Heroes and Villains

If people can't tell good from bad, it's because they were taught there's no difference

Adam Serwer is great and as usual there is absolutely nothing wrong with the reasoning in his latest column on the tendency of conservatives to identify with villains from modern movies and TV. But I think his analysis is incomplete, not because what he’s missing is too complicated for him but because it’s too depressingly obvious.

The idea behind “Trump’s Fans Are Suffering From Tony Soprano Syndrome” is simple: Whenever conservatives publicly discuss pop culture villains who resemble their own role models, they perceive them as heroes. Elon Musk calls Matt Gaetz the “Judge Dredd America needs to clean up a corrupt system,” notwithstanding Dredd is a full-on fascist agent of a fascist state; conservative fans get mad when their heroes, such as The Punisher or Homelander in “The Boys,” are shown — even by their own creators! — to be the bad guys in their stories.

Serwer doesn’t have a lot citations of this phenomenon, but this really is one of those cases where you don’t need a lot of back-up, especially if you’re at all familiar with fanboy culture — even on the level of edited Sopranos clips on Facebook, the come-on for which is often what a badass Tony Soprano is and how cool and/or funny it is when he kills somebody, e.g.:

Also I’ve been talking for years about how stupidly conservative culture warriors misapprehend even the simplest pop art — take, for example, this bit from forgotten-but-not-gone fartmaster general Jonah Goldberg (“But [Auric Goldfinger’s] plot is akin to something happening in modern education and our culture, where the largely well intentioned villains are mostly succeeding in irradiating the historical gold reserve of our civic tradition and national narrative”) — so maybe I don’t need much convincing.

Serwer lays this propensity to a psychological reaction that Tony Soprano-type characters trigger in “a certain type of man experiencing a certain type of midlife crisis because, despite their body aging and their looks fading, they can still shape the world around them with a seemingly infinite capacity to endure or inflict violence.” He notes that both the characters and their defenders often excuse their crimes on the grounds they’re committed in the service of a community or a family, though even an extra minute spent thinking about that shows it to be bullshit, as Walter White explicitly admitted near the end of “Breaking Bad.”

(One small thing Serwer fails to mention is that characters like Tony and Walter are genuinely charismatic, largely because they’re action-oriented and that’s always compelling in drama, and they’re written, performed, and presented by professionals who want you to stay enthralled with them. But a normal person can enjoy the Joker or Richard III without idolizing and posting fan tributes to them, and there’s something literally sick about people who do.)

As I said, Serwer has not too many citations, but I think a reaction to his essay by old-fashioned rightwinger James Joyner of Outside The Beltway — whom I last noticed in 2010 Just Asking Questions about whether the Civil Rights Act should be repealed — explains the syndrome with even greater clarity than Serwer’s dumb fanboy exemplars do, from a Conservatives With Good Taste perspective:

…I don’t think the average Trump supporter (or admirer of Dredd, Soprano, White, or Jessup) really wants to go out and kill people. Rather, they want power and respect.

Why do they feel they lack power and respect? Joyner tells us the Soprano/White fans miss ”the days when a man with a high school education or less could easily get a job to support his family in a middle-class lifestyle.” But neither they nor Joyner lay this come-down to the economic factors most of us acknowledge are responsible for it — nor to the billionaires who sopped up the money that would have made it possible to keep the middle class fat and happy, and the Republicans who helped them sop it.

Rather, Joyner says, Joe Sixpack is discomfited by — haha. I bet some of you have already guessed! — “our social mores.” And what are those? Joyner is cagey about it, in the way that guys like him always get cagey whenever you ask them “no, really, what words are you ‘not allowed’ to say?”:

…our social mores have evolved to take away their presumptive role as head of the household and to constrain behaviors that were once “just boys being boys.”

“Just boys being boys” we can assume means behaviors that get you dirty looks when you act like an asshole in mixed company, which I guess the old-timers can’t manage to avoid anymore thanks to the death of Free Association.

“They naturally resent the hell out of being looked down upon,” Joyner says, not bothering to tell us who exactly is looking down on them, nor how they learned they were being looked down on, nor why these simple sons of toil should even care. Nonetheless, Joyner says, “It’s not shocking that they get some vicarious enjoyment rooting for a Walter White or Tony Soprano.”

So none of these folks “really wants to go out and kill people” — but they enjoy seeing fictional characters do it on TV, and (presumably) imagine in place of Adriana La Cerva or Mike Ehrmantraut that mouthy barista or that uppity presidential candidate they really blame for their declining standard of living, the replacement of affordable corner stores with rapacious chains, and their kids’ six-figure, unforgivable college loans.

Maybe this is what Serwer means near the end of his essay when he refers to “this moral degeneracy, motivated by the need to ideologically justify the place of a corrupt authoritarian strongman in the most powerful government in the world.” I can’t be sure. What I am sure of is this:

Liberals like Serwer (and myself) talk a lot about Trump voters’ willful ignorance of verifiable facts that contradict their beliefs — for example, their insistence, as shown by polls, that crime is out of control when it’s in fact at historically low levels. That’s true as far as it goes. But the missing ingredient in these discussions is why they think that way — the cause of this “degeneracy.” Serwer sort of refers to it at the very end:

What looks like declining media literacy may be something much worse—an affirmation of the underlying values in dystopian literature that inevitably lead to the dystopia itself.

I agree that it “looks like declining media literacy” which I think is as real as our other kinds of declining literacy. But comics, TV, and movies have been around for decades and, until recently, casual readers who were not mentally ill could tell the bad guys from the good guys just by instinct. So if the voters now so misunderstand even the simple lessons of a funny-book, it’s not because they haven’t been educated, but because they’ve been willfully miseducated by people like James Joyner.