Is it any wonder that Firefly was cancelled around the time that the Republican's Southern Strategy finally began to fail?

What, after all, was the show about?

A federation of more rural communities attempts, through a war, to maintain its cultural distance from an industrially powerful and hegemonizing Union . . . um, Alliance.

Our protagonists, though they fought heroically and struggled nobly, were on the losing end of this mighty battle (whose outcome was never really in doubt). In disgust, with bitterness and with pain, they head out West . . . um, to the frontier to prove that honor does indeed count for something, that there are individual values which transcend collective ones and which trump simple commercial ones, values that some villains, in our world, claim to uphold.