This essay examines the crisis in British national identity through the lens of Taylor Sheridan's neo-Western mediaverse, arguing that Britain's current vulnerability to white grievance politics stems from a failure of historical imagination. While Sheridan's work demonstrates how cultural products can make historical narratives accessible to working-class audiences—albeit in ways that often reinforce conservative mythologies—British cultural production remains trapped within aristocratic frameworks that alienate ordinary people from their own history. Through analysis of contemporary political developments and comparative study of American frontier mythology, this piece advocates for new cultural products that could connect British working-class audiences with their radical historical traditions. The stakes of this project are made clear by the current surge in platform-amplified white identitarian politics, which flourishes precisely because progressive forces have abandoned the field of national mythology to reactionary narratives.
Introduction
We're less than a week into 2025 and British public discourse is already swirling around the drain of racism and white identitarian politics. The rise of Farage's Reform UK continues unabated, backed by Elon Musk's platform capitalism and media influence. After pledging support for Farage at the end of last year, the richest and most divorced man in the world is now using Twitter to promote right-wing fearmongering around 'grooming gangs', calling for the release of Tommy Robinson and for the king to dissolve parliament. The prime minister, ever the Milquetoast centrist, seems unable to triangulate a path forward that doesn't tacitly endorse the white grievance narratives undergirding these claims, inviting Musk to "roll up his sleeves and work with us" against rape gangs.
Precisely why Musk is so interested in UK politics remains unclear. Perhaps, like many observers, he sees our two anglophone nations as being eerily similar. It's an easy trap to fall into — we share a language, consume much of the same media, and often face parallel political crises. But having spent time travelling through America recently, I've come to understand that this surface-level similarity masks profound differences in how our respective nations construct and maintain their identities.
American Archipelago
America isn't so much a single country as an archipelago of distinct cultural islands, connected by thin threads of shared mythology and federal governance. Travelling between states feels less like moving through regions of the same nation and more like crossing borders between different countries entirely. The attitudinal differences you encounter — from rural Montana to urban California, from the Texas borderlands to the Washington beltway — are far more profound than anything you might find between Manchester and London, or even between Scotland and England.
The scale of these differences becomes apparent in everyday interactions. A conversation about politics in a Portland coffee shop bears little resemblance to one in a Billings diner. The cultural assumptions, the frameworks for understanding society and history, the very language used to describe similar phenomena — all shift dramatically as you move through the American landscape. This insularity, this profound localism, makes it difficult for Americans themselves to fully comprehend the lives and perspectives of their countrymen in different regions.
Travelling through America in the run-up to the election, where ordinary Americans were only too glad to have conversations about their politics and voting intentions, it became clear that the "Washington bubble" perhaps exemplifies this phenomenon most starkly. Life for people in and around federal politics — their beliefs, social structures, daily rhythms — bears little resemblance to the lives of the 390 million people they nominally govern. Understanding this gap helped me finally grasp the emotional logic behind "states' rights" arguments. When the distance between federal governance and lived experience grows so vast, the desire for local autonomy becomes more comprehensible.
Since returning to the UK, I've found myself engaging with American cultural products in new ways, particularly those that attempt to bridge profound cultural and political divides through historical narrative. In this context, Taylor Sheridan's expanding mediaverse emerges as a surprising case study in both the possibilities and pitfalls of using popular culture to reimagine national identity.
The Sheridan Project
I'll admit to a certain fascination with Taylor Sheridan. I first encountered his work in 2015 as the screenwriter for Denis Villeneuve's thriller Sicario, though I had no idea who he was at the time, much less that it was his first screenplay, one he sold in his 40s. As someone harbouring not-so-secret creative writing ambitions while rapidly approaching the latter years of my fourth decade, I can't help but feel a little inspired by someone who switched careers so late and achieved such success. I also can't help but ruefully admire the sheer brazenness of his hustle — writing Four Sixes, the Texas cattle ranch he purchased with Yellowstone money, into the show itself, not to mention his never-ending cameo performances in his own shows, implies a certain amount of self-confidence that we could all learn from.
I'll confess upfront: I'm not entirely sure I like Sheridan's work. His politics often feel muddled, his writing can veer into self-indulgence, and there's something uncomfortably seductive about how he aestheticizes violence and tradition. Yet there is something deeply compelling about these shows; Sheridan's America exists in a perpetual autumn, forever caught in the moment of deepest beauty and imminent decline. His cultural project fascinates me precisely because of these contradictions, these attempts to bridge seemingly unbridgeable divides through narrative. Sheridan's work offers a masterclass in how cultural mythology can be repackaged for contemporary audiences; through works like Yellowstone, Special Ops: Lioness, and 1883, he performs a remarkable cultural alchemy: transforming traditionally conservative frontier narratives into vehicles for liberal identity construction.
The underlying politics of shows like Special Ops: Lioness, which positions Black queer women at the heart of America's military-industrial complex, reveal the limitations of representation without transformation. The series demonstrates how contemporary American liberalism accommodates itself to empire through superficial inclusion. Diversity becomes a means of legitimising state violence rather than transforming it. This sleight of hand — making imperial power palatable to liberal audiences through superficial progression — holds important warnings for any project of cultural reconstruction.
Yellowstone, Sheridan's flagship creation, performs an even more intricate ideological dance. The Dutton ranch emerges as a metaphor for white America's relationship with its colonial past and neoliberal present, with white ranchers cast simultaneously as beneficiaries and victims of settler colonialism. Through this positioning, Sheridan crafts narratives where liberal audiences can sympathise with traditionally conservative archetypes without confronting their underlying contradictions.
Perhaps nowhere is this tension between genuine solidarity and mere co-option more evident than in Sheridan's treatment of Native American characters in Yellowstone. The show attempts to draw parallels between white ranchers and indigenous peoples as mutual victims of rapacious capitalism and federal overreach. This equivalence feels strained at best and offensive at worst — after all, the Dutton ranch sits on stolen land, a fact the show acknowledges but never truly reckons with. Yet in the series' final turn, when the Dutton ranch is sold back to the reservation for its original price — "a dollar fifty an acre" — we glimpse something more complex than simple appropriation. It's a gesture toward historical justice that, while perhaps inadequate, suggests how cultural products might begin to address historical wrongs without alienating audiences invested in traditional narratives.
The pervasive melancholy in Sheridan's work serves less as artistic choice than as ideological function. His characters move through a twilight world suffused with loss — loss of land, loss of tradition, loss of certainty. This melancholy serves as an emotional bridge, connecting conservative and liberal audiences through shared experience of displacement and disorientation in late capitalism. Every character, from John Dutton to Monica Long, carries the weight of something irretrievably lost, something that perhaps never truly existed except in cultural memory.
Violence in the Sheridan-verse warrants particular examination. His unflinching portrayal of brutality functions as mythic violence — violence that establishes and maintains existing power structures rather than transforming them. Each burst of brutality serves as punctuation in a larger narrative about power, legitimacy, and the cost of survival in a world where traditional sources of meaning have eroded. What's fascinating is how this violence, often shocking in its intensity, is rendered almost beautiful through Sheridan's cinematic eye. The aestheticisation of violence becomes another tool for making conservative narratives palatable to liberal audiences.
As a British viewer watching these shows, especially 1883, I felt an unexpected pang of jealousy. Where are the cultural products that allow me to imagine my own past with such visceral immediacy? More importantly, where are the shows that might help create solidarity between Britain's various communities by revealing our shared histories of resistance and struggle?
This accessibility of historical identity to ordinary white Americans represents a unique cultural phenomenon. No other nation offers its white working-class citizens such ready access to historical narrative ownership. This democratisation of historical identity, problematic as it may be in terms of settler colonial politics, helps explain the enduring power of frontier mythology in American culture.
The British Crisis
The contrast with British historical imagination proves not just revealing, but painful. While American popular culture allows even its poorest white citizens to draw a line through their lineage as pioneers, cowboys, settlers, and frontierspeople, British historical consciousness, on the other hand, remains imprisoned by the aristocracy. Our history is taught as a succession of kings and queens, or battles won and lost by lords and princes: our cultural products always revolving around the great men (always men) of history.
I've never been particularly drawn to mystical practices like past-life regression, but the phenomenon reveals something crucial about our national imagination. It's a comedy trope that, when British people engage in these exercises, they invariably imagine themselves as royalty or nobility, their historical imagination constrained by centuries of class stratification. It's telling that we can't even fantasise about being ordinary people in our own past.
This imprisonment of historical imagination has real consequences. The current crisis in British identity stems not from a lack of history — we have that in abundance — but from our selective remembering. We've chosen to centre our national mythology around monarchy, empire, and military triumph. Churchill's cigar and Nelson's column, slave traders' statues and colonial plunder — these symbols are the architecture of our collective memory, and they're failing us spectacularly.
Consider how this failure manifests in our current moment. The surge in white grievance politics, amplified by figures like Musk through manufactured moral panics, flourishes precisely because we've failed to articulate compelling alternative narratives of British identity. When Tommy Robinson garners support, when racial panics gain traction, when calls for authoritarian intervention find fertile ground, we're witnessing the consequences of abandoning the field of national mythology to reactionary forces.
I grew up in a working-class community where history felt like something that happened to other people. Our past, when it appeared at all, was reduced to a series of dates and battles, kings and treaties. The rich tapestry of working-class history — the struggles, triumphs, and everyday heroism of ordinary people — was nowhere to be found in our education or our culture. This absence creates a vacuum that xenophobic nationalism rushes to fill.
Beyond Critique
If Sheridan's work demonstrates anything, it's that critique alone isn't enough — people need stories they can see themselves in, narratives that make history feel immediate and personal. This is where the British left's response to our identity crisis has proved woefully inadequate. While necessary, the focus on critiquing existing symbols has failed to provide alternatives that could fill the void in our historical imagination. Tearing down statues of slave traders means little if we don't erect monuments to the abolitionists who opposed them, to the workers who built this country, to the radicals who imagined better futures. We need to move beyond critique to creation, beyond deconstruction to reconstruction.
I lived on Cable Street for several years, and every day I walked past the mural commemorating the Battle of Cable Street — that moment in 1936 when Jews, communists, trade unionists and local residents united to prevent Oswald Mosley's blackshirts from marching through the East End. This history offers a model of multicultural British solidarity more relevant to our present moment than any imperial victory. Yet how many Britons know this story? How many of our schools teach it alongside the Battle of Hastings?
The historical threads we might weave into a new national narrative are rich and varied: the Levellers' radical democracy, the Diggers' environmental stewardship, the matchgirls' labour activism. Wat Tyler and Captain Swing remind us that British history belongs not just to kings and queens, but to those who challenged their power. The Chartists, the Suffragettes, the Bristol Bus Boycotters — our past is full of ordinary people fighting for extraordinary change.
This isn't about whitewashing history — quite the opposite. It's about embracing the complexity of our past, recognizing that British identity can encompass both Thomas Paine's radical vision and the imperial violence he opposed. We can acknowledge the wounds of empire while celebrating those Britons who fought against it. We can be proud of our resistance to fascism while remaining vigilant against its modern manifestations.
Learning from Sheridan
Sheridan's work offers both warning and instruction for this project of cultural reconstruction. His success demonstrates the hunger for accessible historical narrative, particularly among working-class audiences. Yet his method of making conservative mythology palatable to liberal audiences through aesthetic sophistication and superficial complexity shows how easily such projects can reinforce rather than challenge existing power structures.
The treatment of gender and violence in Sheridan's work particularly deserves attention. His male characters embody a form of masculinity that simultaneously critiques and reifies traditional gender roles. Take Kayce Dutton in 'Yellowstone' — his sensitivity and moral struggles are foregrounded, yet ultimately serve to legitimise rather than challenge the violence he perpetrates. Similarly, his female characters, while strong and complex, often function to make patriarchal power structures more palatable rather than truly transforming them.
Any project of British cultural reconstruction must avoid these pitfalls. We need narratives that don't just make our existing mythology more palatable, but fundamentally challenge and transform it. This means moving beyond the simple inclusion of diverse characters within traditional power structures to telling stories that question those structures themselves.
Towards Cultural Reconstruction
What might a reconstructed British identity look like in practice? Imagine a television series that does for the Chartist movement what Peaky Blinders did for interwar Birmingham gangsters. Picture a historical drama about the matchgirls' strike that treats working-class women's activism with the same reverence usually reserved for royal intrigue. Consider a film about Cable Street that captures the energy and complexity of multicultural resistance to fascism.
These can’t be simple heroic narratives — they need to engage with the full complexity of their historical moments, just as Sheridan's work does. But unlike Sheridan's project of making conservative mythology palatable to liberals, these cultural products would aim to make radical history accessible to working-class audiences without compromising its transformative potential.
Yet we must acknowledge that the problem isn't simply a lack of historical representation. Britain has produced powerful works about its radical past — from Suffragette film to Steve McQueen's masterful Small Axe series. The issue lies in how these stories remain safely contained within their historical moments, treated as finished chapters rather than living influences on our present. What Sheridan achieves, beyond his historical pieces like 1883, is the threading of that history into contemporary narratives. 'Yellowstone' isn't just about cowboys — it's about how the mythology of the frontier shapes modern American life, for better or worse.
British storytelling needs this same temporal reach. We need narratives that show how the spirit of Cable Street lives in modern anti-fascist movements, how the Matchgirls' Strike echoes in contemporary labour struggles, how the radical democracy of the Levellers speaks to current debates about political representation. These histories shouldn't be museum pieces — they should be living traditions that help us understand and transform our present moment.
These wouldn't be simple heroic narratives — they would need to engage with the full complexity of their historical moments, just as Sheridan's work does. But unlike Sheridan's project of making conservative mythology palatable to liberals, these cultural products would aim to make radical history accessible to working-class audiences without compromising its transformative potential.
Ironically, one of the few British shows that successfully connects ordinary people to history is Who Do You Think You Are?. Watch someone discover their great-great-grandparent was a Chartist or suffragette, and you witness a profound moment of recognition — a sudden understanding that history isn't just something that happened to other people, but a living legacy written in their own family story. Yet by focusing exclusively on celebrities, the show inadvertently reinforces the idea that only special people deserve to have their histories explored and celebrated. Imagine this kind of personal historical connection scaled up to the level of community and culture, translated into compelling fiction that helps ordinary people see themselves not just in their own family trees, but in the broader sweep of British radical tradition.
The key lies in understanding that people need to see themselves in history. Just as Sheridan's America allows working-class whites to imagine themselves as part of a grand historical narrative, our new British cultural products need to help ordinary people locate themselves within our radical traditions. This means moving beyond both uncritical celebration and pure critique to create narratives that acknowledge complexity while maintaining hope.
Conclusion
The success of Sheridan's cultural project demonstrates both the possibilities and pitfalls of reimagining national identity through popular culture. As Britain grapples with its own crisis of national identity, we must learn from his example while charting a different course. The question isn't whether British identity will be reimagined, but by whom and to what end.
If we don't create compelling progressive narratives about who we are and where we come from, others will continue to craft dangerous fictions in their absence. The time has come not just to critique the statues in our squares, but to build new ones — monuments to a British tradition of radical democracy, social justice, and multicultural solidarity that offers genuine hope for our future.
The alternative is already visible in our current moment: a continued retreat into racist myth-making, a politics of grievance and exclusion, an identity built on fear rather than solidarity. The success of Sheridan's work in America demonstrates both the power and the danger of accessible historical narrative. Britain needs its own storytellers, not to replicate his rehabilitation of frontier mythology, but to unearth and amplify our own traditions of resistance and reform.
The stakes could not be higher. As platform capitalism enables the rapid spread of white grievance narratives, as manufactured moral panics find ever-larger audiences, the need for compelling counter-narratives becomes urgent. We need cultural products that make radical British history not just accessible but irresistible, that help people locate themselves within progressive historical traditions, that offer hope without denying complexity.
This is the challenge of our moment: to create new myths that serve truth rather than power, that unite rather than divide, that inspire action rather than resignation. In the face of resurgent reaction, we must remember that Britain's greatest moments have always come not from conquest or domination, but from resistance and solidarity. It's time to tell those stories.
