it would never occur to any of them that they are in need of it. For the people in the Roys' world, there is no possibility for choosing the "good"--there are only winners and losers, and so there are only the clever, ruthless, winning choices—or stupid, cringey, losing choices. They live in an morally flat world absent any ambiguity and so are completely predictable. The writers have fun with the kids' callow idiocy, but that gets old quickly, at least it did for me.
Most people who live in Blue America are not typified by the people who inhabit Succession, but Red America thinks about Blue America’s elites as typified by the the Roy family. Would it be so unbelievable to learn that some in the Roy family are into child trafficking as a sideline? What in their characters would incline them draw a line at that if the opportunity for it came up that would give them a kick or some extra cash?
Red America tends to see all of America's coastal Liberal elites as very comfortable in the world inhabited by the Roys: “Surely, the Clintons are at home there,” so they think. “It's not ulikely that they committed the crimes that were rumored about them in the 90s. Didn't Bill hang out with Jeffrey Epstein? They're all birds of a feather.”
From the pov of Red America the Clintons have done much worse than anything that Donald Trump has done. They just got away with it because the elite establishment circled their wagons around them the way they did it for Ted Kennedy after Chappaquiddick. Trump, at least, hasn't killed anyone. Same now for the Biden crime family. Where’s the evidence, one might ask. “We don’t need evidence,” they reply. “It’s just who they are. Anybody with any sense can see that.”
Now almost all of this is nonsense, but some of it isn't. And it's understandable how Red America, because it is so cynical about America's coastal Blue overclass, might be inclined to believe anything that fits with or reinforces their cynicism. And it's all consistent with what they've been taught to believe about elites from the way they are portrayed in movies and in TV shows like Succession. Red America looks at these elites in the corporate and media worlds and asks, "What deep down do they really believe in? What is their program except to shatter every taboo that decent people have respected from time immemorial? Is there anything wholesome or good that they don't seek to destroy?"
The point is that it's not hard to understand why Red America holds the affluent, well-educated elites in Blue America in contempt. It’s distorted and mostly untrue, but these elites have given the demagogues plenty to work with.
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I live among relatively affluent, well-educated folks in Blue America, and almost everyone I know has a worldview shaped by Liberal cosmopolitan presuppositions. They do not recognize themselves in this caricature that Red America has of Blue America. They are all decent people with a deeply felt, if little understood, moral code. But as with Red America, their moral code comes from their acculturation, and its interior logic is mostly left unexamined.
As social attitudes change so do theirs without thinking about it too much. They simply adapt. Adapting is what Liberals do. It doesn't cost them anything to do so, and so they can't understand why to do so costs Red Americans so much. It must be because they're all racists and homophobes.
Blue America is fascinated by the Roy family, but hardly approves of its amorality. If anything, it mistakenly sees the Roys as inhabitants of Red America. Isn't Logan Roy a thinly disguised Rupert Murdoch? But this is what many in Blue America have a hard time understanding: the Roys and the Murdochs, regardless of the content they produce, are part of the cosmopolitan elite that Red America despises. Their commitments are essentially the same as woke corporations like Comcast and Disney, or Amazon and Apple. They just serve a different, anti-woke market.
Red America believes there’s a difference between good and evil; woke American believes only that there’s a difference between the marginalized and the privileged. Not the same thing. The protagonists in Yellowstone believe they are in a continuous struggle against evil and its agents. But in order to prevail against evil, they believe, they have to play on the field where evil sets the rules. There are a lot of people in Israel who find that logic persuasive these days. Are they right? No, but it's at least understandable why they should.
Folks in Red America often act in vicious, licentious, vulgar, appetitive ways. You know, like Beth Dutton. But they know such behavior is wrong. And while Red America justifies resorting to violence to achieve its goals in ways that Blue America finds horrifying, Red Americans see themselves as defending something sacred. “You've got to be meaner than evil to protect what you love,” says John Dutton. What is sacred for Blue America that it would defend it with the same level of commitment? Abortion?
I’m not here to litigate the abortion issue. I’m just trying to make a point that the issues that incite Liberal passions are more about outrage concerning fanatics on the Right, not about what is otherwise is at best a profound morally ambiguous issue—except for the moralistic fanatics on the Left. Abortion has become a shibboleth issue, not an issue where any kind of serious, nuanced moral conversation is possible.
Other than reproductive rights, what positive thing does Blue America believe about America except some shallow, meritocratic, careerist idea of upward mobility? Isn’t that what the Roy family is all about? On what basis can Liberals condemn them? Because they are venal and mean spirited? And yet the whole system is built to give enormous power to the venal and mean spirited. We justify it with some middle school ideas about freedom, but we all know it’s ridiculous that people like Zuckerberg, Musk, and Trump are allowed to have so much power. How is it possible that we give these foolish, shallow human beings the keys to the bus that we’re all taking into the future? It’s astonishing.
I’d prefer to give the keys to Bernie Sanders, but compared to Roy, Musk, Zuckerberg, or Trump, I’d rather give them to John Dutton.
***
I don't know that Yellowstone qualifies as 'prestige' TV in the way that Succession, The Sopranos, or The Wire do. There are too many contrived, plot-driven implausibilities in Yellowstone, but the writing and dialogue (and the music) are often very good, and there are some compelling characters. For instance, Angela Blue Thunder, a Native American warrior princess with a fancy law degree, tells Tribal Chairman Rainwater in the Season 3 finale--
“They [the white elites] make their rules to be broken. The United States has broken every rule it has ever made. From its first treaty with France to every treaty with us, to their last treaty with Iran. They only hold others to their rules. They make war when they want, where they want, they take what they want, and then they make rules to keep you from taking it back. They make rules for the slave and they make rules for the masters.”
Not ideas you expect to hear expressed on a show streaming on Peacock.
Liberals talk about the "rule of law" as if it has some sacred, numinous glow, but it has no such thing. For most Americans the rule of law lacks any deeply felt legitimacy because no one sees the lawmakers as people worthy of respect. Even decent people feel little moral obligation to obey laws they think are stupid or wrongheaded. Legislators are perceived as easily corruptible, careerist hacks with no claim even to a minimum of rudimentary competency or decency. What right have they to tell me what's right and wrong? Their laws are just stuff they make up as they go along that mostly suit the interests of those who have the power and money to pay them off. Liberals love Nancy Pelosi, but we saw recently how her instincts are to protect her overclass interests before doing what's obviously, from the non-elite pov, in the public interest.
That's why so much piety about rule of law from Liberals in the media sounds so empty these days, especially in Red America. Everybody understands that legislative policy is a tool the powerful use to sustain their hold on power and to enrich their allies. Trump is just more open about it. And the criminal law has no real purpose except to keep the lower orders in line. That's why it's so rarely used against elites in the power structure. How many of the architects of the 2008 economic collapse went to jail? And now you're going after our guy Trump? Rule of law, my ass.
Are they wrong? Yes and no. The rule of law has always been at best aspirational in most of U.S. history, but as such worthy of our aspiration. A democratic republic cannot survive without it, and it's important that we do everything we can to support it. But respect for it would get a huge boost if in fact it was enforced against elites as frequently as it is against poor folks. The behavior or the supreme court lately hasn't helped. If nothing else this attempt to hold Trump accountable for his crimes is forcing us to have a reckoning about how the Liberal Order functions and for whose benefit.
But in the meanwhile, we need to appreciate better than we do why so many people are so cynical about the rule of law. It's not something Native Americans or Black Americans have reason to take seriously, and neither is it for those in the MAGA world. So for them it's to hell with self-serving Liberal pieties about the rule of law. Law is what those with power say it is, and so we in Red America mean to get it back by any means, legal or extralegal, so that we can enact and enforce laws that benefit us. And besides, God is on our side, and we are the tools of his just retribution.
The shrewdest folks in MAGA world understand that Trump is a psychopath, but he is an effectively blunt instrument in helping them to achieve their ends. When Trump tells his MAGA followers, "I am your retribution", he understands how it resonates because he's working with this deeply felt desire to turn the tables, to restore the old order, an order most of MAGA believes has been wantonly destroyed by Liberal elites.
And they're not wrong insofar as GOP and Dem elites both supported the Neoliberal policies that are largely responsible for destroying the economic and cultural matrix that supported their local communities, traditions, and customs. Heartland America has been hollowed out in the last 40 plus years because of a project initiated, ironically, by its hero Ronald Reagan.
***
Our feeling about what's "right" largely derives from custom and acculturation, but in a healthy society custom and tradition would be grounded in a vital, evolving connection to the Living Real. This is how it has always worked in societies with living traditions.
Cosmopolitan Liberal Americans have no belief that law is something aligned with a transcendent Real that is the ground for ontonormative justice. Conservatives do, even if their relationship to it has rigidified into something inflexible and lifeless. The problem with the traditionalists on the fanatical religious Right today is that they no longer have a living tradition, but only zombie traditions--there's no vitality or wisdom in them anymore. Fanaticism is a counterfeit version of genuine faith. The traditions they seek to defend maintain the old forms, but are animated by something quite alien to the originary energies that formed the forms. And the result is that most traditionalists can't tell the difference between what's wholesome and what's rotted. At best they discern the traces of what was once vital but no longer is.
We're not a healthy society, and neither the Right nor the Left has a remedy. Both blame the other for impeding what is in effect their respective hoped-for nihilistic vision for an American future. And now because there's no culture anymore that is shared by both elites and non-elites, it comes down to who has the power to impose laws that benefit their team no matter how unfairly they penalize the other.
Because we live in a society that has no sapiential tradition, we have become default worshippers in the cult of the Invisible Hand. The invisible Hand has no interest in preserving traditions, customs, and communities. It destroys all that in the name of innovation, growth, and progress, and the Left-leaning, cosmopolitan elite are quite comfortable with that. Aren't patriarchy, homophobia, and racism all woven into those traditions and customs? Good riddance to the whole retrograde ball of wax.
But it's more complicated than that, and it's important that Liberals of good will try to understand that Red America is experiencing domicide--the destruction of their homeland--in a way that's analogous to the domicide that white America inflicted on Native Americans, and it's not too much of a stretch to compare it to the domicide that the Chinese government is inflicting on Tibetans and Uyghurs.
Why are American Liberals outraged at the destruction of those Asian traditional societies but not those of traditionalist Americans? Well the reason is obvious. The people in those traditional cultures over there are not a massive voting block over here. Nevertheless, can American Liberals at least attempt to understand why Red America might think that assimilating into Blue America is about as appealing for them as Native Americans assimilating into White America? Or Palestinians assimilating into Israeli society?
So Blue Americans--especially the most affluent and educated among them--should perhaps think a little about what's valid in Red America's perception of it. What do Blue elites really believe in? When push comes to shove, are their deepest moral commitments really all that different from the ambitions of the Roy family? Of course, they're different, they say. The Roys are horrible people, and we're not.
But on what philosophical basis can you criticize their behavior? I would argue that your objection to the Roys is merely aesthetic, like your preferring Picasso to Matisse. And I would go further to argue that the Roys are perfect exemplars of the anything-goes, nihilistic Libertarianism that shapes both the corporate Right and the cultural Left. Tell me why I'm wrong.
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Notes