DC Politics

Some lowbrow psychological realpolitik for ya.

Politicians aren’t as diverse as politics. If we divide them up into four groups, it’s slightly less of an affront to reality than doing the same thing with political philosophies. Here’s my typology:

These are really axes and continuums (continua?) but this way is snappier.

At the top left, we have the least familiar character: Anarky, a radical teenage genius who shows up as a Batman antagonist or sometimes as an antihero protagonist. Anarky politicians aren’t necessarily Anarchists, just people totally committed to radical ideologies and not super into incrementalism.

My main objections to Anarky here, ethics aside, are that becoming an exclusion zone overnight would do much more harm than it prevented and that if your plan is to use brief summonings of an evil entity to do your bidding, you better be sure a superhero isn’t going to punch you at exactly the wrong moment.

Batman has similar motivations to Anarky, but the opposite instincts for how to act on them. He sees violence as a violation of the benevolent status quo. The most utopian he gets is imagining a world that’s without crime, even if the only reason is that if you try to do a crime, a billionaire drops down out of the shadows and punches you in the face.

The “crime bill,” from context, is a bill that makes crime illegal.

Lex Luthor almost always pretends to be Batman, but at the end of the day, he just wants cake. If the rules of the game already favor him, this mostly means supporting conservative policies. But if going radical looks like the opportune move, he’ll do it.

It depends on who’s writing him, but Lex is often more amoral than evil, and often does good things out of either self interest or sparks of altruism. President Luthor was the status quo for a long time, and he did okay.

The Joker is an agent of chaos. Chaos might be a terminal goal for him (“some men just want to see the world burn”) or just what he instinctively believes is the best way for him, personally, to get more cake. He’s equally happy to impersonate any of the other three.

Joker politicians have a broad variety of goals, motivations, and origin stories. Of course, so does The Joker.

Special Team-up Event!

The U.S. winner-take-all system forces there to be exactly two teams. So how do they tend to align?

Note that this is a different question from “what kinds of people vote for which party?” All four archetypes, and many variations, are present in each base. But, in our system, teams need to be lead by a small number of vaguely homogenous politicians.

Revolution: Anarky and the Joker against the 1%.

This plot twist gets undone and redone a lot.

In revolutions, Anarky and the Joker team up: Anarky is willing to temporarily suspend looking too deeply into his comrades’ motivations, and the Joker appreciates that. The ends justify the means, to Anarky, while the ends are the means to the Joker. Batman sees people setting things on fire and decides they need to be punched, and Luthor sees people setting his things on fire and agrees. This is a common setup, but not a particularly stable one—eventually, the revolutionaries either straight-up win, get enough concessions that their coalition splinters, or are brutally smashed.

Business As Usual: Luthor and Joker try to steal Anarky and Batman’s cake

Anarky and Joker never actually team up in the comics, but this team-up happens a lot.

In the more typical status quo, you get Anarky and Batman versus Lex and Mr. J. Anarky and Batman will in-fight endlessly about methods, but Batman can find it useful to be allied with someone scary, and Anarky with someone powerful. The villains will also in-fight endlessly over methods and over who gets the cake, but each needs to team up with someone in order to have any chance.

Strongman Populists: Batman and Joker, or Anarky and Luthor, against the people.

Joker’s got a point.

The diagonal team-ups are thankfully rare, as they tend to be Nazis vs. Stalinists: fascists using stochastic terrorism to intimidate everyone into legalizing their rule, vs. corrupt oligarchs using useful idiots as pawns.

But whose name is on the cover?

The alignment has been stable for a while now. For most of the twentieth century, we had Anarky grumblingly doing Batman’s bidding in exchange for scraps of reform, and the Joker likewise subservient to Lex Luthor, accepting the smaller slice of cake rather than risk losing it all. Batman and Luthor, although publicly adversarial, do often get to make mutually beneficial trades, helping to cement their control.

Lex tries to get ahead of the inevitable betrayal.

I think you answered your own question, kid.

Today, that’s still the alignment, but the power dynamics have shifted. Somewhat. Maybe I’m biased, but I think Batman and Robin are still running the Democratic Party. While the rhetoric runs in the opposite direction, the Democrats are funding the police and the Republicans are defunding them. I can’t even point to any powerful Democrat who really embodies Anarky. But on the other side…

This is what I imagine it felt like to be Fox News in 2016, or any establishment Republicans getting their faces eaten by leopards over the next four years.

Donald Trump, although he might play him on TV, is not Lex Luthor. He’s the Joker, and it’s his party now. So we’re living in interesting times. The big question is whether Mr. J and Luthor will keep playing ball. It worked out okay for them in 2016-2020—Trump didn’t delegate as much power to the deep state as it’s used to, but he still handed it most of the control, let Luthor do the boring stuff like pick judges, and in exchange he got to go on camera every day and announce that he personally was made of cake, which in his psyche made it true.

But January 6th exposed a conflict of interest (the only kind of conflict these two ever have) that might be too fundamental. Luthor wants to preserve the system, while our foremost clown wants to stay in power and never have to speak anything negative about himself into reality. So what happens when the system says he has to leave? Luthor mostly won that one, but how confident is he that he can win round two?

Implications for Realignment

Assuming Trump doesn’t manage to keep his campaign promise to end democracy, we’re overdue for some kind of major shift. The way this has historically worked is parties break up, we get an election cycle with three or four major parties, and then they recoalesce into two.

To split a party, you need a leader willing and able to create a mass exodus. What could that look like?

• Batman-type Democratic party leaders don’t really have an incentive to split the party—they’re already in charge and doing it hands a victory to the Republicans.

• Anarky-type Democratic party leaders don’t really exist at the moment. AOC, for example, has a different vibe from the establishment, but at the end of the day she’s still going to play by the rules.

• Luthor-type and Joker-type Democrats are too weak. They’ve tried to start exoduses, but without much success.

So I don’t think the Dems split first. On the other side of the aisle:

• Batman-type Republican party leaders are trying to start an exodus, currently with little success.

• Joker-type and Anarky-type leaders are prevalent, but don’t have a strong incentive to split since the current chaotic leadership mostly lets them do whatever they want.

• Luthors, as I’ve said, have begrudgingly toed the line, but may be approaching their breaking point.

  So if this all ends at all well, it probably involves a Republican schism, with Luthor and Batman creating a new third party, leaving Joker and Anarky to have fun playing in the ruins of the GOP. How will that end up resolving back into two? Depends on the writer.