Yellowstone and the Countryfication of Culture
By Tess GC
“Country” is in the air lately – Beyoncé is suddenly releasing a country album, apparently pop star Lana Del Rey is, too. Western and country aesthetics in clothing, like cowboy boots and leather fringe are popular far beyond whatever is considered ‘rural America’ these days. And the country surge is nothing new – it’s always been around, going in and out of mainstream popularity. It’s been on the rise, though, alongside the widening gap between the wealthy and everyone else; the election of Donald Trump, and the culture war that 2020 helped more of the country to notice; and, I think, more and more people’s longing for a time when there was still somewhere to go to try to escape the creep of a surveilled, unaffordable, socially controlled life – to the country, and especially, out West.
I’ve been a big fan of the political and social commentary podcast, Trillbilly Workers Party (Or, the Trillbillies) for the last number of years, and one thing I love about them is they’re all over the topic of the countryfication of culture and politics – they started off all living in a town in Eastern Kentucky, and came out of the gate trying to address how a grifter like JD Vance could become the spokesman for Appalachia, Hillbillies, and ‘the working class.’ I think that was back in 2017, but since then they’ve had a lot of observations that are both astute and down to earth about the clash between rural and urban America, the playing up of country, Appalachian, and cowboy cultures, and the conflation of these supposed ways of life with blue collar, working class realities. There’s a whole lot more to say on those topics, but I bring up the Trillbillies because they helped me think about what’s happening where I come from, a town in western Montana, and as it happens, where the major TV show Yellowstone has been filmed for the last few years.
In one of their recent episodes, the Trillbillies brought back these themes of country, Yellowstone, and the cultural politics that are mediated through these topics. I really recommend giving them a listen, if you have the time – but I want to talk a little about what the heck is going on based on what I’ve seen here in western Montana.
Yellowstone, economics, and culture
Five years ago, I wouldn’t have believed I’d struggle to find an affordable place to rent in my hometown, what was a pretty quiet place 45 minutes outside Missoula, Montana. Returning from grad school, I found Missoula, my college town, hammered by gentrification. This change looks like eye-popping rent increases and housing shortages; increases in homelessness; a downtown quickly becoming a mecca for more wealthy remote workers and techies, and the restaurants, bars, boutiques, and other services that cater to them. My hometown got it, too – it’s in a beautiful mountain valley, and the pandemic saw home and land prices skyrocket, and a really noticeable increase in people. Drastic changes that involve class and culture make the political scene here tense, to say the least.
Yellowstone, set in western Montana and filmed around and in my hometown, has been a common topic of conversation at home, while booming in popularity nationwide for the last few years. Yellowstone has found its way into Montanans’ conversations about gentrification in the American West (here by
) and feeds into debates about tourism, the rapid influx of new and more wealthy residents, and land and resource use. Before I had even watched the show, I’d noticed Yellowstone branded merchandise popping up at the local ranch supply in my hometown; by my last few months in grad school – this was in 2022 in New York – I was seeing Yellowstone merch at Target in Brooklyn.Yellowstone is about a wealthy Montana rancher, John Dutton — played by Kevin Costner — and his family, fighting off developers, alternately skirmishing or allying with a nearby Native American tribe, and watching nearby small city Bozeman, Montana, become a playground for rich out-of-staters. Both developers and the tribal chairman spend a lot of time trying to annex pieces of the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch. A steady drip of betrayal, drama, and murder keeps the show clipping along.
I’ll be upfront – I don’t really like Yellowstone. It’s kind of exciting at first, but it’s a pretty silly portrayal of life ‘out West’ now – not that I think it’s supposed to be the most realistic thing we’ve ever seen. The thing is, a lot of people seem to take it seriously, seeing it as a representation of the kind of country culture they align with. Debate about the show has become a stand-in for debate about very real economic and political problems here, and really around the United States at large.
Backlashes to Yellowstone have emerged among some political progressives and Native Americans who make good points. Most notably, that Yellowstone’s unrealistic depiction of Montana sensationalizes the state and its people, accelerating the influx of out-of-staters looking to get a piece of the iconic West – and that it glorifies and venerates the archetype of macho, white settlers of the American West, obscuring the history of European colonization, genocide, and displacement of Indigenous people.
Meanwhile, the show’s creator Taylor Sheridan (A guy who kind of sounds like a rich kid whose family bought a weekend ranch in Texas, before he went on to become an actor) insists that Yellowstone addresses complex, relevant topics like locals’ concerns about land development, cultural change from citified influxes, and Indigenous-settler relations. An interview with The Atlantic quotes Sheridan responding to Yellowstone’s critics: “I’m like, ‘Really?’ The show’s talking about the displacement of Native Americans and the way Native American women were treated and about corporate greed and the gentrification of the West, and land-grabbing. That’s a red-state show?” Similarly, Kevin Costner said in an interview discussing Yellowstone’s filming location in Montana: “The ranchers that came here, they didn't own this land, and they basically banded together and pushed out the Native population. [The land is] still beautiful. But it's very easy to forget the drama, the things that we'll never recover from.”
We could assume that people like Taylor Sheridan and Kevin Costner are just trying to allay liberals’ concerns, as they insist that they’re self-conscious about the origins of the West. I guess it’s pretty gouache in Hollywood now to write an “unenlightened” Western. They also could be genuine in trying to tell a more complex western story – but the bar is pretty low, looking at the archives of the Western genre. It’s also hard to get anywhere very new or interesting by playing into the one-size-fits-all rural/country American culture that tends to homogenize rural America, and makes it kind of ahistorical. Just like everywhere else, the history that shaped Montana is unique to the place, and I think a good modern Western would dig into specific histories instead of painting with a broad brush across rural America or the West. At the same time, there’s a reason people around the country identify with Yellowstone and love it! It’s partly because the Western genre is a depiction of the cycles of conflict, settlement, and the making of the modern U.S. that are the history of the whole country – and it’s also because the problems the characters are grappling with are questions of where our country is going, and what life will look like in the very near future amid an economic war that has turned into a cultural one.
I think those of us interested in building a united front against exploitation in more rural places shouldn’t dismiss Yellowstone without seriously considering why so many people identify with it. If we want to have a prayer of organizing people and having successful social movements, there has to be a reckoning with concerns that a lot of people have in rural America: Loss of culture, the encroachment of social control and urbanization, and the closing in of capitalism’s control over our lives, whether or not we all recognize it as such.
Extracting rural America
The economics that shaped rural America have dealt with many of these places in similar ways: through extraction — taking resources out, churning the people there through a meat grinder, and funneling the wealth off to owners and capitalists somewhere else. And all of that was possible because whole new communities and societies were created at the expense of the Native people already living there. The kind of meat grinder society that developed in Europe pushed people to the Americas, then out West, and leaves everyone with a lot of grievances that can be traced back to the same general sources, the rich robbers who take land, wealth, and our lives from us, and the economic system that facilitates it.
When it comes to how these economic problems have become cultural ones, I want to bring in the thoughts of journalist James Pogue, who I was first introduced to on the Trillbillies podcast, and whose writing I’ve found to be really helpful since. Pogue specializes in writing about places where the population doesn’t believe in the legitimacy of those governing them, and he seems to really know the West. On a Trillbillies episode (unfortunately one of their paywalled ones), Pogue and two of the hosts, Tom and Tarence, talk about how rural American life has gone through huge changes in just the last few decades. He mentions the Farm Crisis, which largely began in the 1980s, as one way that rural life changed drastically in this country, as many small farmers and ranchers lost their land, and the agricultural industry began to consolidate into massive farms, ranches, and giant conglomerates. This is still happening today – this video by
on the consolidation of the beef industry says that “since the 1980s, the United States has lost more than 44 percent of family farms.” And the result of these losses has been the decline of rural communities and the shuttering of social and cultural institutions while both the Democratic and Republican parties have almost totally failed to do anything about it.
And it’s not just these massive transformations in agriculture that have hollowed out rural America – the shuttering of much of American manufacturing, with jobs sent overseas; the devastating environmental impact that industry has had on many small towns, including the boom and bust cycle of resource extraction that makes work unpredictable; all of the same factors of technology that are making everyone more lonely and disconnected from each other have devastated rural life and communities; and many other factors are also responsible. And on top of all that, with more people able to work remote, and especially when many who could afford it made an exodus from urban areas during the pandemic, some rural areas, particularly those considered desirable places to live, got a population bump in the last few years. This put a lot of people from different places in sudden community with each other, and changed the landscape of some rural areas to cater to a different demographic – usually with more money than the people living there already.
James Pogue said of all of these huge changes: “a lot of people who are decent, good people but have qualms about the radical cultural and economic changes that have happened in American life in the last few years are just simply not racists or bad people. And that distinction…is something that the Democrats have not really been able to explore.” And he’s not saying that there aren’t real problems with, say, the racism that can come from white people in more rural areas balking at “urbanites” as a stand-in for people of color and poorer people moving into their towns; he’s saying that the culture clash around rural America and being country is a clash with economic roots that people have a right to be upset about.
For Pogue, the outlook is bleak – he explains how more and more people are reaching a point of no return in this political and economic-turned-cultural divide. They don’t want to be part of the project of a united country anymore. He suggests that to win back rural voters, Democrats could be serious about a Rural New Deal as part of a larger Green New Deal, really making efforts to economically revitalize rural America for the people. But the likelihood of that happening seemed to die with the Bernie campaign, and as Pogue says in a 2020 article, “if the dissolution of the bonds between the Democratic party and the last blocs of rural voters who support it keeps up at this rate, it may be hard for any of them to win reelection” – and I can confirm now in 2024 that it’s indeed not looking good for Montana’s Democratic Senator Jon Tester as he seeks reelection, rural farmer though he may be. Pogue writes:
“The outsize power of rural voters in deciding control of the Senate means that, ironically, Democrats may find it impossible to ever accrue enough power to enact laws that might benefit poor rural voters and win them back. It’s a trap created by decades of political timidity and their own naked indifference to the feeling that rural America was being hollowed out by the consolidations of subsidized big agriculture, chain stores, and the other sweeping and deleterious effects that an era of unchecked corporate power have had on small town life.”
As for me, I’m not optimistic, but I am hopeful. I think there’s a lot of gradations within this cultural war, and a lot of people can still be reached by speaking to what the political Right is pretending to speak to – people’s economic situations.
does great videos (another one here) and writing on this topic, as does (I love this recent one on Dollar General). I also think it’s important that those of us who live in these places should learn our histories from the perspectives of the exploited, and ground ourselves in the ideals of community and solidarity against the economic system that keeps us all down. And crucially, solutions to our problems aren’t going to come from nonprofits, paid organizers, or people who come in to teach us how to do and say what they consider to be “the right things.” Solutions – and real organizing power – have to come from those of us dealing with communities and situations that are complicated. We have to get our hands dirty. We have to learn to tolerate situations and people who aren’t neat and tidy, and insist on being in solidarity with them around our common struggles.When there’s a lack of accessible, thoughtful public conversations about the plights of different people – especially conversation that doesn’t scapegoat other working people for these problems – grifters and poor stand-ins take their place. By that I mean dishonest, manipulative politicians, and cultural markers like Yellowstone that have just enough truth in them to moonlight as the answer to what’s going on. I think the lesson in this conversation, for people like myself who want more dignity, well-being, and justice for our communities, whether those are rural, urban, or somewhere in between, is that when we strip people of their own tales of hardship and victimization, and make fun of and vilify their histories without trying to understand them, we create enemies instead of potential allies. If we refuse to spend time considering what people find appealing in a show like Yellowstone, or even in right wing politicians or Donald Trump, we cede large swaths of people’s communal history and experience to outside or right wing interests, and boy, have they been successful at spinning those for their own gain.
So that’s what I’m thinking about as I navigate where I live, having a hard time with the reality that it’s forever changed from the place I grew up; as I’m listening to Beyoncé and Kacey Musgraves and wondering if I could ever afford some land out here; and as I’m thinking about what working class organizing looks like from western Montana.
And in the meantime, I can find a Yellowstone branded dry rub at the grocery store, but not a decently priced apartment rental. So drop me a line if you’ve got any leads.
Really enjoyed this, thank you. Do you have ideas around deterring gentrification or perhaps allowing for a more positive development of culture when demographics change?
Once again, you put words to a crucial issue that so many of us struggle with, but perhaps haven't found ways to communicate about so clearly yet. Thank you.