Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
In director George Stevens’s classic 1953 Western, Shane, a mysterious stranger and gunfighter in buckskin with a violent past, rides into the middle of the late-1880s Wyoming range wars between cattle barons and homestead farmers. The community-minded farmers may have the law on their side, but the open-range cattlemen have the money and the gun-toting cowboys.
Shane enters the mess but decides to settle down, incognito, with a farm family, shed his past as a hired killer, and begin leading a settled and honest frontier life.
Almost immediately, however, he senses his tragic predicament. The West is not yet so civilized. The farmers, the future of civilization, hardly possess the gun-fighting ability to survive against the ruthless cattlemen and their hired guns.
So a reformed Shane is insidiously brought into the fray, as he figures out how to aid his new hosts while, at least at first, playing by their rules of civilized behavior.
Shane ultimately accepts that his second chance life is not sustainable. He learns that his newfound friends, the sodbusters, lack the skills to survive against Wilson, the cattlemen’s psychopathic hired killer.
Discussion (11)
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I think it was Thomas Jefferson who wrote that governing is an onerous task that is done for ungrateful people, a sour-grapes observation masquerading as timeless wisdom. Many people are grateful for good leadership; not every successful leader is a victorious Churchill turned out of office at the first opportunity. Where the analogy really breaks down, though, is that a substantial portion of the American people are not self-righteous sodbusters who lack guns or the skill to use them. These Americans don't cultivate the cinematically appealing fast draw, which is irrelevant in an actual gunfight, but by putting in the range time they do cultivate accuracy, which is just about everything in real-world gunfighting. Even more importantly, a great many of them have infantry training, which is just what Shane would have had as a Confederate soldier. Even if President Trump is not re-elected, even if the worst sort of leftist ideologue is placed into the White House, this is not going to become an American version of a Europe replete with rape gangs and sharia-enforced zones off-limits to American law and law-enforcement. President Trump represents millions of heavily armed conservatives with military training that is relevant to confronting a federal government which may fall into the wrong hands. Trump may falter and be replaced; millions of his supporters will remain. The modern versions of Shane are alive and well, and the cattle barons of the left had better remember that fact. Academics and RINOs who continually imply that the political defeat of an often badly managed Republican Party automatically equals subjection to leftist schemes had better remember that fact, too.
I think your comparison of Trump to Shane is an excellent analogy, and given the results of the midterms I fear your prediction for the ending of this movie may be spot on. The problem with history is it outlives us and the lessons learned are all to soon forgotten.
So Shane ended up working for the DOJ?
In todays' world The cow boys in this morality play are represented by todays' Left Wing "Reformers" Meanwhile the law-abiding sodbusters are todays' Conservatives who are being forced to turn their other cheek to the escalating attacks of the political Left.
How soon we forget!
Great stuff. I never did get Alan Ladd as Shane though. Jack Palance/Wilson, ok. Who will now be cast as Trump? Tommy Lee Jones? Director: Quentin Tarrantino?
William Kittredge wrote an essay titled "Silver Bullets" partly on the Shane paradox, the hero from outside society who comes to save what he cannot ever join, and the evolution of that mythic idea. Your article reminded me of it. Thank you for your work.