monty

A few weeks ago I was watching the Paramount production Yellowstone. The show follows the Dutton family, the owners of the eponymous Yellowstone Ranch, as they struggle for power in the geopolitics of Montana, a state divided between a complex patchwork of public, private, and indigenous land. The writing in the show is nothing special, and frankly a bit stupid. Despite this, the show is incredibly successful with a specific demographic of American viewers: Republicans.

I don't think Yellowstone draws those people in because of the plot or the writing, but because like most Taylor Sheridan shows it appeals to the American conservative politically. The show portrays the political fantasy of the American Republican. In the show, a single hardworking family controls the majority of Montana's private land. The state government exists entirely at the mercy of the Dutton's, with a significant portion including the governor basically swearing loyalty to the Dutton patriarch's vision for the state. The hated urban expansions the local libs try to make are vetoed consistently in favour of maintaining the massive Dutton ranch network. The Dutton's lease to a hierarchy of hundreds of ranchers, so loyal to their lords that the ranchers literally brand themselves with the logo of the Yellowstone corporation and are consistently willing to lay their lives on the line to act as literal men at arms for the Duttons endless warring with the indigenous and rival white land owners.

The success of this show among Republicans betrays their long-term political dream for rural America: feudalism. The political economy portrayed in the show is the most literal and unapologetically accurate portrayal of feudalism I have ever seen. Feudalism is better captured onscreen in Yellowstone than in Game of Thrones, The King, or any other number of popular medieval dramas of the 2010s and 20s. In fact, the feudalism portrayed in Yellowstone is a more unrestrained and distilled form of the system than even existed in medieval Europe. Real feudalism was a generally restricted system, counterbalanced by the immense power of the medieval church allowed by the magical thinking of pre-enlightenment society and by the very small real gap in power between the peasantry and the state created by the reality of the levee army system that dominated medieval warfare (the peasants were the army). The modern feudalism being constructed by the Republican party and its supporters as portrayed in Yellowstone is a more insane form of the original. A form without the noblesse obligé created by the sincere belief that cruel rulers go to hell and a form backed by the insane technological power of the modern state.

Range feudalism as I'll call it from now on and in future articles is one of the two dystopian futures competing to dominate the modern American smallholder. If the GOP has their way, the average farmer will be reduced to a tenant undyingly loyal to their lord. The lords of range feudalism will slowly consolidate all rural private land and all rural public land will be privatized and fall into their hands. These rural neolords will encircle and choke the cities, powerless to stop the private corporations that feed them. Governments will be captured by the new lords of American feudalism, who will be unregulated and unrestrained in their quest for infinite resource extraction. Those working towards range feudalism are doing it for more than just food production. The partitioning of rural land between barons of resource extraction is also about oil, mineral, and natural gas extraction unrestrained by government interference.

The solution seems simple to the untrained eye, then: vote Democrat! As per usual, voting for liberals will not save you. The Democrat vision for rural America is dystopian too. Instead of Range Feudalism, which sees America's independent smallholders returned to serfdom and subject to neolords, the Democratic party rural project is the proletarianization of American farmers. The Democratic party's true masters, finance and tech capital have spent the last decade buying up gigantic swathes of farmland and turning the farmers who have worked there for generations into employees. Even Bill Gates has gotten involved, with the former tech CEO now being the largest land owner in the United States. At first glance, this system seems little different from Range Feudalism but there is one major difference: farmers under this system are not effectively tenants but actual wage labourers for these corporations. They are proletarianized, not turned into serfs. But the outcome is the same: consolidation of all rural land into a few hands.

If this system is so bad, why do farmers sell to corporations in the first place? Simple: independent farmers are unable to compete with these farming complexes whose sheer scale allows them to undercut and overwhelm the competition and farmers have no choice but to accept the inevitable offer from Alphabet or whoever to turn their land over and become employees.

The job security of farmers, once guaranteed by owning their own land, is threatened by both of these emerging systems. Instead of being able to wait out the inevitable cycle of climate and soil-induced crop failure, a single bad year threatens the very home of a proletarianized or tenant farmer. Unlike the peasants and serfs of medieval Europe, who could not be expelled from their ancestral lands, proletariat and tenant farmers in the 21st century can be fired or evicted directly or indirectly due to crop failure or herd dieoff. Historically a career with slim margins, farmers under either vision for the future will be perpetually hanging by a thread.

What's the solution to this then, if it isn't voting Democrat? The only realistic answer is socialism. Farmers must be allowed to continue producing independently or rural land must be collectivized and shared equally between the rural population. In theory, both dystopian visions could be prevented by a heavily regulated capitalism preventing farm buyup, but wealthy capture of all mainstream politics in the United States makes this not an option. Even under the New Deal, arguably the least capital-friendly period in American History, it was still legal for banks to buy up farmland via mortgaging and foreclosure. As with the urban proletariat, farmers are faced with a simple choice: Socialism or Barbarism.