D (17:07)
So remember that I am trained as a political historian, but my. My doctorate is actually in American culture, in looking at American society as a whole. My master's is in literature, for example, in American literature. And that matters in this context, because what really happened after World War II was with the expansion of the government to regulate business and provide a basic social safety net and promote infrastructure and to protect civil rights. What happened were those people who didn't want it to do those things doubled down on the idea that if a government became powerful enough to do those things, it would become a socialist government, in that it would begin to redistribute wealth from hardworking white Americans to undeserving minorities, in this case, black Americans. And that would be a form of socialism. And that image picked up directly from the period after the Civil War when the former Confederates who ran up against the. The 15th Amendment and the creation of the Department of justice in 1870 to say that they could no longer discriminate against their black neighbors on racial grounds began to say, hey, listen, we never had any problem with the fact our neighbors were black. Our problem is the fact that they are poor. And if you let them have a say in the government, you let them have a vote, they are going to work together with poor white Americans to elect leaders who will promise them roads and schools and hospitals. And those things can only be paid for with white tax dollars, because white people in the American south were the only ones really who had taxable property. So that image that letting minorities. And that's going to expand in the 20th century to include women and gender minorities as well, but that letting minorities vote, have a say in their government is by definition a form of socialism. It's a political understanding more than an economic understanding, the way socialism becomes defined in the late 19th and early 20th centur. But that construction, which really takes off in the United States in 1871, is countered immediately in that period by the image of the American cowboy, who, in reality, about a third of American cowboys were men of color. They depended on the government more than any other region of the country. In the West. There are many ways in which the myth of the American cowboy doesn't stack up against the reality. But that myth of the American cowboy, that the cowboy is a true American and Wants nothing from the government but to be left alone. He dominates women. He dominates the minorities around him, and he's good with the gun, and he just wants to be left alone. That image of the American cowboy really is central to pushing back against the government that expands after the Civil War in order to promote black rights, and to some degree, brown rights, but mostly black rights. In the 20th century, that image of the American cowboy does the same thing. So those people who were trying to destroy the modern American government after World War II really don't get anywhere until Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision which says that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. With that, they begin really to lionize the idea of the American cowboy, which had fallen out of American culture during the Depression and the Dust bowl, when, in fact, people in the American south and the American west were really keen on federal help because they were losing their land and starving. That image comes back in the 1950s. By the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s, Westerns dominate television, which is a new medium. For example, Bonanza, that incredibly famous Western, is the first TV show in color. It goes international. That idea of the American cowboy as being central to what it means to be an American becomes a political statement by 1960, when you get the rise of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater with his stance as an American cowboy. He's always out there with a white hat saying, I came from Arizona before we had any of these stupid regulations. His family, by the way, depended on government money. That image of the American cowboy, cowboy as the central figure of American history and of America really becomes this political statement for the people who take over the Republican Party, that a true American wants nothing from the government. You should get rid of business regulation, get rid of a basic social safety net, get rid of government promotion of infrastructure and so on, and dominate others with force. And that was a rhetorical thing for Goldwater and for people like Ronald Reagan, who did the same thing. Even George W. Bush picks it up. But in this incarnation under maga, it has become the driving force. It has gone from being rhetoric to being an image of what America should be. That is driving their behavior in any number of ways. Right? So you're seeing this attack on the. This alleged attack on the cigarette boat that theoretically, according to the administration, was smuggling drugs. We're having the report that just came out in the New York Times today of the Navy seal attempt in 2019 to bug North Korea that ended up in the unacknowledged death of two to three Korean fishermen who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. You're seeing this idea that the government can simply do whatever it wants to assert its will by force. And at the same time, this concept that if you get rid of the government intervention in the economy through regulations, for example, and social safety nets and so on, you will return America to this great past, is, I think, where you're seeing the extraordinary attempt of the administration to throw its weight around and simply dictate what the government thinks should be happening with the economy when the actual numbers are devastating. So that's what I mean by the idea of the mythology coming up against the reality. And I will say one of the things that I think is fascinating in this moment is that image of the American cowboy was always just an image. We have these wonderful reports of people who knew Buffalo Bill, for example, and he knew, quite deliberately that he was constructing an image. He would literally wear certain clothes when he went to perform some great feat of bravado, so that he could then go on stage and say, these are the very clothes I wore. But there was another image in that same period of what it meant to be an American that was much more true to American history, and that was to be somebody who believed in community and believed in making sure that you protected your weakest members and made it possible for everybody to have a shot at equal access to resources so they could work hard and ride. And the replacement of the cowboy image with that image of America is one that has real possibilities, I think, for our future.
