Robert Redford was the man MAGA men wish they were

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• “She should be put in jail”: Trump celebrates Willis’ removal from Georgia case

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• “One of the lions has passed”: Robert Redford dead at 89

  The actor, director and environmentalist died at his Utah home on Tuesday. Read more.

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If a rolling plain with a mountain in the distance and a bit of fence in the foreground flashes on the screen during a network TV commercial break, start counting. See if you make three seconds before some Republican in an ill-fitting sportcoat and too-light jeans waddles onscreen prattling about school boards, transgender children and Twitter beefs.

Campaign ads relying on the glamor of the Mountain West to sell politicians steeped in culture war greivance are, by now, predictable. They’re ridiculous. And any honest look at the electoral maps shows they are infuriatingly effective. Americans want to be sold the story of American greatness, even if it comes from a guy in boots that are too clean and a hat that looks fresh out of the box. 

The resulting ads take quite a bit from the first acts of Robert Redford’s most famous films. The actor, who died at his home in Utah on Tuesday at the age of 89, cut a mythic figure in movies that frequently began as half-remembered fables of the Old West. In “Jeremiah Johnson,” a man sets off into the wilderness, desperate for solitude and to try his mettle against nature. In “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” a pair of scruffy, charming outlaws do their best to outrun the law after a daring heist. It’s all of a piece with the story Americans love to tell about themselves: a nation of 400 million rugged individualists.

Of course, it’s not true. And though Redford had a chin that would be right at home in an ancient Greek mural, he had no interest in selling the myth. This effortlessly cool, would-be studio icon came on at a time that the old Hollywood system was dying and he picked scripts that reflected that fact. His protagonists were folks who came too late, bumbled their way into good fortune and ultimately ended up dead. In Redford’s most beloved films, the good old days were dying (and they might not have been all that good to begin with, come to think of it).

In his real life, Redford was anything but a doomer. The Wild West might be gone, but America was still around and it still had a lot worth saving. A conservative in the non-political sense, Redford dedicated much of his life to preserving and promoting the beauty that the United States has in abundance and the beautiful things its people can make. 

Where MAGA conservatives seek to sell off the west to the highest bidder, Redford worked tirelessly to preserve America’s wild places. Where followers of Donald Trump pay lip service to the idea of making things in this country again, Redford focused on expanding the manufacturing capacity of our movie-making machinery. GOP stars troop in from the hinterlands to Washington, D.C., bringing their petty small grievances in from the wide, open air. Redford set up shop on the side of a mountain and trusted that the people he wanted to talk to would come to him. 

Trump and his ilk want to Make America Great by recreating an American fiction they were sold via movies and television. The actual movie star wanted to add to America’s greatness by finding what was great about it and doing more of that. Redford spent his life as an exemplar of the ideas conservatives say they’re about. He was his own man, who stood up for what he believed in, and it brought him astronomical success. We have no doubt that they hated him for it.

What do you think? Could we use more Redfords? Are there more Redfords? Will there ever be? Sound off in the comments.

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