HBO's astonishing Wild West show, for those who haven't seen it, is a bracing slap in the face to Hollywood's mythical and cheerfully bogus convention of the western, and a ribald, murderously raw, yet inspiring celebration of frontier ingenuity and the American language.

As series creator David Milch recently told Salon, "90 percent of the characters are real," including purported hero and reluctant sheriff Seth Bullock (who, among other things, created Yellowstone Park,) Wild Bill Hickok (whose murder provides the dramatic backdrop to Season 1), the shaky alcoholic Calamity Jane, and above all, the brutal and utterly compelling brothel and bar owner Al Swearengen.

"Deadwood's" realism, wrapped in Milch's signature brooding on human complexity (he created the character Andy Sipowitz on "NYPD Blue"), are used to probe a fascinating question: What happens when there are no laws? Rampant murder is one obvious by-product, but so is the fascinating development of spontaneous and beneficial order, where traditions (such as sharing peaches at town meetings) are created by accident and clung to out of touching necessity, and where the federal and state governments are understood to be land-grabbing enemies to be opposed or at least swindled.

"I am a sinner who does not expect forgiveness," Hearst Corp. representative (and big-time sinner) Francis Wolcott confesses in a recent episode. "But I am not a government official."

At a time when Washington is passing laws to intervene in individual medical cases, and self-described federalists want to amend the Constitution itself to prevent individual states from experimenting with marriage laws, "Deadwood's" skepticism of government and celebration of individuality couldn't be timelier. And its viciously profane yet pragmatic demonstrations of tolerance feel more stiff-spined and American than an anti-defamation industry that has been enthusiastically adopted by the same conservatives who once mocked it. Episode 22, for example, has this delightful live-and-let-live exchange:

Silas: You talk like you take it up the ass.
Hugo: I do not, my friend Adams, take it up the ass.
Silas: Don't call me your fuckin' friend!
Hugo: But I suspect those that do consider that they advance their own interests. Like them, shall we not pursue that which gratifies us mutually?

In Episode 2, after Bullock objects to Swearengen's anti-Semitic insults of Bullock's partner Sol, Sol refuses to let words get in the way of business: "I been called worse by better."

There is an excellent pragmatic political reason to embrace "Deadwood's" frontier ethos as well -- the West, and especially the Mountain West, may be the key to the Democrats' electoral future. The "Western strategy," chewed on daily at Web sites like New West and WesternDemocrat, aims to extrapolate from the interesting trend of popular Democratic governors like Brian Schweitzer, Bill Richardson and Janet Napolitano running pro-Bush states such as Montana, New Mexico and Arizona, as the region as a whole grows sharply in electoral votes. This new Western breed of Democrat tends to be pro-gun, anti-tax and shruggingly tolerant of their constituents' various political beliefs and religious affiliations.

"When you've got more cattle than people and you've got blue sky that goes on almost forever," Montana Gov. Schweitzer told Salon recently, "people have got room to roam without bothering each other. Live and let live."

As "Deadwood" and the success of these politicians illustrates, that gruff tolerance and natural skepticism toward authority is written into the very DNA of the West. It's no accident that Barry Goldwater's libertarian take on Republicanism originated from Arizona, and it becomes clearer with each day that the modern GOP has little in common with the man whose idea of limited government meant real separation of church and state, and the "constitutional right to be gay," among other heresies.

Under Bush, and too often with the Democrats' acquiescence or even support, the federal government has butted into our bedrooms, our locker rooms, and our living rooms. Right now there is wide open space on the political spectrum for someone to treat government as a grudging necessity to meet specific and limited goals, whether those are policing Deadwood's murderous streets, or guaranteeing healthcare for children while balancing a budget. There's electoral gold in them thar hills!

And there's fun, too. Above all else, "Deadwood" is a pleasure to the senses. Prospectors and frontiersmen were "counterculture" a century before anyone had invented the term, inspiring the very people whose 1960s transgressions created the movement that "South Park" conservatives have been itching to roll back -- Bob Dylan, San Francisco heads who decamped to Virginia City, Ramparts editor Warren Hinckle. There is a natural connection between the Wild West and anti-authoritarianism, and real cowboys never go out of style. If the Democrats embrace this and adjust their outlook accordingly, there might finally be a major party worth voting for.

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