Teflon Don and the Modern Cowboy: Examining Beliefs and the Rural-Urban Divide in Policy, Politics, and Pop Culture

The last decade and a half has seen the rise of the American neo-Western genre in pop culture, with more than the double the number of such films being released than in the decade prior, including box office hits like the remake of True Grit (2010), the Tarantino films Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2015), and Indie favorite Hell or High Water (2016). This has since bled into network television, most notably with the Kevin Costner-led family drama, Yellowstone, one of the highest rated and most-watched shows since its debut in 2018. With an audience that spans, gender, race, and age, unlike the traditional Westerns of the twentieth century, the neo-Western also carries with it discourse emblematic of the rural-urban conflicts that characterizes contemporary political polarization. This study uses the Advocacy Coalition Framework and Narrative Policy Framework to examine the parallels in discourse and beliefs about rural-urban conflicts in both politics and pop culture. To do this, discourse analysis is used to code President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign speeches and the scripts of the television series Yellowstone in order to identify overlap in identified beliefs, as well as heroes, villains, and victims. These results are then compared with analysis of interviews of individuals living in identified rural communities undergoing suburbanization and urbanization. This study expands our knowledge of synergies in politics, pop culture, and policy, as well as how pop culture may have the power to communicate political and policy positions to audiences outside those of their “target” audiences.