The world is burning and i am watching the Duttons

A couple years ago i became obsessed with Yellowstone. Yes, that one. The conservative cowboy epic, with all its horses, open skies, gravelly-voiced patriarchs, and rugged Americana soaked in blood and sentiment. And not just Yellowstone but the entire world Taylor Sheridan has constructed - Neo cowboy, sprawling mythologies centered around the Dutton family’s relationship with the birth of America in 1883, and 1923 and its subsequent rebirths, the rise of late stage capitalism desperate to put an end to the ways of ranching and natural landscapes for miles. A mythology of whiteness wrapped in barbed wire and panoramic vistas.

i’ve always watched a lot of films and TV shows but the Western genre rarely seduced me. Too many bloodless depictions of massacres. Cowboys and Indians? Come on! i was never going to side with anyone other than the Native people whose land was stolen. It was a pointless dichotomy to me. Too many squinting men on horses talking about honour while erasing Native presence from the very soil they claim to love. Too many tired tropes of civilization and savagery, where whiteness is always the force of order. i preferred my heroic loners in Samurai films - quieter, stranger, less burdened by the myth of Manifest Destiny. Still misogynistic, of course. The patriarchy is everywhere. But the fantasy didn’t reek of the same settler delusion.

But damn, Yellowstone, it pulled me in. i couldn’t stop watching.

Sheridan’s story depicts a land that is often a character in its own right, as factions fight for their right to work it, live on it, return it back to its Native owners, protect it from city progressives looking to make their next millions. Montana becomes a living force. Something to be fought for, sacrificed for, reclaimed, sold off, desecrated, restored. The land becomes a battleground for power, legacy, and that endlessly American question: who owns this? Who belongs here?

And Sheridan’s answer is compelling in its contradiction.

The Good White Rancher's guide on how to steal land - with integrity

The Dutton family - violent, elite, deeply problematic - are also positioned as underdogs. Protectors of something pure. The entire story is so dreamy - it transports the viewer into a world where this family are posited as the final defence against the faceless corporate interests of a variety of city folks who want to transform the sacred land into ski resorts and strip malls. These are not men of Wall Street - they're men of dirt. There's a nobility painted onto their grit.

The story positions John Dutton as a kind of flawed prophet. When he denounces “progress” as Governor of Montana, i found myself agreeing with him. If progress means bulldozing land, gutting local economies, and converting everything sacred into luxury housing - maybe we should be skeptical. Progress that comes in the form of destruction to nature is something we should all think twice about opening the door to. Sheridan makes you feel it: the heartbreak of watching nature get sacrificed on the altar of profit.

But the problem is this: it’s a fantasy.

A clean, seductive fantasy where the landowning elite are the ones defending tradition and spirituality. Where white ranchers and Native communities form convenient alliances. Where racism, exploitation, and historical theft are acknowledged just enough to give the illusion of depth - but never enough to unravel the entire myth. It’s a kind of intoxicating storytelling that has millions of viewers feeling something profound about land, family, honour, resistance to power.

One of the Dutton sons is married to a Native woman. There are visions and spirit animals. There is a kind of spiritual respect threaded through the dialogue. But it's curated. It’s ornamental. Because at the end of the day, the land is still theirs. The Duttons remain the heroes of a story about land that was never theirs to begin with.

That’s the dangerous part. Yellowstone feeds the illusion that America, at its most noble, is still white. Still masculine. Still ruled by people who own vast property, kill to protect it, and are somehow the moral counterbalance to corporate greed. Sheridan gives us critique without disruption. A rebellion that leaves power untouched.

Whomth owns this land?

What fascinates me isn’t just the story Sheridan tells - but how deeply it lands with its audience. How effectively it gives the right wing a narrative to believe in. A myth that flatters their view of America while offering just enough complexity to feel modern.

Yellowstone and its companion series present a vision of America that never quite existed. Yes, the Dutton family is depicted as violent and problematic - the show doesn't shy away from their moral complexity. But it simultaneously suggests they've always been accepting of Black cowboys, always respectful of Native land rights, always the scrappy underdogs fighting against corrupt systems rather than beneficiaries of those very systems.

This is where the fantasy becomes dangerous. The show feeds into a delusion of grandeur about what America could be - or what some believe it once was; there's an entire marketing slogan from the current administration around this delusion, including hats made in China. It's a story about triumph over the land, over hardship, over poverty, told through the lens of a family that owns vast amounts of property and wields considerable power. The contradiction is stark, yet somehow it works dramatically. Here's a story that should critique capitalism and corporate greed, that should champion the oppressed against the powerful, yet it does so through protagonists who embody the very systems it claims to resist. The ranchers who work for Dutton, are quite literally branded into the Dutton family and their, often violently criminal, extra curricular activities.

It’s not that Sheridan’s world is naïve. The Duttons are morally compromised. The story acknowledges settler violence, colonial theft, ecological destruction. But those truths are wrapped in an emotional logic that still makes the audience root for them. The narrative doesn’t interrogate systems, it personalises them. You’re not watching a critique of empire. You’re watching a family defend their ranch.

And so Yellowstone gives its (largely white, i assume likely Republican) audience something the left doesn’t: aspiration.

A dream. A vision. A story about who they are and what they’re fighting for - even if that fight is based on a lie.

The left, by contrast, has no such mythology.

Who is my author, where are my stories?

Do the authors of mythologies on the "left" know this season was their column to write? This is what keeps me up at night: where are our stories?

What’s the "leftist" Yellowstone? The dreamscape of solidarity, community, mutual aid, land stewardship, and true liberation? Where is the sweeping, cinematic vision of a world after capitalism - not in collapse, but in bloom? Or at least, worth protecting to ensure its continued bloom.

i’ve watched Succession, Severance, The White Lotus - shows that eviscerate power, lampoon the rich, expose the rot in every corner of neoliberal life. We are masterful critics. Our satire is searing. Our analysis is sharp. We know how to take things apart. i watched Succession in the same years i watched Yellowstone - we don’t lack capacity to laugh at, ridicule and depict an oppressive billionaire class in all their horror and depravity. We have Severance that captures the death of soul that has come of working with little to no power over the means of production, selling our bodies for pointless labour. All very top notch, widely watched shows that feed up a type of leftist ideology that one can consume and feel “of taste”.

But what do we know of how to build?

Where is the show that makes me want to fight for something, not just reject it?

We can write brilliant think pieces about extractive economies and systemic violence. We can break down race, class, gender, and empire with eloquence and fire. But when it comes to imagining the alternative - to creating cultural visions of justice that feel as emotionally rich as they are politically sound - we’re still coming up short.

We know what we’re against. But do we know what we’re for?

Post rage blueprints

i think this is the real crisis of imagination on the left. We’ve ceded the dream. We let the right own fantasy, nostalgia, romance, beauty. They wrap their ideology in horses and sunsets and rugged fathers doing what needs to be done. We wrap ours in critique. We speak in warning, not in invitation.

But people don’t move because of data. They move because of story.

So i’m asking: where is our mythology? Where is our flawed-but-beautiful world of collective life, of chosen family, of land returned and cared for? What does it look like to romanticise abolition, to aestheticise solidarity, to mythologise our own resistance?

We don’t need propaganda. We need narrative. We need art that gives us characters who dream of liberation and make us dream with them. Not utopias, but grounded futures full of complexity and contradictions - and still worth fighting for.

We need a new kind of epic. Not cowboys. Not billionaires. Not tech saviours. Something older, and newer, and truer.

We need to tell the story not just of how the world ends - but how it might begin again.