This chapter contextualizes McCarthy’s fiction and drama in main currents of North American politics since the 1960s. The chapter outlines a set of assumptions about how political meaning and value are generated in literature, with a particular emphasis on the need to historicize the relationship between the political and the literary. The argument is grounded in the assumption that as subjects or citizens, and as consumers of language who are themselves historically produced, it is readers, not writers, who establish the parameters in which literature becomes “political.” Reading his prose through the prism of twenty-first century culture wars, the chapter suggests that McCarthy’s writing can be read as either liberal or conservative, or as both simultaneously, depending on the politics that readers themselves bring with them to the act of reading the work.