[This post originally appeared as a note in an essay I put up in October called "Liberalism + Whatever". It doesn't really belong as a note there, so I'm moving it here with a few revisions to compliment "Beth Dutton: Uebermensch?" that I posted earlier this week.]
In recent posts, I've assumed you have some familiarity with Yellowstone, the most popular (and important?) TV show in America right now, but it's not watched as much in Blue America, which prefers Succession. So perhaps I assume too much. [See "How Taylor Sheridan Created America's Most Popular TV Show" in The Atlantic.] It's in its fifth season now, but I only started watching it earlier this Fall. I think every Liberal in Blue America should watch it to better understand a moral world that is largely incomprehensible for them unless they already know people in Red America.
I don't know that it qualifies as 'prestige' TV (too many contrived plot-driven implausibilities), but it's got some good lines here and there and some compelling characters like Beth Dutton, about whom I wrote the previous post. And while this is a show mostly about megalothymic White males, the most interesting lines go to the women characters like Beth. Another interesting female character that hasn't shown up much in Season 5 is Angela Blue Thunder, a warrior princess with a fancy law degree who's working for the Chairman of the nearby Indian Tribe. In a conversation with Chairman Rainwater in the Season 3 finale she says--
“They [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 the kind of sentiment you expect to hear expressed streaming on Peacock. But that's how the Duttons run their ranch, and it's how the U.S.--whether the Blues or Reds are in office--runs the world. And it belies the Liberal fetishization of 'rule of law', and it's why so much piety about rule of law from Liberals sounds so empty these days in Red America. What does it have to do with the way the world really works? It's just a tool that the powerful use to sustain their hold on power and to punish their enemies. It's used to keep the lower orders in line, but rarely. if ever, against elites in the power structure.
Wonder why it's taking so long to indict the egregious lawlessness of the Trump family? Same reason none of the egregious lawlessness of the Duttons ever gets indicted. He like the Duttons and other elites have been breaking the law with impunity for decades, but It's understood that the system just doesn't go after it's elites unless it's forced to some. Black and Native Americans understand this. White Jacksonians know this. They regard Liberal Hamiltonian with bemusement because apparently they don't.
This is why a Trump indictment will never be accepted by his MAGA Jacksonian supporters. He will be indicted, I believe, but only because he poses such a threat to GOP establishment elite dominance. GOP establishment elites just hoped he'd go away, but he won't, so now, regardless of what they say publicly, they will green light the Justice Dept to do the dirty work. His Jacksonian supporters understand this. The law, in their reckoning, has nothing to do with justice; it has everything to do with punishing your enemies. And they will see the law being applied to Trump in this valence. That's why it's essential that they obtain power--so they can use it to club their enemies rather than to allow their enemies to club them. We'll see them try to swing it in the House now that they have control of it. They don't have enough power to do much damage there, but they will do their best to make mess.
Are the Jacksonians wrong about the emptiness of the rule of law in U.S. practice? Yes and no. The rule of law has always been at best aspirational in most of U.S. history. It's a worthy aspiration, but at best it's been like a fragile truce competing parties agree to abide by until it's no longer in their interests to do so. And it's a truce that the MAGA world no longer feels works in its interests. So for them it's all-out war now, and they will use any means, legal or extralegal, violent or non-violent, to get power and to hold onto it. Whether they succeed or not remains to be seen.
In a society with a living sapiential tradition, the "law" would be grounded in what I've been calling ontonormative justice, as for instance the Tao or the Torah is understood to be grounded in the law of heaven. We don't have a sapiential tradition, so Law is whatever we make up as we go along, and when it goes against people's sense of what's "right", it's disregarded as illegitimate. This sense of what's right largely derives from custom and acculturation, but in a healthy society custom and tradition would in turn be grounded in a vital, evolving connection to the Living Real. We're not a healthy society, and so appeals to Tao/natural law don't make much sense now, but that needn't always be the case.
In the meanwhile the distance between what people feel is right based on custom and what is enacted law results in a contempt for the law and the kind of vigilantism that is rampant in Yellowstone or that we saw on J6. The law when it's just just based on one faction's opinion is substance-less and evanescent, a temporary inconvenience for the faction that opposes it because if can and will be reversed when the opposing faction has the power to do so. This is why they are so desperate to retain power--to prevent a reversal of their reversal. Because we live in a society that has no sapiential tradition, the rule of law has no deeply felt legitimacy because no one sees the lawmakers as people worthy of respect. With a few exceptions, they are just careerist hacks with no claim even to even a minimum of moral authority.
Succession and Yellowstone are very similar in their being about two "mob bosses" and their families, but despite their similarities, the Succession world is profoundly repugnant to those in the Yellowstone world. The differences more significant than the similarities, and to understand why is to understand a lot about the clash between Red and Blue America. It's really about the clash between Jacksonians and Hamiltonians.
The difference lies in that none of the principal Hamiltonian characters as written in Succession has a soul and so redemption isn't a possibility any of them. Winning is the best it gets for anybody, so it's the only thing that matters. But you don't care who wins, or at least I don't. Goodness doesn't exist, so there is no possibility for a good choice--there are only the clever, ruthless, winning choices—or stupid, cringey, losing choices.
The principal Jacksonian characters in Yellowstone--particularly John, Beth, Rip, and Jamie--are really bad people when we first meet them, but goodness is a possibility in the Yellowstone world in a way it's not in the Succession world. There's moral ambiguity in the Yellowstone world. The characters in Yellowstone are at first glance all loathsome, but at least they have souls, and you find yourself, despite the horrible things they've done, hoping for their redemption.
Most people who live in Blue America are not typified by the people who inhabit Succession, but that's how Red America perceives Blue elites, and leads them to find plausible all the nonsense about grooming, etc. Reds can't trust Blues because they perceive Blues as holding nothing sacred. They see Blues as nihilists who delight in transgressing taboos, who celebrate moral license and any kind of sexual weirdness. People in Red America act in egregiously licentious, appetitive ways, but they at least they know it's wrong when they do it, and have the decency to feel guilty about it. Not so Liberals.
And yes, they admit, our heroes in Red America might be lawless and often ruthlessly violent, but they act in the service of preserving something sacred that they believe is threatened. As Beth Dutton says, "I believe in loving with your whole soul and destroying anything that wants to kill what you love." And they ask, "How are we any different from the patriots that violently threw out the British?" Goldwater got it right when he said, "“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”. He's not advocating violence, but, you know, when it's called for, it's called for.
And, they ask, "What does Blue America believe in except its mission to break ancient taboos or to obsess about some callow, meritocratic, careerist idea of upward mobility?" That's why Jamie Dutton is such a pariah in the Yellowstone world. He'd be a perfect fit in the Roy family. He's a careerist who only cares about what's good for him. And Blue America asks, "What's wrong with that?"
So Red America knows the difference between good and evil, and the protagonists in Yellowstone believe they are in a continuous struggle against evil and its agents. But in order to prevail against evil, they must be meaner than evil. They do evil things in full knowledge about what they are doing, and so in a curious way, they come across as more complex, more human that the characters in Succession who are utterly predictable, at least in terms of their moral choices. Red America also knows the difference between having a soul and not having one, and Red Americans see the ethos of Blue America as so soulless that those who live in it have become incapable of making such distinctions.
They are wrong, of course, to think so. I live in a very secularized Blue American ethos, and almost everyone I know is genuinely decent and lives by a deeply felt, if little understood, moral code. But Blue Americans--especially the most powerful, affluent, and educated among them--should perhaps think a little about what's valid in Red America's perception of them. What do Blue elites really believe in? When push comes to shove, are their deepest, most motivating commitments really all that different from the commitments of the Roy family?
I would never, ever want to live in the Yellowstone world, but put a gun to my head and force me to choose between it and the Succession world, I'd pick Yellowstone because for all that's cruel, lawless in it, it's a world in which the people there are more interestingly human in a way people in Succession just aren't. I don't think that most educated, urban Blue Americans understand why that's so. It's important that they do.
I doubt that Sheridan is going to go there, but it's not impossible in a sequel show called 2043 that Tate --the child of both White America and Native America and heir to the massive Yellowstone Ranch--returns the land, his patrilineal inheritance taken from those in his matrilineal heritage, to the Tribe and succeeds Rainwater (or whoever) as chief/chairman. Unlikely, but not inconceivable in the more complex moral world Yellowstone explores. Kayce, Monica, and Tate, when all the intrigue is put aside, are the throbbing heart of Yellowstone, and its moral center. Justice is a possibility in the Yellowstone world even if it rarely shines there. It's just not a possibility in Succession because there is no moral center anywhere in it.