The Rugged Individual and the Government

A reader of James Fallows comments on the great myth of the West, that individuals succeed there without government intervention:

Worster goes on to argue throughout the book, similar in this respect to Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert, that the control of water in the arid west led to the creating of the massive federal bureaucracy in the 20th century. Thus:
"Beyond the hundredth meridian the necessary goad was more starkly, emphatically present--a dry throat, a daily uncertainty, always the danger, the anxiety, of life in a desert or near desert. Travellers found themselves in an even more awesome space, grander by far than any Appalachian vista, one big enough for dreaming, all right, but a land too empty, barren, dusty, and austere, to invite the soul to loaf and take its ease....
"How could deprivation be translated into wealth and power and influence? That was the problem posed to the arid region from the beginning. The answer . . . was that people had to bend themselves to the discipline of conquest, had to accept the rule of hierarchy and concentrated force. That acceptance they seldom acknowledged, at least publicly. Again and again, they told themselves and others that they were the earth's last free, wild, untrammeled people. Wearing no man's yoke they were the eternal cowboys on an open range. But that was myth and rhetoric. In reality, they ran along in straight, fixed lines: organized, regimented, incorporated men and women, the true denizens of the emergent West. It might have been otherwise, but then they would not have made an empire."
I apologize for the long quote, but it is something to think about, I believe, as you continue your journey across the trans-Mississippi West. How has the lack of water shaped the lives of the inhabitants? Is there a stronger federal presence in the states of the arid west, the lands beyond the 98th, or 100th meridian, to use Wallace Stegner's famous phrase, than one finds in the east? What do the realities of the west say about the mythology of place?
And, perhaps equally important, do they teach us something about the "sagebrush rebellion" and the emergence of the modern Republican Party? I know that journalists and public intellectuals often make a strong case for the southern strategy, as the origin of modern conservative politics, but if it was a southern strategy, it was a southern strategy with a western face. Not to oversimplify the point, but every successful Republican presidential candidate, with the exception of Gerald Ford, from Barry Goldwater to Mitt Romney, was either of the West, or as in Romney's case held strong ties to western modes of thought: the Mormon Church, is after all, headquartered in Utah, and was one of the early sponsors of irrigation in the nineteenth century.

Rick Perlstein makes a similar point in his book Before the Storm, on Barry Goldwater and the rise of the conservative movement.  The story of the rugged individualist living off of the land in the West takes a hit when one considers how much federally funded infrastructure had to be constructed to provide water to cities and agriculture.  The water projects made the west habitable, at least for a while.  Climate change may force populations down in some of these areas, and will greatly impact agriculture, as the debate comes down to water for food or water to live.