lol Ninki -
I'll give it my best shot 
In narrative mythological terms The American Old West appeals to people because it almost always has some element of the following:
-a taciturn, tough, fiercely independent man (or Sharon Stone) who is often nameless and usually a "stranger in town"
in opposition to
-an institution which is in some way bad
and/or
- an individual who is objectively evil
It's a classic manifestation of Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and you see it explicitly referenced in movies like High Plains Drifter, where Eastwood's Mysterious Stranger is more the applied force of vengeful fate than a human being.
For the first several decades of the 20th century the Western Mythos usually represented the stranger as an avatar for civilized progression, even more subversive films like The Searchers placed their protagonist in opposition to the 'uncivilized' Native Americans or anarchic bandits as part of the Manifest Destiny of wholesome Anglos to 'tame' a brutal wilderness.
It wasn't until Leone's Dollars Trilogy that the hero made the mainstream transition into an anti-hero, and the struggle became one against the merciless institutions which were inexorably progressing across a once wild landscape. The clearest early example of this is Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, in which the railroad's civilized progression across the desert is visibly marked by corruption, rape, and the murder of children. Bronson's Stranger is almost mute, unconcerned with the law or love - everything in him but vengeance has been burned away.
The narrative shift into Individual Vs Machine is what most modern Western stories portray. While it is true that every backwoods militia survivalist harbors a private belief that he is Josey Wales, that belief has nothing to do with shared lack of education or distrust of city slickers, and speaks more to the needs of almost every person in a culture where the individual is subsumed and spent by massive and faceless institutions to believe that an alternative exists. A show like The Wire is made as a direct response to this perception, and the follow-up, Treme, seems to be speaking to what it takes to survive anyway.
It isn't about being a redneck. It's about fighting the Man, and RDR is a story about just that. It's good, Ninki, and you should check it out if you get a chance
