On August 15, 2018, a little over three months before she would form an exploratory committee for the Democratic presidential nomination, Elizabeth Warren issued a press release announcing new legislation. The Accountable Capitalism Act, a hilarious contradiction in terms, promised to “eliminate skewed market incentives” and return America to an era when corporations and workers “did well together.

Few narratives remain as endearing to the American mythos as the frontier. The images it has given us—from the small-town saloon of drunken gunslingers to the rugged cowboy wandering a lonely, expansive landscape—symbolize the organizing principles of American capitalism: individualism and self-sufficiency, property rights, a domination of nature, and a masculine celebration of violence as a vehicle for creation (“disruption,” as it is now called in startup speak). In our increasingly borderless world of global capital, the frontier’s legacy continues to validate a conquest of land and people that falsely imagines itself without limits.