My Nana had a CT scan done on her lung one time in Atlanta, and the doctor asked if she was from Kingsport, Tennessee. She said, “Yes, how’d you figure?” and he said her lung looked like it belonged to a coal miner, but that this didn’t make sense for a woman, and that her accent sounded like the hills, so it must be the Tennessee Eastman Chemical Plant that did it to her. My folks don’t look much different from any other white people down south, but you can always tell from a CT scan of the lung. Kingsport is a small town, and most of my cousins still living there call it a shithole even though they’ll never leave. Its significance is limited to sharing a border with the Cherokee in the 18th century, hosting a Civil War battle in the 19th century, and lynching a circus elephant in 1916 (they had to use a crane). Now it’s the kind of place where if you’re not working at the plant or selling drugs, you’re working at the McDonald’s in the plant. Back when Cormac McCarthy was a regular guest at my Nana’s house, there was no McDonald’s, no opiates, and no running water. He was a close friend of my Nana’s husband, Conrad, and the best man at their wedding. This was well before he found literary acclaim, and it didn’t last long anyhow on account of Conrad dying young. These were McCarthy’s Knoxville days of intentional poverty, DIY stonemasonry, and eating beans out of a can for supper. I’m not sure what all they talked about at my Nana’s house, and I sure wish I could ask her. All I know is she found out she was pregnant shortly after Conrad died, suffered a psychotic break, nearly burned the house down, and that McCarthy never responded to a letter from my family again.

A few years later, McCarthy moved to the Southwest, where he split his time between writing classic American novels and running off to Mexico with underage girls. His writing is variously described as amoral, nihilistic, or anti-humanist, and he lived his life more or less the same way. The revelation that he groomed an abused runaway for sex was shocking to many, but he wrote about pedophilia plainly in his books. Of the three main characters in No Country for Old Men, the only one who didn’t marry a child bride was the villain. These days, we tend to individualize this kind of behavior, but the truth is far worse than “Cormac McCarthy was a bad guy.” Cormac McCarthy was a regular guy, and that’s what regular guys did. My dear old Aunt Dolly died this year in her nineties. She got married when she was thirteen. Watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High or listen to Christine Sixteen by Kiss, and see how recently it was socially acceptable for a grown man to sleep with school-age kids. It still happens plenty today, but back then, nobody would even look at you sideways. McCarthy was absolutely correct in his assessment that we live in a sick society of men who act like animals. His sin was deciding that this is humanity’s natural state and that there will never be a solution, so you might as well just go along with it.

McCarthy’s analysis of human nature was rooted in an undue universalization of his environment. Born into an invasive polity transposed onto an exterminated land, he observed the routine violence that sustains American capitalism and concluded that this must simply be how humans live. When confronted with the existence of societies like the Uruk, Essenes, Yoruk, Wendat, Diggers, Shakers, Quakers, or any number of others defined in opposition to the ethic of human sacrifice, the defense offered most often is “they were defeated by those who embraced our true nature." This sort of attrition bias rests on the twin assumptions that dominated peoples are unrepresentative of humanity writ large and that murderous thieves will remain dominant forever. The former is absurd at face value, while the latter betrays a lack of curiosity for either the past or the future. McCarthy himself understood that empires always fall, but saw these upheavals as a return to a natural state of “every man for himself” individualism. In other words, for him, human history alternated between contrived periods of organized violence and authentic periods of chaotic violence. The socialist response to this anti-humanist assertion is to point out that empires can be, have been, and will again be replaced by more egalitarian modes of social organization. The rational kernel of McCarthy’s outlook, and the central theme of No Country for Old Men, is that the United States now faces the fate which all empires share: collapse. Unlike contemporary commentators left and right who treated collapse as a looming threat, McCarthy had the prescience to point out in 2005 that it had already begun.

Twenty years later, the novel’s foresight is more impressive and instructive than it appeared to its original audience. McCarthy was one of the few thinkers in the early 2000s who could see the path from the Brooks Brothers Riot, 9/11, and the Patriot Act to where we are today. The Guantanamo-style concentration camps have expanded stateside and gone from detaining those accused of terrorism to those accused of immigration paperwork crimes. “Alligator Alcatraz” was opened by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who previously helped run the Guantanamo torture program during his time in naval intelligence, and while it has since been closed, hundreds of detainees have gone “missing." Extrajudicial killings of American citizens have become routine and are carried out by administrations of both major political parties. Mass shootings are part of daily life, with the ones that qualify for a news article almost always carrying the line “suspect was previously known to intelligence agencies." The Trump administration continued the Biden-era policy of unlimited support for Zionist genocide, issued erratic executive orders defunding key government agencies and labeling political opponents “terrorists," and brought the full weight of government censorship down on anyone deemed insufficiently aggrieved by the death of a white supremacist podcaster. All of this was preceded by a tweet from Vice President JD Vance shortly after the election in which he quoted No Country for Old Men villain Anton Chigur: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

From his perch at the Santa Fe Institute, McCarthy could see the road ahead stretched out before us. In his twilight years at 72, something about WB Yeats’ contemplative poem Sailing to Byzantium resonated with the old writer from Tennessee. The poet describes his surroundings as “no country for old men” and decides to embark on a journey of the soul to the holy Christian ground of Constantinople. The poet reviles his humanity, describing his heart as “sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal” while hoping to find meaning and perfection in death. The poem ends with a vision of the afterlife as a gold-enameled dream wherein the poet sings “to lords and ladies of Byzantium of what is past, or passing, or to come.” With a multi-million dollar fortune, a private ranch, and a post at a prestigious think tank, McCarthy had found his Byzantium. No Country for Old Men was a song of what was to come. We will explore the portents embedded in this well-known novel before examining the limits of its political conclusions and sketching out a corrective.

No Country for Old Men is variously described as a “neo-Western," “modern Western," “Western noir," or some such variation meant to explain its 1980s setting and lack of horseback action sequences. However subclassified, it remains a Western, a uniquely American literary tradition which emerged from deadly class conflict at the turn of the 20th century. Owen Wister’s The Virginian: Horseman of the Plains, published in 1902, is widely regarded as the first Western. The genre exploded in popularity after its publication, eventually spawning a television and film industry centered around similar frontier cowboy stories, and has thus far received two stage adaptations, five film adaptations, two television adaptations, and one issue of a comic book. In the novel, the unnamed protagonist gallops into Wyoming and learns the ways of the Wild West: fellow gamblers must be intimidated, rivals must be shot, women must be wooed, and crucially, cattle rustlers must be hanged. Each of these elements make their way into virtually every Western story that came afterwards, but that last one is key to understanding why the novel was written in the first place. Owen Wister was not some rugged frontier writer capturing the authentic spirit of his surroundings. He was a Harvard Law School graduate from Philadelphia, a theater kid with a brief opera career in Paris, and a personal friend of Theodore Roosevelt. Drenched in wealth from birth, Wister did not spend much time with working cowboys. He spent time with their bosses.

When Wister went out West, he enjoyed lavish treatment and company at the Cheyenne Club, a social venue in Wyoming’s capital frequented by members of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. The WSGA was an amalgam of large landowners that functioned as the de facto government of the region. By electing their members to local, state, and federal office, their internal regulations became law. By hiring mercenary bands, private detectives, and hitmen, their law was brutally enforced. Extrajudicial killings tend to inspire more exciting fiction than backstage musical theater rivalries, so Wister was enamored with his newfound friends’ stories and wanted to use them to enrich his artistic profile. The Wyoming cattle barons had just put down a popular rebellion and were more than happy for a friendly writer from back East to provide them with much-needed public relations assistance. The last guy they hired for the job, Asa Mercer, went rogue and wrote a book called Banditti of the Plains detailing their recent terror campaign against the small ranchers of Johnson County, so they burned his printing press and every copy of the first edition they could find, hijacked the train carrying the second edition and destroyed all those copies, sued the man, had him arrested, and finally drove him out of town. Mercer was a disappointment, but they did ask him to write a journalistic account of the Johnson County War. The stock growers figured if they could feed Wister a fictional version portraying the vigilante enforcers as heroes and the terrorized ranchers as cattle thieves, it would be less likely to backfire. Thus, The Virginian was born. Whereas Mercer’s novel was systematically suppressed, Wister’s was promoted in the New York Times, staged at the Manhattan Theatre, and adapted into a silent film all within ten years of publication. The ruling class had discovered a powerful weapon in the culture war.^[1]

Westerns were subsequently deployed against immigration, integration, indigenous sovereignty, communism, universal suffrage, and every other perceived threat to bourgeois hegemony for the following hundred and some-odd years. Revisionist Westerns in the United States and “Osterns” in the Soviet Union were produced in response, subverting traditional narratives most often by portraying non-white people and women as human beings. When McCarthy published No Country for Old Men, he was not ignorant of this history. His novel was a conscious entry into the long-raging narrative conflict of the Western genre.

I’ll provide a brief recap of the plot before we dig into how it predicts the downfall of Western civilization.

A guy named Moss goes hunting antelope in the backcountry of Terrell County, Texas. This is right near the border. He was a sniper in Vietnam, and usually he’s pretty good at tracking and killing, but this time his shot fails to kill, and he loses his prey, instead finding a suitcase full of money surrounded by dead Mexicans. He doesn’t know it yet, but there’s a GPS tracker hidden in the hundred-dollar bills. He takes the money, runs home, fucks his wife one last time, runs off, and gets killed. Then his wife gets killed, and a teenage girl he picked up gets killed too. The Mexicans kill Moss, and the Texan oil men, who were trafficking drugs to, hire a hitman to recover the money, and that’s who kills the wife. His name is Chigurh, and he was a special forces guy in Vietnam before he came home and entered the private sector. There’s also a bounty hunter named Wells who was also in Vietnam, and who also got hired to recover the money. He tries to help Moss, but Chigurh kills him too. The whole time, the old Terrell County Sheriff, Ed Bell, is fumbling around trying to find the guy leaving piles of bodies all over town, and he never can do it. Bell wasn’t in Vietnam, but he was in France, and he got a medal for running away after his whole squad got killed by the Nazis. A Mexican guy gets arrested for all the killings, and everybody knows he didn’t do it, but they give him the death penalty anyway. The novel ends with Bell telling his wife about a dream he had where his father rides a horse into the afterlife as if beckoning him to join.

Moss, Bell, Wells, and Chigurh drive the overwhelming majority of the plot. The women in the story are given little agency, mostly consisting of wives, girlfriends, clerks, and victims (sometimes all four). Carla Jean Moss gets the most dialogue of her cohort, but when she’s not talking about her husband, she’s begging for her life. McCarthy was either incapable or uninterested in portraying women as fully developed human beings. We learn little about the male characters aside from Bell, since every other chapter is written from his perspective, but McCarthy’s writing truly shines when the reader is made to feel the presence of off-stage characters. This amalgam of concepts, organizations, peoples, and ideas dominates the named characters and permeates the atmosphere of every scene. In no particular order, they are as follows: Time, Death, First Nations, Settlers, the Federal Government of the United States, Wives, Animals, Hunters, Silence, Decay, Collapse, Good Intentions, and Mammon. They live in clocks broken by bullets, stillborn daughters still alive in daydreams, cupstones in the shelving rocks, cowboys and their descendants, Vietnam veterans turned hired killers, passing thoughts of little significance, names and last words, first and last appearances, sockfeet stalking in the shadows, newspapers and ill omens, toothless guard dogs, and Dallas highrises.

After the stream of consciousness from Sheriff Bell that McCarthy intersperses throughout the novel, the first proper chapter is less than three pages of text. This is the scene where Chigurh is brought into a small town Texas police station by a lone officer, who he garrotes with his handcuffs and then carjacks, followed by a subsequent carjacking to switch into a civilian vehicle that won’t arouse suspicion. It ends with the following lines:

The man stepped away from the vehicle. Chigurh could see the doubt come into his eyes at this bloodstained figure before him but it came too late. He placed his hand on the man’s head like a faith healer. The pneumatic hiss and click of the plunger sounded like a door closing. The man slid soundlessly to the ground, a round hole in his forehead from which the blood bubbled and ran down into his eyes carrying with it his slowly uncoupling world visible to see. Chigurh wiped his hand with his handkerchief. I just didn’t want you to get blood on the car, he said.

McCarthy put his prophecy right at the beginning of his book, so if you’re in a hurry, you don’t have to read the rest of it. People will realize the system is rigged against them as soon as it’s too late to do anything about it. Death will be sold to us as a comforting deception. The process will unfold more like the industrial slaughter of cattle than any sort of grand struggle. Our killers will view the whole situation as a matter of casual convenience without any emotional investment. Once the door is closed, it will never open again. Whether prompted by impending ecological collapse, increased militarization, Malthusian anxieties of overpopulation, or the sudden excess of blue-haired young people his characters complain about, McCarthy regarded annihilation on the horizon with an intellectual detachment characteristic of his literary influences.

Sheriff Bell comes across one of these on a drive down US 90 toward the turnoff at Dryden. Dead hawk in the road. He spends a moment contemplating its hunting prowess before reverently laying it in the grass so it won’t get run over by a truck. Here McCarthy pays homage to the wild god of Robinson Jeffers.^[2] A favorite of Charles Bukowski and friend of Ansel Adams, Jeffers has been described as “California’s premier bard”^[3] and even had his work narrated on a Beach Boys track.^[4] Jeffers coined the term “inhumanism” to describe his worldview, one that centered the beauty of nature’s indifference to humanity so thoroughly that he wrote several poems decrying US involvement in World War II. Why go off and fight the Nazis when we’re all just animals at the end of the day? This man, for whom the Holocaust wasn’t worth stopping, was a lot like McCarthy (or perhaps the other way around): an amateur stonemason, prolific writer, and close confidant of the land around him. The natural references in both their oeuvres are staggering and unlikely to be matched by future generations of writers raised on the soft blue light of the screen. It’s worth noting that every plant and animal included in No Country for Old Men is identified by name except one: “some kind of large bird” that Chigurh rolls down his window to shoot at on the Devil’s River Bridge. Whereas Bell has spent most of his life in Terrell County and identifies the “big redtail” hawk immediately, Chigurh can only flail at what he doesn’t understand because he isn’t of the land.

That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash.

In Hurt Hawks Jeffers relays the life and death of a wounded redtail from two perspectives: the “wild God of the world” and the man who tried and failed to rehabilitate the bird before euthanizing it. Chigurh gives this terrible God a trigger finger to kill with in the same way that Christ gave his God a human body to die with on the cross. While McCarthy has little interest in evangelizing his reader, Jeffers gives us a clue:

The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.
You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

No Country for Old Men blurs the line between man and animal most often through the use of dehumanizing violence. Chigurh executing most of his victims with a cattle gun is the most obvious example, but his hunt for Llewelyn Moss is easily overlooked in this context. We first meet Moss on an antelope hunt in which he wounds his prey but fails to deliver the killing blow. While attempting to track it down, he comes across the battle scene with the suitcase full of money. He opens the door to one of the trucks there and finds a dying man who asks him to close the door to save him from the wolves. When Moss tells him there aren’t any wolves around, the man replies:

Si, si. Lobos. Leones.

Leones in Spanish, llew in Welsh, lion in English. Llewelyn is the lion too proud to heed the warnings of wolves. He opens a door he can never close and transforms from predator to prey. Later on, as he escapes the Texan hotel, Chigurh tracks him down with the GPS hidden in the hundred-dollar bills, he then bails out of a window and tears down the street towards an imagined freedom. Chigurh takes an unlikely shot from the window and wounds Moss in the leg, but fails to deliver the killing blow. Suffering, the lion limps away towards a later death, just like the antelope he had hunted before.

In his seminal work The Wretched of the Earth, psychologist Franz Fanon drew a distinction between the dehumanizing violence of oppression and the humanizing violence of liberation. He argued that while colonial overlords strip their hostages of humanity through ritual violence like checkpoint beatings, systemic sexual abuse, and prison torture, colonial subjects reclaim their humanity through retributive violence in the process of rebellion. McCarthy’s work tends to focus on the former type, and No Country For Old Men is no exception. Where would an American in the 1980s have gotten the idea to slaughter people like chattel for a living? Every killer we meet in the book got their first taste of murder in Vietnam. Chigurh is eventually revealed as a former special forces operator during the US invasion of Southeast Asia, a job that most often involved terrorizing civilian populations. Perhaps he was a member of the US Army’s “Tiger Force," an airborne reconnaissance unit which routinely drugged, raped, tortured, executed, and dismembered their civilian victims, taking their scalps back to camp and stringing their ears along paracord to wear as necklaces.^[5] All of this was proven during internal investigations performed by the Army, but nobody was ever prosecuted for these war crimes.^[6] If Chigurh had been involved, he certainly would have been free to operate in the private sector afterwards.

Beyond expanding the recruiting pool for contract killers, the Vietnam War played a major role in rebuilding the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist organizations in general,^[7] skyrocketing the violent crime rate starting around the time of the invasion and not decreasing again until the 1990s, and ushering in the era of biker gangs, serial killers, credit scores, and the general collapse of civil society. Much of the fictional violence in No Country for Old Men bears an uncomfortable similarity to violence that occurred in the real world before and even after its publication. There’s a passing mention in the book of a federal judge being assassinated, based on the real-life killing of Judge John H. Wood Jr. by a man named Charles Harrelson. The film adaptation of the book cast the assassin’s son, Woody Harrelson, in the role of Carlson Wells. In another scene, Chigurh bombs the small Texas town of Uvalde, where an infamous mass shooting of schoolchildren surrounded by cowering cops would take place 17 years after the novel’s publication. This is the war come home.

We spend more time with the bumbling Sheriff Ed Bell than any other character in No Countor Old Men, and he’s the only one whose private thoughts we are privileged to hear. The titular old man, for whom this country no longer belongs, ruminates constantly on how things fell apart. For him, the slow pace and minded manners of small town life that he experienced in his youth are what the United States had always been, and this sudden wave of horrifying violence is something entirely new. He fixates on the fact that his father, uncles, and grandfathers often didn’t even carry guns while serving as police officers. Towards the end of the novel, he visits an older relative, and they discuss what to do with all their family heirlooms now that there aren’t any more children to pass them down to. “Uncle Mac’s old cinco peso badge and his thumb-buster” comes up, and the conversation turns to family legends. Bell thinks Uncle Mac died in battle with some famous band of Rangers, but his elder sets the record straight:

That’s all bull. I don’t know who started that. He was shot down on his own porch in Hudspeth County…They was seven or eight of em come to the house. ..he kept tryin to get hold of the shotgun again. They just set there on their horses. Finally left. I don’t know why. Somethin scared em, I reckon. One of em said somethin in injun and they all turned and left out…He was shot through the right lung. And that was that. As they say…Eighteen and seventy-nine…

Unable to catch Chigurh, save Llewlyn and Carla Jean, or even look back on a simpler time, Sheriff Ed Bell finally realizes the violence all around him isn’t some newly grown tumor, but a crack in the foundation finally giving out. In our modern world of mass shootings, illegal invasions, secret police abductions, and AI psychosis, many Americans are coming to the same realization. This is the rational kernel of McCarthy’s novel; there is no fixing the rotten colonial foundation of the United States. This truth is wrapped in damaged packaging, however, best illustrated by the familial parallel between Bell and Moss. Llyewlen didn’t know it, but the midnight sex he had with Carla Jean on page twenty-two was his last chance to leave something of himself in the world. Whether they conceived or not, she was gunned down just like him, and their bloodline ended forever. Bell and his wife survive to the end of the book, but they’re past their child-rearing years with only the memory of a stillborn daughter. Most parents who lose their children talk to them every day. Bell admits to it in the book, and I do it too. It’s a lonely comfort to imagine how they’d answer. Moss and Bell failed to leave a legacy. I reckon if I dug up Cormac McCarthy and asked about my prospects, he’d say I’m bound to a similar fate. The man erred on the side of pessimism and usually turned out to be correct. Life ain’t fair, and the world is mean. He was wrong, however, to use his childless characters as a metaphor for our collective future. The novel’s ending, when Bell dreams of his father declining to pass him the torch and beckoning him to death, wasn’t just McCarthy’s prediction for the future of the United States. It was his prophecy for all humankind.

Cormac McCarthy was a masterful writer. He was also a pedophile with the politics of a German Shepherd. We are no more obliged to take his “anti-humanism” seriously than we are to negotiate a lease with the spiders who lived in our houses before we arrived. His nihilistic embrace of amorality is not the product of natural wisdom, but the ignorant universalization of whiteness. The world is brimming with the seeds of social arrangements that uplift the best instincts of humanity– communities of care, common treasuries, systems of justice that prioritize reconciliation over punishment– all these trampled or under threat by the truly anti-human forces of capital, imperialism, and colonial domination. In 2005, conservatives salivated at this problem and screeched for more; liberals were blind to it, and McCarthy was one of the few who could identify its inevitable end. He was a man with half the truth.

When I was a kid, there was a big house in a neighborhood that everyone said was haunted because it was built on an “indian burial ground." The United States of America is an empire built on a mass grave. We are haunted by ghosts of the past, but we are not doomed. If we shed the Slavers’ Constitution, pay all due reparations, and build a new republic built not on profit and murder, but liberty and justice, we can leave a legacy that is worthy of our descendants.

1. For more on the birth of the Western novel and class conflict in Wyoming, see Chapter Six of Chad Pearson’s excellent book Capital’s Terrorists.

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2. Graham, Don. “Robinson Jeffers’s Presence in Cormac McCarthy’s Imagination.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 16, no. 2 (2018): 189–91. https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.16.2.0189.

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3. Haven, Cynthia. “A Black Sheep Joins the Fold.” Stanford Magazine (2001): https://stanfordmag.org/contents/a-black-sheep-joins-the-fold.

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4. Lenin has lived and Jehovah died while the mother-eagle hunts the same.

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5. These are the only people I’ve ever heard my grandfather refer to as “animals," and meeting them played a major role in turning him against the war.

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6. Sallah, Michael; Weiss, Mitch. “Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War.” Little, Brown and Company. (2006).

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7. For a thorough investigation of this topic and its consequences for us today, Kathleen Belew’s Bring the War Home is unmatched

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