Yellowstone Season 5, States v. Corps, the New Old Conservatism
Season 5 of Yellowstone premieres in November, and the Dutton family is continuing to protect its property, the largest contiguous ranch in the continental United States. This season its strategy is to operate out of the Montana’s governor’s mansion against the giant multinational corporation looking to force a sale of the land.
Yellowstone has been called a conservative television show, a throwback, or “your dad’s favorite show.” The fact that it’s the most popular show in the country, a sleeper hit whose Season Five trailer got nearly 15 million views and left established media rushing to cover it, backs up the labels. Other than that, labels deceive. Yellowstone is both conservative and traditional, but only if you accept that both words are acquiring more and more layered meanings.
Yellowstone is comfortable with guns and believes in self-sufficiency or at least in limited chains of reliance: in those ways, the show is conservative. But those values push it in directions that the current Republican Party is also taking, and that break from what the labelers are thinking about when they use the word conservative.
The driver of the Dutton Family’s actions isn’t, for example, money, it’s preserving their ranch and way of life on the ranch. By Season Three the family is coming up against an enemy liberal labelers think of as a conservative ally: the too-big-to-fail multinational corporation for whom an oil deal in Yemen and a land deal for a projected resort in Montana end up being the same thing: hard pushes against recalcitrant locals. “It’s poverty with a view,” says the chairwoman of the board about Montana, adding that “this is all they have.” (This isn’t a new sentiment: “Poor land makes good scenery,” the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith said for attribution sixty years ago.)
Like the anti-colonial locals abroad, and like their Indian neighbors on the res, the Duttons see threats to the way they live from giant structures that seem to want to wipe them out. If anything sums up the change in conservative sentiment the past twenty years, it’s that feeling. Beneath all the high-flying idealistic language, the real purpose of universities, economists and administrators is, as Joseph Conrad’s last line in Heart of Darkness has it after sentences of flowing tributes to human progress, “Exterminate the brutes!”
Like large parts of the current new conservatism, this view makes for strange new political understandings—after Season 2, the show is more than just politically resonant, its plot depends on politics. At the end of Season 3, the Duttons save the ranch from the too-big-to-fail corporation by allying with the Indians to mount an environmental lawsuit. By the end of Season 4, the Duttons have shifted to a strategy conservatives are now using in real life, where they minimize one of their values, business, in favor of another, federalism. Yellowstone has anticipated (and shown the human reasons why) conservatives are making this shift.
In real life, this strategy makes for complicated situations and strange alliances. In June, the Supreme Court, by a vote of 5-4, blocked a Texas law passed by the Republican legislature and governor requiring social media companies not to censor users on the basis of their viewpoints: three conservative justices (Gorsuch, Alito, Thomas) and a liberal (Kagan) dissented.
This October, the Court heard the case National Pork Producers Council vs. Ross. The case turns on whether California’s 2018 proposition banning the holding of pigs in certain conditions is constitutional under the Interstate Commerce clause. Two George W. Bush appointed judges on the Ninth Circuit and a Clinton appointee ruled for California; and the Biden Administration is backing the pork companies even as sixteen Democratic senators are opposed. Meantime, Republican-led states led by Indiana have filed an amicus brief arguing that, since forcing new regulations on multistate corporations in one state will raise costs in other states, the lawsuit violates the sovereignty of each state under the Constitution.
All of this plays out against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s actions against Disney Corporation: a likely presidential contender antagonizing one of his state’s largest corporations in the name of the cultural values and free expression of its citizens. (Even as a high-profile Republican Senator, Lindsey Graham, defends another “woke” corporation, Amazon, against union organizing.)
Generally, the a priori view from here is, not taking into account the question of the effect on other states, the more pro-state the ruling, the better in the near and middle term future of America. Let California be California; and let North Dakota be North Dakota. Let the Duttons curb the multinational, and California voters curb the pork producers. Let real diversity, a diversity in values, reign. The closest model to this Republican model is America in the 1880s, 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. In this period, Massachusetts was the most active state government in the country, a pioneer in public health, and California was not, and labor movements and moral associations across the country petitioned state legislatures on behalf of active citizens. The system worked, with offenses against Native Americans mostly flowing from the national government via the Army. The one exception, egregious and unerasable, was Southern reconstruction and persecution of the 90 percent of Blacks who lived in the southern states by state legislatures.
The principle conservatives can take from this period is a basic one. Outside of egregious cases, self-preservation means accepting incompatible values and letting them live beside each other, and the states are the laboratories of those values democratically decided.