The Right's Hero Problem

By way of Jonathan Last’s and Victorino Matus’ commentaries on Star Wars and Indiana Jones, Sonny raises a pop culture problem with profound implications for right-leaning political philosophy:

[Last] argued that viewers were cheering for the wrong side in the Star Wars flicks–that the empire was a force for stability in a universe ungovernable by the republic that once ruled. […] Matus writes, “the Nazis were digging in the wrong place. It is Jones who actually excavates the Well of Souls and hands the Ark over to the Germans. And despite Jones’s heroic pursuit of the Ark while on horseback, the prize is ultimately returned to the Germans when they board the ship.” Perhaps the world would be better off with Jones leaving well enough alone…

It’s impossible to make any sense of the fabulous popularity of the Rebel Alliance and Indiana Jones without reference to Americanism — that portmanteau folk philosophy of pragmatist-opportunists and the common people who love them, in which enterprising male individuals who know what’s right and have the pluck to stay alive ought always to fight, both for his own and for what’s right, no matter the risk to stability and order. Americanism holds that that risk is always worth taking because the triumph of American heroes produces the greatest goods we could hope for. Meddling — even if it almost blows up the universe or makes the Nazis immortal — is a dance with disaster that’s Americanism’s grandest form of entertainment, because what sees the American hero through this peril is a combination of grace under pressure and dumb luck that Americans think of as making the most of what you’ve got. And when One of Us makes the most of what they’ve got under impossible odds — odds made all the more impossible by the essentially amateurish bumbling of the hero himself — we all stand up and cheer, because our art is declaring ritually that our values are truths. All that and a large popcorn. No wonder Americanism bestrides the globe.

Paradoxically, however, this is all something of a difficulty for the right. Libertarians, for instance, are so accustomed to finding every sociopolitical regime unacceptably constraining in principle that any regime in which they flourish at the margins is tolerated in practice. I don’t mean to insinuate that Libertarians aren’t really trying to fight the good fight. I do want to suggest that there’s no natural Libertarian affinity for Luke Skywalker. It was Harrison Ford who was playing the libertarian in Star Wars — one of the sort he simply wasn’t playing in Indiana Jones. While Han Solo is a quintessential ‘social loner’ (capable of true friendship only with a Wookie, but connected all throughout the Imperial underworld), Indy is a different kind of rogue: dutiful professor by day, getter of girls and world heritage artifacts of uncanny power by night. Han is a public nuisance on the margins; Indy is a privateer who can’t stay out of the thick of things.

For conservatives, especially traditionalist ones, the problem is even worse. Gersonian helpy heroism is so revolting to many conservatives not just because they distrust and dislike ideologies of helping but because they fundamentally distrust and dislike ideologies of heroism, too. Americanism smacks of pride, arrogance, and foolishness to a certain type of conservative; this fellow looks at the Sgt. York legend and sees a hypocritical, idealized cover story for a war America never should have joined. He looks at John Wayne and sees what Hunter Thompson called a human hammerhead shark…

[Ed. See further P.J. O’Rourke:]

‘A John Wayne movie,’ I said. ‘Thats what you were going to say, wasn’t it? We think war is a John Wayne movie. We think life is a John Wayne movie — with good guys and bad guys, as simple as that. Well, you know something Mr. Limey Poofter? You’re right. And let me tell you who those bad guys are. They’re us. WE BE BAD. ‘We’re the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We’re three-quarters grizzly bear and […] descended from a stock market crash on our mother’s side. You take your Germany, France, and Spain, roll them all together and it wouldn’t give us room to park our cars. We’re the big boys, Jack, the original, giant, economy-sized, new and improved butt kickers of all time. When we snort coke in Houston, people lose their hats in Cap d’Antibes. And we’ve got an American Express card credit limit higher than your piss-ant metric numbers go.

Thompson knew about Americanism. This entire blog post is really just a restatement and elaboration on Thompson’s central reflection that

Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men’s reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of ‘the rat race’ is not yet final.

Both libertarians and conservatives have a standing ideological interest in denying that there is an inescapably tyrannical rat race. Post-Thompson, libertarians and conservatives have both maintained that America is great because you can drop out of a politics or a culture gone wrong — with your family and closest friends. Libertarians love free agents and conservatives love patriots, so they suffer a certain strange agony when confronted with Real American Heroes. Americanism produces mythic heroes that only a heel or an ingrate would dismiss or belittle. (Note the impossibility of criticizing any action-hero character played by Will Smith.) But Americanism also produces mythic heroes which paper over some of the profoundest grievances libertarians and conservatives cultivate — a massive, war-inaugurated government bureaucracy, intimately connected to corporatism and big business; a glib, flashy, irresponsible culture dazzled by easy victories and contemptuously ignorant of consequences; a foolish naivete about the corrupt power behind the public image; an all-too-instinctive conflation of State and Country; a mania for making everyone’s business everyone else’s business; and the list goes on.

Yet consider Socrates’ teaching that democracy was a degenerate political regime which nonetheless best enabled philosophy to develop. (Academic infighting note: Straussians should attend to the way that the higher is sublimated out of the lower even here.) In a way, libertarians and conservatives bear a similar curse — what they criticize is what makes their existence possible. Even more strangely, I bet, if asked, that many on the left would complain of being stuck self-consciously in a similar paradox. And now let me make the very strange-sounding claim that this is the true genius of Americanism, and the reason why, in the West, only America has truly flourished as a truly modern regime: all of us, regardless of our cultural or political position, more or less are stuck with the knowledge that we are really dependent on what we criticize. It’s impossible under such circumstances to really advocate revolution in the way that it’s been advocated (and accomplished) so many awful times in Europe. Americans know in their gut that, as pathological and silly as Americanism can be, it’s knit into the fabric of all our lives, so much so that even staunch critics of America have absolutely no desire to jump out of America’s skin. No American really wants to replace America. They just want a better America, a more truly American America.

That’s a really precious source of order and stability after all, and — feeding fully into the crazy Americanist creed, I admit — it’s something in which we should take a great collective pride.

(Greatest American Hero courtesy of Flickrer Chris Nilka.)