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Hi Blog. Emerging from my busiest semester ever plus a November election, I have a lot on my mind. And it’s about US politics, since that is the data set I’m working with these days. Here’s something you might find interesting about it. Thanks for reading as always. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.
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SNA VM 62: “Electing the Joker”
People still can’t believe Trump won again. Let’s consider how a shift in American popular culture favoring the villain over the hero might have legitimized it.
By Debito Arudou, Ph.D. Shingetsu News Agency, December 10, 2024
Courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2024/12/10/visible-minorities-electing-the-joker/
I read an inspiring column in the New York Times, “The Supervillain is the Hero Now” (Nov 23), by cultural critic A.O. Scott. It surprisingly offered me a plausible theory as to why Trump got re-elected.
Scott’s thesis was that popular culture and politics are linked, in that politics is downstream from culture. That is to say, metaphorically speaking, what condenses in the snowpack of a society’s culture is eventually reflected downstream in the meltwater of its politics.
Suffice it to say, America’s politics have shifted, where it seems that the bad guys triumph, there are no truth or consequences for any actions, and you can do anything as long as you win.
The cause is that American popular culture has justified it—over the past decades, according to Scott, the “villain” of a story is portrayed as the “hero.”
For those who still can’t wrap their head around how Trump won despite all the baggage, this column offers a cultural theory rooted in decades of attitude shift in favor of the bad guys. To the point where being bad has become a sales point.
TRACE THE ARC OF THE ELECTABLE VILLAIN
Let’s start with how villains are of course attracted to politics. In fact, it’s generally seen as part of the job description: people with no patience for politics see politicians as venal, self-serving, and corrupt crooks.
But historically, that in itself hasn’t made them electable. In popular culture, crooks were at least supposed to hide their criminal tendencies during election campaigns, and portray themselves as morally upright with a sense of public duty. But if they were caught with their hand in the till, popular culture served up justice: They lost office, stood trial, and got put behind bars.
As many have noted aloud, if you tried to sell a story of a candidate running for president with the slogan of, “I’m voting for the convicted felon,” no TV or movie producer would have bought it. It would have been too far-fetched and unrealistic.
Not any more. And that’s because we’ve gotten to the point of voting for even the most obvious, cartoony villains in popular culture.
This plot twist has been decades in the making. Consider, for example, in two 1966 episodes of the Adam West “Batman” TV series, cartoon villain The Penguin actually ran for Mayor of Gotham City, having gotten a substantial lead in the polls against the incumbent. Batman, naturally, had no choice but to run against him, and eventually won after The Penguin conveniently got caught showing his true colors as a criminal in public. Justice prevailed.
Now fast forward thirty years and consider the 1994 “Simpsons” episode where cartoon villain Sideshow Bob ran for Mayor of Springfield. What was interesting this time was how sophisticated the nomination process was. The local right-wing talk show radio host (styled after Rush Limbaugh) portrayed Bob (a felon convicted of attempted murder) as a victim of the justice system, got him pardoned, and had him run against (venal, self-serving, and corrupt) Mayor Quimby.
In this case, Bob won the election. Why? He had an ace up his sleeve: charisma. Being an entertainer, Bob approached public policy in an unserious way, making the audience laugh with physical comedy and antics. Being an outsider not behaving “like a politician” was his selling point. And, once elected, he used his mandate to take revenge against his enemies.
(Justice ultimately did yet prevail, but that’s because each Simpsons episode has to reset every week, Bob was again conveniently shown in public to have rigged the election, putting Quimby back in office.)
Nowadays things are different. Villains, even the cartoony ones, win the popularity contests for real. Reality shows such as “Survivor” (which does have elections at the end of every episode) routinely decide not to vote out the villains early (or at all; as of 2020, at least nine seasons have had the sociopathic contestant win—including the wildly successful first season).
This attitude has trickled downstream into real-life politics. Given that US Presidential elections are basically a season of Survivor that lasts for years, the American public has learned to accept, even celebrate, the villain as the hero now. To the point of now being electable not despite, but because they are villains.
TRUMP’S SURPRISING ADVANTAGES IN THIS NEW CULTURAL MILIEU
As Scott notes in his column, the “evil” villain has distinct advantages over the “good” hero. One is that standards of ethical behavior are looser for villains. We expect the “goody-goodies” to follow the rules and political norms to the letter. To the point where one presidential pardon by Joe Biden of his son Hunter (an act plenty of earlier presidents have similarly done) is somehow more outrageous than the huge list of other convicted felons (who have committed egregiously worse crimes than Hunter) pardoned by Trump in his first term.
The reason for this double standard, in my read, is that Biden didn’t adhere to our image of a hero, and villains can get away with more because they’re acting within our expectations of an villain. Being venal, self-serving, and corrupt is what they do, so the hero must do only good things in contrast. Or else there is no truth or justice, the whole system is bad, and we can believe in nothing.
Another advantage villains have is they are simply more interesting than heroes. We can actually live without a hero at the center of a story now. Whole series are devoted exclusively to the villain (two movies about “The Joker” alone since 2019), with immersive TV series that spend years developing classic villain backstories, either humanizing/justifying their character traits, or showing how both hero and villain are not that far apart (witness “Wicked,” “Maleficent”, “Gotham,” “Cruella,” or the multi-movie Star Wars arc about Darth Vader). Even the optimistic “Star Trek” universe is plumbing the lawless “Section 31” loophole, while “The Wire” or “Breaking Bad” have gone out of their way to make us root for the bad guy no matter how evil they become.
This fandom for the “anti-hero” probably started with “The Godfather” series (later rehashed in much more detail as “The Sopranos”), but back then I remember it being scandalous. Not any more. Nihilism is now normal.
The twist is that in a society like America’s that is addicted to entertainment, boredom is somehow worse than bad behavior. People need drama 24/7, and the villain is intrinsic to drama.
Finally, villains have an advantage when it comes to what’s considered “entertaining” with the accelerated media consumption of the Internet. Anything made public needs to be short (or risk being dismissed as “TL;dr”), easily digestible, viral, and optimally funny.
That means a Sideshow Bob-esque character like Trump, with all his loopy dances, puerile humor, and communal grievances, holds the aces in modern political debate. He can in turns, as Scott puts it, “enact both the babyface tropes of wounded innocence and flag-waving wholesomeness and the belligerent, transgressive, over-the-top rantings of the classic [villain],” as illustrated in professional wrestling matches. That comparison is insightful. Just watching wrestlers do their thing gets boring. We positively crave the backstories, slaps, chairs over the head, and bloodletting between a villain and a hero. And the bad-guy character often triumphs.
Trump knows all of this, as he is a huge fan of professional wrestling. And from decades of media events he has mastered holding your attention forever. As presidential historian Jon Meacham put it, “Trump doesn’t see America as a country. He sees it as an audience.”
That craving for drama at all times puts our public servants, especially those wanting to win a popularity contest, at an enormous disadvantage. Public policy, i.e., the ability to use the government to find solutions to collective problems, is actually pretty ho-hum stuff.
But it’s supposed to be. You want the complex planning, detail, and implementation to be as predictable (and undramatic) as possible, or resources get wasted, people get hurt, and government gets blamed for not doing a good job.
Yet if you’re a dry, serious, or complicated candidate or functionary, then boooooriiiiing. To win, you must now put an entertaining spin on policy minutia. Most people simply aren’t talented enough to do that, as it requires comedic timing, an economy of words, an effective use of visuals, and internet savvy.
That means the Class Clown who spent high school disrupting class making people laugh at their desks has a more electable skill set now than the Teacher’s Pet who spent all their years quietly studying and mastering complicated concepts.
Hyperbole? Contrast the tone and content of the Trump and Harris rallies. Which one is closer to the Class Clown? Which one is more televisable? Which one grabs more headlines? Which one brings back more repeat viewers, crowds, and ratings? “Are you not entertained?,” I’m expecting Trump to say someday.
DEMOCRACY FANS NEED TO GET READY
The point of this column is to point out a stone unturned in the political debate: How American culture itself has shifted against the “goody two-shoes” doing the right thing. In my view, the Democratic Party did everything they should have done as the Good Guys to appeal to the American public as they knew it. They lost in part because they just weren’t interesting enough to get out enough votes in their favor, or to stem the wave of voters dissatisfied with the status quo.
But there’s more, and here’s where the brain rot goes very deep: Voters who like sociopathy.
Trump is fortunate enough to be downstream of an American cultural snowmelt that has normalized and celebrated sociopaths as never before. The deluge of shows celebrating villains has created a permission structure for a cult of copycats who want bad because it is bad. The “bad fan,” as Scott puts it, is where “the most passionate members of the audience embrace what they are meant to condemn.”
For the echo-chambers of communities of “bad fans” who found each other via the Internet, what unites them is Trump’s villainy—it’s what they like best about him. The Democrats just aren’t villainous enough—and they better not be, or American democracy is doomed.
The problem is that this simply isn’t politics as usual, and what’s about to happen isn’t just contained within a movie or TV drama anymore. America is about to be run by villains, put there in part by “bad fans.”
I don’t think they know what they’re getting everyone into. Americans have never dealt with an authoritarian like Trump before. (Contrast with the South Koreans, who have, and voted down the recent attempt at a Martial-Law coup within hours.) Americans are convinced their democracy in America is invulnerable, that authoritarianism “couldn’t happen here.”
So they essentially elected The Joker on a whim and a lark. After all, he didn’t destroy American democracy last time around. What’s the worst he can do?
We’re about to find out, because here comes the kakistocracy. The Joker’s minions are much better organized this time, and Republican majorities in all three branches of government (including a Supreme Court that has unprecedentedly granted him immunity) means even less oversight. Something very wicked this way comes.
But the Americans who eventually find they aren’t entertained by all this won’t be able to walk out of the theater partway or change the channel. They’re stuck. The Joker is on them.
Hang on, everyone. It looks like America has to get the authoritarian disease before it comes up with a cure.
ENDS
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5 comments on “Debito’s SNA Visible Minorities 62: “Electing the Joker” (Dec 10, 2024), on how a trend over the past decades to depict the “villain as hero” in popular culture has influenced politics downstream and made Trump more electable”
While I agree with the conclusions, and while I usually find your articles insightful and well thought out, this reads more like a review of another article.
Admittedly, I haven’t read the other article, but your commentary on it seems to miss one VERY important factor: America is a nation where a significant portion of the population is driven by bigotry; whether it’s racism, antisemitism (note here I do not equate objecting to the actions of the nation of Israel with antisemitism, because they are, in fact, different things), or anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, a lot of people base their decision making, whether consciously or unconsciously, on “will the people I hate get hurt enough like they deserve”. Villainy has nothing to do with this, because bigots don’t see their bigotry as villainous. And they think that denying themselves actions that would benefit them is preferable to those actions being taken and benefitting both them and the targets of their hatred. Plus, Trump has been explicit about how his hatred aligns with theirs.
Additionally, I have to disagree with this:
“In my view, the Democratic Party did everything they should have done as the Good Guys to appeal to the American public as they knew it. They lost in part because they just weren’t interesting enough to get out enough votes in their favor, or to stem the wave of voters dissatisfied with the status quo.”
Yes, that’s your view, but the Democratic Party as a whole is perpetually kneecapping themselves by trying to chase the unicorn “undecided moderates”, and think there are sufficient numbers there to win elections. There are not. They consistently leave progressives out in the cold, which is an own-goal. So, they inevitably end up alienating a significant portion of what SHOULD be their base by trying to reach across the aisle, or only making minor, token legislative efforts that don’t draw support from people who want to see more progressive policymaking. The fact is, among the general American public, the majority of people, even people who identify as conservatives, LIKE what are, in fact, progressive policies. (The trick with the conservatives is that these policies have to be couched in language that stays as far away from their trigger words, such as “liberal” or “progressive” or “regulation” and the like, as possible.)
Of course, it doesn’t help that mainstream media institutions in the US have been actively shoving the Overton Window to the right for decades now.
Anyway, I dunno. Yeah, people can be and are infatuated with villain narratives, but I personally find attributing this fact as THE (or even A) primary cause of the state of affairs in the US to be lacking nuance. And that’s my unsolicited $0.02.
— And thank you very much for investing those two cents in a well-thought-out response. I feel richer for it.
Two responses:
1) You wrote, “Villainy has nothing to do with this, because bigots don’t see their bigotry as villainous.” Yes, everyone wants to see themselves as the “good guy” in their movie, unless they’re deliberately out to portray themselves as a “villain”. But the BEHAVIORS of LEADERS (one of which cites “Hannibal Lecter” as some kind of hero or role model) matter, as they deliberately go out of their way to break the law and hurt people. And their followers follow suit (in the dynamic that I have described) through the permission structure.
But villainy has everything to do with this, because it’s not a matter of self-description. Villains don’t have to SEE themselves as villains to BE villains — the same way that bigots don’t have to see themselves as bigots (they usually don’t, in my decades of experience in Japan, for example) in order to BE bigots.
It’s a matter of judgment by (if it’s in a story) the “omniscient narrator” or by the viewership at large (which, as I argue, we’ve seen blurred in popular culture). In the real world there are objective, legal, moral and ethical criteria for judging behavior as “good” or “bad”, and it’s not up to the perpetrator to define those. Society does. It’s called a sense of justice.
So sociopaths do not have a free hand to redefine what’s “good” in their destructive favor, unless you subscribe to the “post-truthiness” of Trumpworld. I don’t, and nobody should. Because societies break down quickly when justice is denied like this. And it’s happening right now in the United States for real. The villains won, and they’re putting more villains in power to collectivize the injustice and further disenfranchise the heroes. They’re still bad people doing bad things, even if they say (or even possibly believe) otherwise.
2) I wrote, “the Democratic Party did everything they should have done as the Good Guys to appeal to the American public as they knew it.” Note my caveat at the end. “As they knew it.” When it’s politics as usual, the Dems and the GOP are “big-tent parties”, and their incentive/reflex is to appeal to the middle. So that’s what the Dems did. They went “big-tent”, which is the time-honored tactic they know for popular appeal.
But it’s NOT politics as usual, and most institutionalists in the US (read: almost all Dems and the “Never-Trumpers”) still have not realized just how authoritarian things have become. It’s not a shift to the right. It’s a shift away from democracy itself. That means the regular rules and tactics are out the window.
So it looks like the US is going to have get really sick before it finds a cure, i.e., we’re going to have to go through wasteful authoritarianism before people legislate against it and re-democratize US politics. People, and voters in particular, will have to get over American Exceptionalism and realize that “it can, and did, happen here”.
This might sound optimistic, but it’s happened before, for example, in California in a watershed election (1914), where politics did radically swing towards Progressivism and made California the incredible state it is today. It’s also happened again after WWII and all those treaties deciding crimes against humanity, genocide, and universal human rights were created in the wake of the shock of industrialized extermination policies.
(The problem is that it had to get really, really bad and a lot of people had to get hurt and die before people finally learned to stop. I agree with you that short of that, modern Progressivism keeps being sold out by the Dems. They’ll have to take that risk next time and start by being anti-corporatist, methinks. Will they? I have no idea. The tribalism of “I wouldn’t be caught dead voting for a Dem”, coupled with the ingrained sociopathic bigotry that (as you note) has long been an undercurrent of America society, is just that strong. I don’t think we’re all that far apart in our worldviews, in the end. Just in our interpretations of the past.)
Thanks again for your comment. — Debito
IMHO Biden and Harris just came across as inept and inexperienced respectively, so simplistically why not (re) elect someone who has at least experience of being president and not presiding over any new wars during his tenure (whether that was by blind luck or naivety, or by cozying up to dictators like Kim, I am not sure).
However, this is how it looks like via the mass media; Biden- calling Zelensky “Putin” (ffs) and lots of wars going on.
The Media is the Message. It is how they are perceived.
Trump is a narcissistic sociopath and crooked businessman. He reminds me of Nixon- yet Nixon normalized relations with China and left Vietnam (to its own devices) perhaps in retrospect not a morally good move at all, but a realistic one as Red China of course governed over most Chinese. Hilary came across as a psychopath with her willingness to attack Iran (with nukes).
I am painting this through the filtering lens of the media and how people simplify messages. For example, Nixon lost to Kennedy partly on looks and the fact he refused to wear make up for TV, so he looked kind of “dirty” (foreshadowing? haha).
Image and Impressions matter.
And that seems to be the key difference between the Democrats and Republicans; the former are the “Morally Good” party, on a crusade for world democracy (its in the name) so lets fund Ukraine to the hilt in a stalemated forever war of attrition, while the Republicans and Trump are more about “Let’s make a deal” with dictators to calm them down.
Morally bad indeed, but financially cheaper.
So, the narcissistic sociopath was elected. But Trump doesn’t come across as psychopathic. Emphasis on “come across”.
None of them are particularly good candidates, good people, or good leaders. It is possible a morally good person is not particularly successful in the role either. Gerald Ford was described as “a morally decent guy” (sorry, can’t find source, Newsweek or somewhere) but his presidency was not particularly successful. Ditto Carter.
Churchill had some morally dubious qualities to him but was successful and clearly was (seen to be) on the Goodies side vs Hitler and later, Stalin. He was not weak however, and I think a projection of strength plus not being completely evil is probably the job description. Even Aung San Suu Kyi and Mother Theresa and Gandhi had their not so good sides, somewhat hidden from public perception.
Purely my opinion at the moment, and certainly open to challenge and debate.
OK, but I’d much rather hear your thoughts on this matter, rather than your thoughts about somebody else’s thoughts. So, I’m on the same page with @Zig Justice w/r/t how this particular article reads more like a review of another article.
Also like @Zig Justice, I respectfully disagree with this statement. In fact, I agree strongly with Tim Walz’s assessment of the situation:
Reference: Gov. Tim Walz says he’ll propose anti-fraud measures, reflects on VP bid
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, my thoughts on this matter are more in line with @Zig Justice as well.
Also, I’ll buy that some percentage of the electorate loves a good villain / sociopath, but is that percentage large enough to elect “The Joker”?
TBH, I think it’s more a case of what Dark Helmet once said:
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— Thanks. And since we’re trading bon mots, I’ll paraphrase Barbara Mandrell back at you, “If being good is dumb, I don’t want to be ‘smart’.” (like that)
It’s a dreadful way to simplify the complex field of politics, but if you’ll quote Space Balls, I’ll quote country music.
Funny enough, when Lex Luthor became president in the 2000s, he actually put his company in a blind trust. Trump is more transparently evil than Lex Luthor.
While we’re here; that Section 31 movie looks awful, don’t it? They’re ending Lower Decks and making that instead?!
-They lost in part because they just weren’t interesting enough to get out enough votes in their favor, or to stem the wave of voters dissatisfied with the status quo.
This might be a tangent, (or it might be the Elephant in the Room) but I watch a lot of Youtube and there is a huge grassroots bias there across the Anglosphere against “Woke (Hollywood)” “Looney Lefties”, “Asylum Seekers/criminals”, “Two Tier Kier” and Feminazis vs MGTOW, or more specifically on the ills of American/western women…..which brings this conversation back to Japan or at least Asia, because …Passport Bros.
And all these people seem to think a Trump presidency will solve these issues; or at least more likely, rub it in the face of their enemies listed above, e.g. “(Western) women on sex strike if the men (or their fathers) voted for Trump” – prompting a deluge of comments like, “Let’s see how long that lasts” or “Nothing has changed in her life, then” or “Oh good, the STD rate will go down etc.
Their narrative goes that the West is in terminal decline (with all the above culture wars going on) and only Trump can fix it, or the west is in terminal decline and Trump is the last hurrah, the final stand of traditional values (not that he is a paragon of those virtues anyway but he talks as if he is), etc etc but after four years it’ll be back to progressive liberalism again anyway…
As a reaction people elected a reactionary……
America, and the West in general, needs better choices. There are no statesmen or people who are morally unambiguous anymore. I find it incredulous Trump managed to even stand given his convictions; its as if NIxon made a comeback after Ford pardoned him and got elected again instead of Reagan.
Except I think Nixon was way more intelligent than Trump, a real politician and (controversial opinion because of his illegalities) actually quite an effective president in hindsight, if only for getting the USA out of Vietnam.
— I wouldn’t credit Nixon for getting the US out of Vietnam. He was the reason they stayed many years longer — about the same as under LBJ.