Boomer dads excepted, most people don’t watch Westerns. Even among cinephiles, Westerns are easily shunted off into their own niche that—in a world that rarely produces new Westerns, at least unless they’re Yellowstone spin-offs—is easily imagined as separate from film proper. There are lots of genres for which this is true to one extent or another, but unlike swashbucklers, screwball comedies, or Commedia sexy all'italiana (look it up), lack of exposure does not deter anyone from thinking they know exactly what Westerns are like. The Western is judged on a collage of second- and third-hand sense impressions. The Western is pre-emptively dismissed based on myths and assumptions, the most damning of which are political anathema to the average leftist. Eileen Jones of Jacobin concedes only that one may “enjoy aspects of old Westerns, in spite of their generally nightmarish Manifest Destiny ideology.” Everyone knows that Westerns are racist, sexist, imperialist propaganda valorizing the conquering white man. But when I got into Westerns in my twenties, this collaged Western I had culturally absorbed turned out to be like the shadows on Plato’s cave wall: not a lie, precisely, but nothing like the complexity, color, and depth of reality. 

More than any other genre, Westerns are about the values of the United States: the alleged ones and the ones in practice. They are about clashes between bandits and the law, between working-class immigrants and mega-rich ranchers, between settlers and Indigenous people (who, even in ugly depictions, are less often generic “Indians” than Apache, Comanche, Cheyenne, Sioux). They’re about the tension between individualism and community, between justice and violence, and the hope and horror of wide open space. Sometimes this is in service of Manifest Destiny, colonialism, and white supremacy, disseminating America’s founding myths of idealistic expansion. But the same themes that can enable all of that also make the Western especially adept at tearing that mythology apart. At their best, Westerns serve to critique colonialism and genocide, to expose the falsity of America as a land of opportunity, to call out when the U.S. stands for evil, in the Old West and now, and when the U.S. fails to live up to its own promises. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Jimmy Stewart plays a lawyer from back east who sets up a school for children and adults in the community, most of whom cannot read. Woody Strode, as the film’s only Black character, recites the Declaration of Independence in class, but cannot remember the line “all men are created equal.” Stewart tells him, “That's all right, Pompey, a lot of people forget that part of it.” Liberty Valance came out in 1962, when plenty of people were forgetting about all men are created equal, not least the segregationist rioters at the University of Mississippi a few months after the film’s release.