Superman, the embodiment of American Values, the beacon of Conservatism and Americana.Being used to push a political agenda that is the complete opposite of who he is as a character.
Just to be expected. Superman the embodiment of conservative American values can’t be a conservative or believe in conservative values in today’s world.Because GOD FORBID Superman stand for something!
Rather than flowing with the tide of the liberals who own the rights to him!
Hey do you know who Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster are?
Superman’s very first story literally dubs him “Champion of the Oppressed.” He stops a wife beater from killing his wife and threatens a lobbyist.
Superman has literally never been a beacon of conservatism. Superman is meant to be an ideal. He’s aspirational. And he’s a goddamn immigrant created by two Jewish men who were the sons of immigrants.
Superman is not just a refugee, he’s an undocumented immigrant. Just because he’s white-passing and enjoys Ma Kent’s apple pie, that has never meant that he is not a refugee or an undocumented immigrant.
Though I hesitate to use the term because no human beings are illegal, he is quite literally an illegal alien.
Yeah, Space Moses is totally the champion of conservatism.
His arch enemy is a billionaire who later became President, for Rao’s sake.
Let us not forget the Of Gods and Monsters universe where he was adopted by Mexican immigrants instead of the Kents
I think that this is being a bit unreflective of what “conservatism” means in the modern world.
To imagine that such a thing as “truth, justice, and the American Way” – indeed even any one of those ideas – is something to protect? That is conservative against the tide of progressives and SJWs.
To speak of unity and of racism being un-American, rather than stoking the fires of Maoist self-criticism? The same.
And as to his actual position… He seems to be established as being very aggressive, but very, very un-radical. At least in the popular view of Superman (no idea if this matches up with the endlessly stacked wierdness in eighty years of Comic Book Superdickery), he’s essentially somebody who attacks corruption, crime, and reactionary evils from the right.
Or, as is true in many cases, “right” and “left” are not useful categories for analyzing any of this art.
Yeah, that’s actually what I’m trying to get at.
“punch fascists and Lexcorp to bring down late-stage capitalism” is a very different expression from “punch fascists and Lexcorp to defend the American people from their depredation”.
This, and your previous post in the thread, are not…good analyses of Superman. More importantly, they’re not good analyses of people on the left generally – they fall into the same errors that you see from the kind of leftists who yell about how all conservatives are animated primarily by their hatred of women and minorities.
I promise you, both “truth” and “justice” are leftist buzzwords every bit as much as they’re rightist buzzwords. There are a vanishingly small number of actual postmodernist types who believe that “truth” and “justice” are just instantiations of phallocentric Western oppression-speak, but…well, let’s say they’re akin to the vanishingly small number of actual pure-tribalist types who are willing to say “yep, only Our Folk matter, and we’ll laugh while we watch outgroup children being burned alive.”
(Even “the American Way” is pretty damn popular on the left. “We are too cool and cosmopolitan to love our country” is way more stereotype than truth. I spent part of this just-past July 4th at a barbecue containing no shortage of social-justice-y types, and there sure was plenty of American-flaggery and “USA! USA!” and suchlike. Speaking as someone who is himself disgusted by nationalist sentiment, and who is solidly embedded in the Blue Tribe, this is annoying…but there you have it.)
And if you think the folks on the left want nothing more from their escapist and aspirational art than an eternal circlejerk of “Maoist self-criticism,” rather than a fantasy of strong unified beautiful heroism that is also anti-racist and anti-sexist etc. etc. – well, you haven’t been paying the slightest attention to leftists talking about art on the Internet.
You’re letting your frustrated stereotypes run away with you here.
But that’s boring. Let’s talk about superheroes.
[NOTE: Everything I’m about to say about Superman applies, even more strongly, to Captain America. Cap is explicitly an avatar of national ideals; Superman is kinda that thing, complicated by his status as “alien outsider whose existence as a human is a commentary on the entire species.”]
Mandatory up-front disclaimer: yes, yes, this is a character who has been reinterpreted in countless ways and taken on countless different narrative roles in his coming-up-on-a-century of mythical existence, there is no single “true Superman” and there are plenty of counterexamples to everything. But there is a core understanding of what the character means, a cultural consciousness that hovers over every portrayal and from which all deviations deviate.
You’re 100% right to say that Superman is not a radical. The people who portray him as a communist or a crypto-communist are engaging in a lot of wishful thinking. I’ll go further than that – a lot of the arguments used to present him as Definitely a For-Reals Leftist, like “he cares about poor people” and “he is (unlike Captain Atom) sometimes willing to stand against the military-industrial complex,” are stupid arguments that reflect a very poor understanding of what separates leftism from its rival ideologies.
This does not actually add up to him being a conservative. And, given key elements of his central narrative, I think it’s actually very hard to spin him as that thing. Nor does it add up to him being an apolitical symbol of American glory, a thing that he can’t be given the extent to which “being used to illustrate the actual content of the American Way” is in his conceptual DNA.
Superman is a mainline centrist liberal.
It’s important that, while he was raised on a farm in Kansas – and while he loves Ma and Pa Kent, and honors their lifestyle – he himself moved to the big city to take a creative-class job, and he dwells in a Fortress of Solitude rather than being embedded in a tight-knit culturally-thick community. He spends basically none of his time propounding or defending classic culturally-American folkways, traditions, etc. Rather, he fights for America-the-land-of-abstract-theoretical-ideals. Over and over again, he takes a stand for the stranger and the outcast. He is absolutely fucking obsessed with civil liberties. He reliably interprets “the rule of law” as being defined primarily by procedural checks on the government and other powerful institutions, rather than as being a mechanism used to control low-level individual behavior.
He’s not just punching fascists and Lexcorp and green-eyed space monsters; he’s punching the Klan, and other liberal bugbears. Lex Luthor could be written as an Evil Coastal Elite Liberal stock character, and in fact you got that in the recent Zack Snyder movies where he was portrayed as a very-thinly-veiled Mark Zuckerberg, but he’s far more often written as an Evil Republican Tycoon who is rapaciously avaricious rather than callow and status-obsessed.
(You can make a much better case for conservative-Batman.)
