NYT Journos Just Don’t Understand Why Americans Love Cowboys

The very serious journalists over at The New York Times apparently just can’t wrap their heads around why Americans love “all things country and rural.”

In an attempt to get to the bottom of this supposed mystery, the Times assembled a crack team of experts to investigate this supposedly new phenomenon and explain why Americans love cowboys, country music, and everything down home.

From the names on the byline, it’s safe to say that the investigation didn’t get very far. Times Opinion editor Meher Ahmad sat down with photo editor Emily Keegin and columnist/sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom, and the transcript detailing their conversation, titled “The Aesthetic That Explains American Identity Now,” contains just about all the self awareness and insight you’d expect from an outlet that still, a decade later, doesn’t understand why people voted for Donald Trump.

There’s been “an ongoing mainstreaming of all things country and rural. Think shows like ‘Yellowstone’ and ‘The Hunting Wives,’” Ahmad began the conversation. “So what does the mainstream embrace of this aesthetic say about our society and about our politics?”

Of course, they determine that Trump deserves at least some of the credit — or, in their minds, the blame — for the “rise” of the country aesthetic.

“I think that what Donald Trump does is he becomes associated with rural life because of how often he has appealed to Southernness, when he, of course, raises the specter of racism or raises the specter of genteel womanhood — all of those things that the South is kind of known for.” McMillan Cottom proposed.

They discuss the trend in terms only used in the critical studies departments on college campuses, never in the honky tonk. They theorize about power structures, systemic racism, and symbolic nostalgia to try to explain why normal people like cowboy hats, country music, and the show Yellowstone.

“So power goes back and taps into the cowboy when it is saying there is some new horizon that we need to capture, tame and own, and it is dangerous. The reason we like the cowboy is because it is safety in a dangerous world,” McMillan Cottom said. “The cowboy comes into a lawless land always full of a dangerous ‘other’ — whether it is Indigenous people, whether it is immigrants.”

They speak about rural people as if they’re a lost tribe in the Amazon, with preferences and customs totally alien to civilization, rather than their own countrymen.

“And after the second Trump win, what I noticed was there was a big cowboy trend that took off. Denim is big. Western culture is big. ‘S.N.L.’ this season had a musical act in a hayloft. Realtree coming in and dominating the sweatshirt world,” Keegin said. They then begin to explain what camo apparel is, and, assuming their audience won’t know what they’re talking about, they use the most baffling examples: pop star Chappell Roan’s merch and the Harris-Walz campaign’s laughable camo hats.

They make passing mentions of American history, like Manifest Destiny and the American Revolution, but they don’t really look to it for answers. They prefer to stick to more contemporary, and politically useful, explanations — Trump, racism, and systemic power structures.

But the truth is that our people’s love for the country and Western aesthetic is not some new phenomenon. America has been obsessed with “the West” and the rural, rugged frontier since before its inception.

One of the reasons for the Revolution was the desire to push west past the boundary set by the British Crown in the Proclamation of 1763, which forbade colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. The founders regarded the simple independent farmer as the backbone of the republic and the ideal citizen, with Thomas Jefferson declaring, “The small land holders are the most precious part of a state.”

James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, the first distinctly American literature produced by the United States, tell of bravery and the fight for survival on the western frontier. Talk of Manifest Destiny and a country that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific dominated political rhetoric throughout the first half of the 19th century.

The Wild West has been a fixture even in crowded East Coast cities since the first dime store novels in the 1860s, and the cowboy became iconic with the first silent films in the 1900s and ’10s. The cowboy continued to dominate the silver screen up to the 1970s, and he became an international symbol of America itself. John Wayne is still known all over the world and is indisputably one of the most famous Americans to ever live, and it’s not for his turn as Genghis Khan.

The drive toward the frontier, the taming of hostile wilderness, and the carving out of a place for oneself to profit by the fruit of one’s labors is the founding myth of America. It’s always been with us, ever since the men of the Virginia Company set foot on a small marshy patch of land in eastern Virginia in 1607. And that myth has been with us since, not as a way to hold up existing power structures or excuse the oppression of minorities, but as a reverence for the grit that it took to create a civilization on this vast continent. It reminds us where we came from and what we aspire to be. The revival of the country and Western aesthetic in our culture signifies a return to the values that made this country great in the first place.

For the “journalists” over at The New York Times to be this obtuse about America’s love for the West and the country aesthetic is to admit that they don’t really know anything about America.

It’s yet another example of leftists trying to cast as weird and outdated something that, up until recently, was so normal that it was taken for granted (like public Christianity). No matter how much leftists try to make it a dog whistle for racism or sexism, an admiration for all things country and rural is, and has always been, the norm in America.

Hayden Daniel is a staff editor at The Federalist. He previously worked as an editor at The Daily Wire and as deputy editor/opinion editor at The Daily Caller. He received his B.A. in European History from Washington and Lee University with minors in Philosophy and Classics. Follow him on Twitter at @HaydenWDaniel