The Frontier Mind: The Shape of the Right: An Autopsy of American Conservatism-A Ten Part Series, Nr 2
The Myth of Self-Reliance in a Subsidized Nation.
“The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization.” — Frederick Jackson Turner
This essay is part of The Shape of the Right: An Autopsy of American Conservatism, a ten-part exploration of the ideas, myths, and moral compulsions that shaped the American Right. I’m not here to sneer or to support it, but to understand how a movement that began with sermons and self-discipline grew into a politics of grievance and spectacle. Each essay stands on its own, but together they form an autopsy, not of a party, but of a moral psychology that still thinks it’s the soul of the nation.
The Cowboy in the Mirror
I grew up around men who swore they owed nothing to anyone. They fixed their own trucks, mended their own fences, and said things like “a man’s word is his bond” with the conviction of scripture. They believed in standing tall, paying their own way, and never asking for help. You had to admire it, even when you could see it wasn’t true.
Because every one of them drove on a federal highway, drank from a county water system, and used electricity regulated by the state. Their kids went to public schools, their farms survived on crop insurance, and their pensions came from Washington. Yet if you pointed that out, you’d be treated like you’d insulted their mothers.
That’s when I realized something: we weren’t just talking about pride. We were talking about faith. Self-reliance in America isn’t just a virtue; it’s a theology. It’s the creed that built our self-image and blinded us to the hands that helped us build it.
We tell ourselves that we conquered a continent with nothing but grit and God’s favor. The truth is, we built it on rail subsidies, land grants, and public works. The cowboy in the mirror isn’t a man. He’s a myth, riding a government-funded horse across a subsidized sunset.
The Subsidized Frontier
You don’t have to dig deep to find the evidence. The so-called Wild West was one of the most state-supported projects in human history. The Homestead Act gave away land to settlers who wouldn’t have survived a season without military forts nearby. The Pacific Railway Acts handed vast tracts of land and federal loans to corporations that called themselves pioneers of enterprise. The Bureau of Reclamation turned deserts into farmland with dams paid for by taxpayers who’d never see a crop.
And let’s not forget the U.S. Cavalry, that great enforcer of manifest destiny, clearing Indigenous nations off the land so freedom could plant its flag. The story we tell is that Americans tamed the frontier with their own two hands. The story we don’t tell is that those hands were guided, guarded, and financed by the state.
Once, on a long drive through Utah, I stopped at a diner covered in flags and slogans about freedom. The waitress poured my coffee beans from Brazil, mug from China, building kept open by a highway built with federal funds. She told me her nephew worked for the Bureau of Land Management but hated “government overreach.” We both laughed, though neither of us found it funny.
That’s the paradox at the heart of this country: we’ve always been a socialist nation that refuses to admit it. The West was won with government money, government guns, and government roads, yet we turned around and swore we’d done it all ourselves.
The modern conservative myth of self-reliance isn’t new, it’s just the frontier ghost in a three-piece suit. The slogans have changed, but the habit remains. We love collective benefit, as long as it looks like private virtue.
The Religion of Self-Reliance
Emerson told us to trust ourselves. Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately. Those were spiritual experiments, not economic policies. But somewhere between the Transcendentalists and the tycoons, we translated their call to moral independence into an economic gospel.
In this gospel, God helps those who help themselves, and the rest are just moral cautionary tales. Poverty became a sin, wealth a sacrament. It’s the prosperity gospel stripped of Jesus and rebranded for Wall Street.
Reagan preached it from the podium, declaring that government wasn’t the solution but the problem. The congregation roared its approval. Ever since, America’s been attending the Church of the Self-Made, where the only commandment is Thou Shalt Not Need.
The trouble is, nobody truly lives that way. Emerson could write his essays because someone else ran the printing press, cut the lumber for his cabin, and built the roads that carried his words westward. The entrepreneur with a “garage startup” probably had parents who paid the mortgage on that garage. The myth of the self-made man has always depended on invisible scaffolding: labor, law, infrastructure, and luck.
We built a theology of independence on a foundation of interdependence. That’s not hypocrisy; that’s alchemy. We turned subsidy into sanctity and shared labor into legend. And like any religion, once it took root, it stopped being a story and became an identity.
The Great Forgetting
The real tragedy isn’t that the myth is false, it’s that we forgot the truth it replaced.
The GI Bill didn’t just lift veterans; it built the middle class. Federal mortgages didn’t just house families; they created suburbs. The Interstate Highway System didn’t just connect states; it tied a nation together. Every piece of this infrastructure was a collective act of will.
But when we tell the story now, we skip the collective chapter. We jump straight to the moral: “I worked hard for what I have.” Sure you did. So did the millions of taxpayers who made your success possible. Gratitude quietly gave way to entitlement, and entitlement learned to call itself freedom.
We edited out the chorus and kept only the solo. That’s how forgetting works, it’s never accidental. It’s a cultural choice.
When people forget how much they’ve been helped, they start believing no one else deserves help. They say things like “I did it on my own, why can’t they?” as if public education, clean water, paved roads, and the miracle of modern plumbing fell from heaven fully formed.
This amnesia isn’t just historical. It’s moral. It blinds us to how civilization actually works. Every road, bridge, and safety net was built not by lone heroes but by people who understood that freedom without cooperation is just survival with better branding.
The Politics of the Frontier Ghost
The ghost still whispers in every anti-government rally and small-town diner. You can hear it when politicians rail against Washington while cashing their federal checks. You can see it in states that receive more aid than they pay in taxes yet wave “Don’t Tread on Me” flags from subsidized trucks.
The ghost speaks in bumper stickers: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” It chuckles in statehouses that decry socialism right up until the hurricane hits, and then call for federal relief. It haunts the same people who distrust the government that inspects their food, keeps their water clean, and flies their rescue helicopters.
This isn’t hypocrisy so much as a kind of spiritual dissonance. The frontier mind can’t admit the frontier is gone. It clings to the image of endless land, endless chance, endless freedom, long after those illusions dried up like prairie grass.
And the result? A political identity that celebrates dependence while pretending to despise it. We’ve turned resentment into a national language and denial into a civic virtue. The cowboy rides again, this time with a cell phone in one hand and a government loan in the other.
The Moral Cost of the Frontier Illusion
You can see the damage everywhere, but you can feel it most in the silence between people.
The myth of self-reliance has made us lonely. It tells men not to need, women not to ask, and neighbors not to interfere. It tells workers not to unionize, families not to rely on community, and citizens not to trust one another. It isolates us behind fences, screens, and slogans about freedom.
And what is that freedom worth, really, if it comes at the cost of belonging?
I used to believe the myth myself. I thought strength meant standing alone, that needing others was weakness. It took years to understand that the opposite is true. The strongest people I’ve known are the ones who give and receive help without shame.
When dependence becomes a dirty word, compassion becomes impossible. A society that worships the self-made man loses the art of gratitude. It forgets that cooperation isn’t charity, it’s survival.
The moral cost of the frontier illusion is a kind of civic loneliness. We’ve replaced fellowship with competition, cooperation with pride, gratitude with grievance. We no longer see ourselves as a people bound together by shared fortune but as contestants in a permanent audition for worthiness.
The self-made man may be the loneliest myth in America. I’ve met him. He sits alone at the end of every bar, talking about freedom like it’s a lost lover. He’ll tell you he doesn’t need anyone, but the silence between his sentences says otherwise.
The New Frontier
If there’s hope (and there is) it lies in reclaiming the frontier not as geography but as moral imagination.
The old frontier was about claiming space. The new one is about claiming responsibility. The old one expanded the land. The new one must expand the soul.
We can still keep the best parts of that myth. Courage. Work. Perseverance. But they mean nothing if they exist in isolation. Freedom isn’t found in fences; it’s found in shared purpose.
Maybe the next American frontier is realizing that self-reliance and solidarity aren’t opposites. They’re partners. The cowboy can keep his grit, but he doesn’t need to pretend he roped the horizon alone. Behind every rider was a blacksmith, a trail cook, a farmer, a soldier, a teacher, and a thousand unseen hands.
Imagine a patriotism honest enough to admit that freedom has always been a group project. Imagine a nation mature enough to say, “We built this together, and we’ll keep it together.” That’s not socialism. That’s sanity.
We could still honor the frontier spirit, its daring, its imagination, but we must let it evolve. We no longer conquer the wilderness; we have to learn to live in it, sustain it, and share it. The next frontier isn’t physical land. It’s moral land, cooperation, trust, humility, and gratitude.
Turner said the frontier made us American. Maybe cooperation will have to make us human.
A Closing Reflection
The longer I live, the more I think self-reliance is adolescence masquerading as virtue. It’s that teenage insistence that you don’t need your parents while eating food from their fridge. It’s fine when you’re young. It’s dangerous when you’re a nation.
America is old enough to grow up. We don’t have to kill the myth, only mature beyond it.
Every morning I drive down a highway I didn’t build, drink water I didn’t purify, and speak in a language shaped by countless teachers, poets, and strangers. Every comfort I enjoy is the product of unseen hands. That doesn’t make me less free. It makes me part of something worth saving.
Self-reliance is a beautiful story. But the fuller truth is even more beautiful. We’re all here because someone shared their labor, their time, their care. That’s not dependence, it’s belonging.
Maybe the real frontier is learning to say thank you. Maybe freedom was never about standing alone, but standing up for one another.
We’ve all been riding on someone else’s road from the very beginning. The least we can do is build a few miles for whoever comes next.
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I love reading your pieces. Your thoughts tend to line up well with mine. Blessings to you, Dino.
thank you for remarking on America’s adolescence.