The Frontiersman as a Touchstone

In the 18th and early 19th century, a number of people made their living in the western frontier beyond the Ohio River in what's now Ohio. Those guys became an iconic character archetype--the frontiersman. They were outside the boundary of the new American country and served as go-betweens and traders with the tribes. They often served as diplomats or messengers between the colonies or the early US government and the tribes. In some of the recorded cases, they were also neutral, or on their own side in the countless disputes between the two, or sided with the tribes against who were ostensibly "their own" people.

Life on the frontier was often brutal, and some of the frontiersmen were hard asses and violent, too. However, Johnny Appleseed was a totally different case, as were the religious missionaries who went to the frontier to indoctrinate the tribes in Christian dogma.

In the wake of the 2016 election, New York media people started to look at the country outside their little cliques as a new frontier. They produced some TV shows on the trope of "exploring" the country more in the spirit of the bizarro world version of the christian missionaries of the early days of America than the spirit of the frontiersman. In this new yorker version of the story, the white people of the middle of the country are some version of savages that need to be conquered with propaganda for Karl Marx and Das Capital.

Elizabeth Warren, aka Fauxcohantas, and other white people who claim indian tribal ancestry basically disavow their roots to recast themselves as primal people. It's actually pretty interesting that Elizabeth Warren and her ilk view that oppressed victim with no agency as a sort of holy archetype. It's similar to Cortez claiming to be a latina hoodrat or Harris claiming to be a pot smoking gangsta. It's the inverted version of Roman patricians claiming blue-blood descent from gods or heroes of the Trojan War.

Politicians in the US have to disavow patrician upbringing and pretend to be self made. George W Bush is a great example of that. Since the US was founded as a rebellion against the old world "for the people" the establishment is forever illegitimate.