A long-running theme in the right-wing critique of progressive politics in the 2010s was mockery of its reliance on fantasy fiction. Left-leaning commentators appeared to have been trapped within the reference points of the novels of their childhood.
Harry Potter was especially prominent in left-wing arguments. Anti-Trump activists were “Dumbledore’s Army.” Signs at left-wing protests featured slogans like “Hermione wouldn’t stand for this.” Even J.K. Rowling came out to say that Lord Voldemort was “nowhere near as bad” as Donald Trump.
Now that Rowling has become so controversial for her critique of trans radicalism, this is faintly ironic. (It must have been a terrible shock for Dumbledore’s Army to realise that they had become the Death Eaters.) Still, the 2010s were a different time. Back then, we critics of “social justice” activism found this discourse entertaining. We mocked its Manichaean vision of the world, in which everyone was either a goodie or a baddie. We made fun of its at least implicit reliance on magic. “Read another book” was a popular jibe.
This was more than legitimate. Still, as the American-Israeli war against Iran continues, I can’t help feeling that some people on the right were laughing without thinking. Now, some right-wing figures seem to be viewing the world through the lens of childish fiction. Prowar rhetoric is seething with cheap comparisons to popular culture.
A new video on the White House X accountant is captioned “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.” Here, clips from movies like Iron Man, Braveheart and Top Gun are interspersed with footage of the U.S. military taking out Iranian targets.
Did the creators of the video appreciate the irony of using Braveheart to promote a superpower attacking a smaller and weaker state? Did they know that Saul Goodman, from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, who also appears, is a corrupt lawyer? Is that “justice the American way”?
Perhaps the creators were unbothered about thematic coherence. The sense of jubilant macho power could very well have been all that mattered to them. Elsewhere, the White House account posted a video which featured a montage of missile strikes interspersed with footage resembling a video game. Jean Baudrillard must have been chuckling in his grave.
This triumphalism has obvious moral implications. According to various analyses, the most probable culprit behind a strike on an Iranian school, which killed 175 people, many of them children, was the United States. Of course, this was a mistake, and while I oppose the American-Israeli campaign I must acknowledge that even a just war would involve horrific mistakes. But the awful nature of war explains why a more sober tone is appropriate. Top Gun would not be a beloved film today if it had featured Tom Cruise wiping out a school — or even bombing an enemy warship and then leaving the survivors to drown.
But the chest-beating comparisons to action movies and video games, which are also reflected in the Department of Defense’s furious announcements about “UNLEASHING American power” to “DESTROY THE ENEMY,” also appears to have strategic implications. It looks very much as if Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth and co. believe that the key to using American power effectively is a display of overwhelming force and unashamed brutality.
Well, war is war. It isn’t a game of Risk. Of course overwhelming force can be valuable. But Trump and Hegseth seem to have watched one too many movies in which a storm of righteous violence delivers total victory.
I can’t claim to know what is going to happen in Iran, but a state which has spent decades insulating itself against regime change, with its different power centers and its strong and fiercely ideological military apparatus, is not going to cave in at the first sign of a cruise missile. This appears to be sinking in, with U.S. officials shifting more responsibility for regime change onto local dissidents, while focusing on the more realistic goal of degrading Iran’s military capacities.
Still, gung-ho invocations of action movies are at best misleading, whether or not they express the mindset of people who have misled themselves. ICE raids were also promoted with references to war movies, and childish slogans like “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.” Comparing Trump, as the meme did, to a vicious, if fictional, killer from a failed war was an interesting choice, but it was appropriate for a campaign which put a lot of focus on sensational optics and ended up making ICE largely unpopular. This sort of propaganda, it seems, is quite effective among the extremely online young—and not so young—men who end up being staffers for the Trump administration, but rather less effective elsewhere.
The Trump administration should stop thinking in terms of action films—or, on a somewhat meta note, the memes that have emerged from action films. It was childish when progressives were yelling about how Donald Trump was a blond Voldemort, and it is childish when the White House is comparing dropping a cruise missile onto a bunch of hapless Iranians to the struggles of William Wallace.
At least the libs could say that they had actually read a book.
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