I feel like I'm seeing a number of largely unrelated conversations about that "rugged individualism" paper. A lot of them are actually more compatible than some of the authors seem to think!
It can simultaneously be true that "the frontier" was created by the mass murder of Indigenous people by the government & also that white people who moved there developed a more individualistic (narrowly defined) culture than those in other regions, which (might have) persisted.
Particularly if you think there is a dark side to conservative individualism that isn't easily separable from racial exclusion, this doesn't even require much reconciling.
I do think economists could do a better job...framing their historical papers.
Econ papers like this start because someone finds some "cool data"/thinks they can causally identify something. Then they try to frame it as a Big Question, often by referring to some classic debate they might not be that familiar with. Historians...don't approach things that way
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