How Trump's politics emerged from American cowboy culture
The myth of cowboy individualism is 'central to the culture of Republican politics,' says historian
With Donald Trump in his second term as U.S. president, America is now in a "constitutional crisis," according to renowned historian Heather Cox Richardson.
"The Trump administration is operating outside the Constitution. They're not just breaking the laws — they're acting extra-constitutionally, which makes things really difficult because we have systems set up for when people break the laws. We don't have systems set up for when people say I'm gonna pull this billionaire off the street, and give them access to all Americans' data."
Cox Richardson argues that the U.S. crisis today is the result of a 40-year-old Republican ideology she terms "cowboy individualism."
"Those people who embrace cowboy individualism believe that a true American is a man who operates on his own outside the community. He needs nothing from the government, he works hard to support himself, he protects his wife and his children, and he asserts his will by dominating others," Cox Richardson told an audience at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She delivered the final lecture in the 2025 Phil Lind Initiative presented by UBC's School of Public Policy and Global Affairs.
According to Cox Richardson, the quintessential American cowboy hero became a prominent feature in politics immediately after the Civil War.
Professor Cox Richardson is based at Boston College. She writes a popular Substack called Letters from an American with over 2 million subscribers. In her talk, she examines the popular mythology of the solitary cowboy.
Here is an excerpt from her lecture:
"The cowboy image actually faded in the early 20th century Progressive Era, which is itself an interesting story. It sprang back to prominence in the 1950s and the 1960s as a propaganda tool to oppose the wildly popular, post-World War II government. That government reflected the idea that government had a role to play in regulating business, in providing a basic social safety net, in promoting infrastructure, and in protecting civil rights.
And those people who were determined to get rid of government regulation and taxation resurrected the myth of the American cowboy. They championed this idea of cowboy individualism. They embraced the idea that a government that worked for ordinary Americans was a form of socialism because it redistributed wealth from hard-working white people to Black Americans, people of colour and women who demanded equal rights.
In 1960, the Republicans nominated Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who was famous for his cowboy persona and his white cowboy hat and his opposition to the post-war government. They nominated him for president. And then, of course, in 1980, Ronald Reagan put aside his British riding clothes, put on a Western cowboy hat, and rode that ideology to the White House.
That myth of cowboy individualism became central to the culture of Republican politics as a way for Republican politicians to convince voters to support the destruction of federal government programs that actually benefited them."
"From 1981 to 2021, Republican policies moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90 per cent of Americans to the top one per cent. And the party stayed in power through media disinformation, voter suppression, gerrymandering and the flood of money into politics.
Those systemic changes to the political system in the United States move the Republican Party farther, and farther, and farther right. And the rhetoric of cowboy individualism became more and more extreme. They demonized non-white Americans and women in the public sphere. And they dismissed all government policies that promoted social cooperation, whether at home or abroad.
And in place of the post-World War II idea of cooperation among equals, they replace that idea with the idea that individual men should dominate society, ordering it as they thought best.
Over time, white men rejected the socialization and the education that would enable them to rise to prosperity or to develop meaningful relationships. That domination, to which they turned at the heart of cowboy individualism, grew increasingly apparent in the United States after 1992, when the modern militia movement took off after a standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, between federal marshals and a former factory worker named Randy Weaver, who had failed to show up to court for a trial on a firearms charge, convinced a number of Western men that they had to arm themselves to fight off the government.
By the early 2000s in the U.S., gun ownership first became a symbol of cultural identity, and then it became a way to groom younger people into Republican political ideology. This is why we see political leaders posing with their families holding AR-15s on Christmas cards."
The Trump administration has taken cowboy individualism now to an extreme, I believe, gutting the U.S. government and centering power in a dominant president, while also pulling the United States out of the web of international organizations that have stabilized the globe since World War II.
The administration began its run in 2025 by firing the women and the racial and gender minorities who held positions in the government. But it is not just exercising domination over others — it is revelling in that dominance and advertising it, especially over the migrants it has sent to prison in El Salvador, showing films of them being transported in chains, and displaying caged prisoners behind Homeland Security.
In place of cooperation, the Trump administration's determination to exercise its dominance shows, I think, in its plan to invest $1 trillion in the military after gutting the U.S. Agency for International Development, also known as USAID. Now, Trump is trying to demonstrate his power over the global economy. He's rejecting the conviction of past American leaders that true power and prosperity rests in cooperation.
Trump has always seen power as a zero-sum game in which for one party to win, others must lose.
He appears incapable of understanding that global trade does not mean the U.S. is getting ripped off. Now he appears unconcerned that other countries could in fact work together against the United States. He seems to assume they will have to do what he says.
If, in fact, Trump succeeds in asserting his dominance over the United States of America and over the globe, the Republicans will have succeeded in replacing American democracy with a dictatorship, and they will have rebalanced global power."
