GUEST COLUMN, Michael Bedenbaugh
Americans are exhausted — not from blazing new trails, but from fighting over old ones. We bicker about politics, identity, and ideology as if conquest were still our national sport. Our frontier spirit, once the wellspring of creativity and courage, has curdled into something more cynical: bureaucracy, spectacle, and burnout.
A century ago, historian Frederick Jackson Turner predicted this moment. In 1893, he warned that when the physical frontier closed, America would lose the crucible that shaped its independence and adaptability. “American social development,” he wrote, “has been continually beginning over again on the frontier.”
By the end of the 19th century, the Census Bureau declared the frontier closed. Turner foresaw that this loss would change us profoundly — that a people defined by expansion would have to turn either inward or outward to find meaning.
He was right.
From Homesteaders to Hedge Funds
Within a decade of Turner’s address, the United States had become a global power. The humble republic of pioneers and farmers turned outward — fighting the Spanish-American War and seizing new territories. America began to see itself not as a community of settlers, but as an empire of influence.
The pioneering farmer gave way to the industrial magnate. Manifest Destiny no longer meant clearing land and planting roots; it meant extracting, building, and consolidating. Power shifted from the frontier to the factory, from homesteaders to tycoons.
In Turner’s day, the rise of the robber barons — men like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan — was already a sign that frontier self-reliance had been replaced by industrial dominance. They were empire builders in their own right, carving monopolies instead of settlements. Though they endowed libraries and universities, they also reshaped America’s sense of virtue. Wealth became the new frontier; acquisition became the measure of worth.
That impulse has never left us.
From Franklin’s Enlightenment to Trump’s Transaction
Historian H.W. Brands, in The First American, described Benjamin Franklin as the prototype of the American ideal: ingenious, civic-minded, thrifty, and endlessly optimistic. Franklin blended intellect and practicality; he believed prosperity and public service could reinforce one another. The first American was, above all, a builder of communities as well as fortunes.
Fast-forward 250 years, and that civic temperament has curdled into something louder, brasher, and more transactional. Donald Trump’s impulse to literally remake the White House in gold leaf — to tear down and rebuild the East Wing as his personal statement — is not just vanity; it’s the cultural DNA of a people that remake themselves by destruction.
Where Roosevelt once said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” Trump’s style might be summarized as “Shout loudly and hit bigly.” His rise should not surprise us. He is not an aberration; he is a mirror. He reflects a nation that now measures success by domination rather than contribution, and leadership by volume rather than vision.
The same culture that once produced quiet statesmen like Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson now rewards those who embody branding over belief, spectacle over substance, and appetite over restraint.
The Death of Renewal
Turner warned that once the frontier disappeared, America would lose its “perennial rebirth.” Without that testing ground, he feared, the republic would stagnate under the weight of its own success. He could not have known how right he would be.
In the 20th century, the United States became a global empire — militarily, economically, and culturally. The same restless energy that once drove settlers west now drove corporations, armies, and ideologies across the planet. Expansion continued, but it was no longer a moral experiment in self-government; it was an assertion of dominance.
At home, the old tension between liberty and equality hardened into bureaucracy and polarization. The frontier that once united us through shared struggle now divides us through competing myths — the nostalgic rural past versus the technocratic urban future.
The Last Western
Even as the real frontier faded, its spirit lived on in American storytelling. Through the mid-20th century, the TV western kept that myth alive — “Stagecoach,” “High Noon,” “The Searchers,” “Bonanza,” and “Gunsmoke.” Each reminded Americans that courage, justice, and redemption still mattered.
But after the 1960s, the genre began to fade. The old myth of honor and duty was pummeled by modern forces — corporate money, suburban sprawl, and political cynicism.
Then came “Yellowstone.”
The Dutton family’s fight to preserve land, tradition, and independence against developers and bureaucrats struck a deep cultural nerve. Viewers saw not just cowboys, but themselves — citizens trying to protect something sacred in a system built to consume it. Yellowstone was more than a television drama; it was a eulogy for the American character Turner once described. A last stand between the frontier’s moral clarity and the empire’s moral fatigue.
The New Frontier
And yet, all is not lost.
If the old frontier forged our independence, perhaps the next one can restore our balance. The next American frontier won’t be geographic or economic — it will be moral, civic, and local. It will test whether liberty and responsibility can coexist in an age of instant gratification.
To revive the republic, we must rediscover Franklin’s synthesis — intellect joined to humility, prosperity to public good. It means rejecting both the robber baron’s greed and the populist’s rage and recovering that rare balance between ambition and restraint.
We have conquered the world.
Now we must conquer ourselves — our fears, our appetites, and our cynicism. The great work before us is not empire, but equilibrium: to prove once again that a free people can govern themselves without the need to follow zealots, parties, or demagogues.
If we can do that, America’s story will not end as another fallen empire’s tragedy. It will begin anew — as a republic restored, admired not for its dominance, but for its example.
Navy veteran, community leader, and political thinker Michael Bedenbaugh is dedicated to revitalizing America's founding principles. His diverse background includes naval service, academic studies, successful leadership in both nonprofit and business sectors, and an independent candidate run for Congress in 2024. He is also the author of the new book, Reviving Our Republic: 95 Theses for the Future of America, on which this article is based
