Yellowstone, Taylor Sheridan’s immensely popular neo-western prestige drama, has emerged as one of America’s most beloved television shows in recent years. Yet, despite its soaring popularity—which has led to an evolving universe of spinoffs, including 1923, whose first season concluded this Sunday—the show has been snubbed by major awards and has often received lukewarm treatment from the media. Perhaps not unrelatedly, Yellowstone has gained a reputation, including in this very publication, as a “conservative” series, one targeted toward viewers who also voted for a certain former president. However, notwithstanding its reputation as a cowboy soap opera for Trumpists, it is not always clear what, if anything, about Sheridan’s work is actually right-wing.
In an interview in November 2022 that touched on accusations that Yellowstone and its spinoffs are aimed at Republicans, Sheridan responded incredulously. “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?” On those rare occasions when he has discussed his politics, it is clear enough that Sheridan—who infamously referred to Trump as “that motherfucker” in 2017, calling for the former president’s impeachment—seems to view his work as an ongoing critique of structural racism, misogyny, and the economic status quo. These are not exactly popular Republican talking points.
This tension between the show’s “red-state” aesthetics (big hats, handguns, horses) and its left-of-center messaging has confounded critics and viewers since the show’s release in 2018, as evidenced by a revolving door of articles that can never seem to agree as to where exactly Sheridan’s work falls on the political thermostat. This yearslong debate exploded again last week after a critic at IndieWire declared that the newest Yellowstone spinoff, 1923 (the second of two, after the miniseries 1883), is not simply progressive—its unflinching look at the Indigenous boarding school system is “critical race theory” embodied. Responding to that article in the New York Times on Friday, Ross Douthat asserted that the IndieWire piece represented a fundamental misreading; Sheridan is producing conservative content that is squarely aligned against “blue-state outsiders,” the columnist insisted. For viewers like Douthat, the Yellowstone universe is one big traditionalist romance, offering the ranch’s “masculine freedom … as an alternative to the crowded suffocations of the city.”
Yet, for my money, what is most interesting about this interpretive fracas is not which political reading of Sheridan’s series—conservative or progressive—is correct. (For what it’s worth, I see all three of the Yellowstone shows as being deeply left-leaning). Rather, what is most interesting, or at least most revealing, about the cultural reception of Yellowstone is that pundits and critics of all political persuasions are increasingly eager to claim it as their own.
Sheridan’s series are those rare birds in our deeply polarized media environment: they are politically ambiguous. To this end, perhaps the real question critics should be asking is not whether Yellowstone and its spinoffs are “red-state” or “blue-state.” The real question is this: Why do both red-staters and blue-staters want so desperately to see their politics in Sheridan’s vision of Montana?
In my view, the answer to this quandary is straightforward. Sheridan’s world offers something that the mainstream American left and the mainstream American right each sorely lack: a positive conception of human purpose that is tethered to an equally coherent conception of authority. Sheridan’s protagonists are often antiheroic, frequently unethical, and invariably tribalistic. But what these characters almost never are is confused, and therein lies the appeal of Sheridan’s shows. Their protagonists’ place in the world and their duties to their community are always perfectly, and often painfully, clear.
For both the Duttons and the shows’ Indigenous characters, there are only a few meaningful sources of obligation and authority: the tribe, the family, and the land. These characters are sometimes unequal to these duties and fail to meet them, but the duties themselves—and the authority they stem from—are almost never in question. And it is here, in its valorization of authority, that we might locate the key to the pan-political enthusiasm for the Yellowstone universe.
Although the American left and right differ profoundly on nearly every issue of importance, what both camps share is a conception of freedom that the philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously called “negative liberty.” For Berlin, a society that values “negative liberty” understands freedom as the absence of constraints on one’s behavior. Indeed, where Democrats and Republicans often differ concerns not their basic conception of freedom, but rather the particular constraints that tend to keep their denizens up at night.
For lefties like myself, freedom primarily means freedom from things like intolerance, bigotry, economic inequality, and reproductive coercion. For the Fox News set, freedom tends to mean freedom from religious censure, “compelled speech,” the threat of crime, and being made to share resources with outsiders. Chasmic policy differences stem from how these constraints are valued, but that does not change the fact that the left and right increasingly tend to define freedom in the same way: Freedom means being left alone to be who you are, and above all, not being made to do things you don’t want to do.
Although there is much to recommend this conception of freedom, it also has a fatal flaw that has long been recognized by philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists: Negative liberty places a heavy burden on the modern individual, who must decide for themselves who they are, what they want, and how they should live. It is this burden that characters in the Yellowstone universe—at least the ones audiences root for—do not have to shoulder, precisely because they are immersed in meaningful communities that provide ready-made answers to these questions. Indeed, Sheridan’s shows all reflect the conviction that the conception of freedom endemic to modern American society is dogshit—that true freedom comes not through the absence of constraint, but the presence of authority.
If it sounds odd to assert that a show I see as left-leaning should be interpreted as a paean to authority, that is because our conception of what authority actually means has been almost entirely eroded in modern life. Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher whose work on totalitarianism had a renaissance during the Trump era, was persistently at pains to distinguish authority from authoritarianism. “Since authority always demands obedience,” the philosopher wrote, “it is commonly mistaken for some form of power or violence.” Arendt went on to note that although we tend to associate authority with coercion or persuasion, these actually signal the absence of authority. “Where force is used, authority itself has failed!” she claimed. By contrast, she argued that “authority implies an obedience in which [people] retain their freedom.” It is this conception of freedom through obedience to a higher authority that the Yellowstone universe champions.
To see what I mean, one need look no further than 1923, the recently concluded spinoff that was the focal point of IndieWire’s “critical race theory” argument, and Douthat’s conservative reprisal. Set in Montana’s not-so-Roaring Twenties, several decades after 1883 lets off and almost a century before the flagship show Yellowstone picks up, the first season of 1923 follows two primary storylines: the escape of Teonna Rainwater (Aminah Nieves), a teenager from the Crow Tribe, from a brutal boarding school for Native American girls, and, in parallel, the Dutton family’s efforts to stave off a land-greedy miner who is conspiring to steal their ranch right out from under them.
As these plot threads develop and tangle, the audience’s rooting interests are quickly established: Viewers are persistently asked to cheer for the characters who understand, as Arendt argued, that there is a certain kind of freedom to be found in obedience to a deserving authority. This is signaled from the very beginning of the show, in an early scene in which the matriarch, Cara Dutton (Helen Mirren), explains the hardships of cowboy life to the East-Coast-educated Elizabeth Strafford (Michelle Randolph), who intends to marry her ranch-hand nephew Jack. After the wedding must be delayed so the Dutton men can attend to a herd of cattle imperiled by drought, Cara counsels the distraught Elizabeth:
You’ll miss more than weddings for cattle, my dear. If you give birth during calving season, it’ll be a month before [your husband] sees his first child … You will stand knee-deep in mud to help a sick foal. You’ll drive wagons through blizzards with hay for cattle and hear them screaming with gratitude when you approach. And you’ll be free in a way that most people can barely conceive.” (Emphasis added.)
Almost every sympathetic character in 1923 is someone who learns the lesson Cara offers: that freedom is downstream from duty and all its hardships. Whether you see 1923 as conservative or liberal depends not on whether you like this image of freedom or not, but on which character’s submission to authority you most admire.
Lefty viewers like me and the IndieWire critic tend to view Teonna as the show’s central protagonist. Trapped in a religious boarding school where priests and nuns dole out brutal punishments to any students who speak their native language or show any Indigenous cultural affinities, Rainwater steadfastly refuses to accept the attempted acculturation to Christianity and Americanism. Though the priest in charge warns that he will beat “the savage” out of her, even if it kills her, she rejects his fraudulent authority in favor of her duty to the cultural authority of the Crow people, accepting beating after beating until finally she has her revenge, escaping the school in a cathartic orgy of violence. Throughout the recently concluded first season, Teonna’s story is driven by this uncompromising obedience to the moral and spiritual ways of the Crow, an obedience shared by other Crow characters who repeatedly sacrifice their own safety to help her. It is not hard to see why progressive viewers see her as a kind of civil rights hero, and as someone who embodies freedom, even as her entire character is defined by obedient submission to the demands of her culture.
However, as much as 1923’s unflinching look at anti-Indigenous violence gives us a genuinely radical critique of structural racism (to say nothing of the series’ deep and abiding environmentalist anti-capitalism), it is also not hard to see what right-wingers see in the show. For conservatives, the real heroes of this prequel can be Jacob Dutton (Harrison Ford)—the unkillable patriarch—and the prodigal son Spencer (Brandon Sklenar), a lion-hunter and veteran of WWI who is (literally) the show’s great white hope, as his promise to come to the family’s rescue hangs over the entire first season.
Yet, even as both Dutton men offer plenty in the way of freedom talk and red meat (“Government’s man’s way of trying to control our behavior” and “I kill for a living, you do not want to fight me” are two actual lines delivered on this show), they are, like Teonna, defined by their submission to a worthy authority: in Jacob’s case, what’s good for the cattle and what’s good for the land; in Spencer’s, the familial duty that cannot be shirked. Like Teonna, both men are faced with endless physical hardships, but they are spared the hardship of uncertainty, indecision, or insecurity about their identity. Every character worth rooting for in 1923—Elizabeth and Cara, Teonna, Jacob and Spencer—knows exactly who they are, and because they know who they are, they know exactly what is required of them. And you would be hard-pressed to say any of them aren’t free in the ways that matter.
Perhaps critics like me miss the entire point when we spend our energy trying to crack the code of the Yellowstone universe’s politics. Ultimately, these shows’ real affinities may not be with the left or right, and their ultimate targets may not be bankers or bad priests or land developers or coastal elites. Rather, the real target of Yellowstone and its spinoffs is a society that champions the kind of empty freedom that comes without obligations to others, a prevailing political culture—on both sides of the aisle—that is (often rightly) so busy worrying about what we need freedom from that it rarely stops to ask what makes a free life worth living in the first place.
