The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer, who coined the “cruelty is the point” meme, asserts that “Trump’s Fans Are Suffering From Tony Soprano Syndrome.”
In every Judge Joe Dredd story I’ve ever read, there is at least one almost comically obvious moment when the author makes clear that the protagonist is a jackbooted fascist and not someone to admire. This may come across to the average reader as heavy-handed, but when the richest man in the world misreads the character as heroic, you can see why such heavy-handedness is sometimes necessary.
Shortly before former Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida withdrew his nomination for attorney general, Elon Musk posted on X that Gaetz was the “Judge Dredd America needs to clean up a corrupt system and put powerful bad actors in prison.” Generally speaking, one’s model for justice should not be a fascist invented in part to illustrate the distinction between elite impunity and the brutality that ordinary people face.
There’s quite a bit more on Dredd as an unthinking tool of a fascist system before shifting to other fictional antiheroes that have spawned legions of admirers:
As Trump reshapes the nation in his image, some of his supporters seem inclined to turn cautionary tales on their head, empathizing with villains or antiheroes to such a degree that they miss the point of these stories entirely, even when the writers make the message as clear as possible. We might call this problem Tony Soprano Syndrome, after the patron saint of flawed antihero protagonists. One undecided voter told a New York Times focus group earlier this year that Trump is “the antihero, the Soprano, the ‘Breaking Bad,’ the guy who does bad things, who is a bad guy but does them on behalf of the people he represents.”
Almost every single thing here is wrong, but it’s wrong in a way that illustrates the illiteracy that I am talking about. The Sopranos is by any measure one of the greatest television series of all time, focusing on the daily travails of a mob boss who tries to balance his mental health with keeping his marriage together and raising his children. But Tony is a murderer whose greed and ambition harm the people he claims to love. He is not a moral exemplar, nor is he intended to be; his selfishness helps no one else and is destructive to all around him. The same is true of Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad, who at one point in the show literally looks at the camera and says of his crimes, “I did it for me.”
Again, the creators could not be more clear that these characters are horrible people whom others should not seek to emulate. There is a difference between thinking Darth Vader is an awesome character in the fictional context of Star Wars and, you know, wanting to be like Darth Vader, a psychotic child-killer. Quite similarly, Trump could not be more clear that he is out for himself, seeking the power of the presidency to enrich himself and his allies, protect himself from legal jeopardy, and bask in the cultlike adulation of his followers. But fans of Tony or Walter, living vicariously through the power and cruelty of the object of their admiration, invert the moral implications of those characters’ stories such that selfishness and malice are justified or laudable. In the same way, Trump supporters treat the real-life Trump, who seeks power for his own gain, as a fictionalized Trump whose vices are in service to a selfless cause.
So, I don’t think this is a function of illiteracy but rather of admiration for a certain archetype of masculine strength. The fourth post I wrote here, way back on January 31, 2003, dealt with a similar phenomenon:
Jonah Goldberg’s column today is an excellent example of how you can agree with someone’s conclusions but strongly object to their argument. Yes, the Tom Cruise character in “A Few Good Men” was a smart-aleck pretty boy (as he is in all of his watchable movies; he’s dreadful when he tries to go against type). Yes, the Jack Nicholson character (Colonel Jessup) had some great lines and it was easy to cheer for some of them. But Jessup was a villain in the flick. However well-intentioned, he believed himself above the rules of his society and ordered his subordinates to break the law, with the tragic result of killing one of the men under his command. And then covering it up rather than taking responsibility. Not exactly heroic. I’d hate for Jessup to be the role model for American foreign policy. And, getting to Goldberg’s direct point, while it’s true that the US provides the lion’s share of the NATO defense burden, that doesn’t mean the Europeans have lost all right to dissent. They’re sometimes (okay, usually) annoying, but they aren’t our subordinates; they’re sovereign states with a rather different set of interests. Indeed, that’s the reason we need to preserve the option to act “unilaterally” rather than having all our actions subject to a NATO or UN veto.
In the linked column (originally to its Townhall variant; the Jewish World Review version survives), Goldberg readily acknowledges, “Now, I know Nicholson’s supposed to be the villain,” before going on to express his admiration for the “I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it” speech.
Jessup is a charismatic war hero and, until the very end of the movie, Cruise’s protagonist was a take-the-easy-way-out pretty boy who didn’t seem to grasp the nature of military service. It’s easy for men—and it’s mainly men that we’re talking about here—to fantasize about being men of action who take no shit and get things done, rules be damned.
Tony and Walter are also aspirational figures for a certain type of man experiencing a certain type of midlife crisis because, despite their body aging and their looks fading, they can still shape the world around them with a seemingly infinite capacity to endure or inflict violence. They want to tell themselves they’re protecting something—home and hearth perhaps—but actually want to validate themselves with a justification for hurting someone else, even if they have to invent one.
Here, I think Serwer misses the mark. Just as I don’t think the cruelty is actually the point (it is, rather, a comeuppance for an Other that is responsible for some imagined humiliation), I don’t think the average Trump supporter (or admirer of Dredd, Soprano, White, or Jessup) really wants to go out and kill people. Rather, they want power and respect.
This is one reason the actor Anna Gunn, who portrayed Walter’s wife, Skylar, drew an intense backlash—she was the embodiment of the nitpicky wife whose jealousy held her husband back from greatness (as a murdering meth kingpin).
Skylar is intentionally portrayed as a shrewish foil for Walter to elicit precisely that reaction from the male fanbase. But, yes, there’s a lot of macho fantasizing at work.
Walter represents the emotional state of a particular type of viewer—someone who wants to enjoy his ability to make himself feel good through violence and suffering, and doesn’t want his good time spoiled by a mouthy woman reminding him that the things he is doing are actually bad. This type of reactionary masculinity is itself emblematic of the Trump era, as if conservatives listened to feminist critiques of “toxic masculinity” and decided to shear all virtue from their conception of traditional manhood and retain only those parts that involve dominance and exploitation of others.
Again, I think Serwer identifies something real but misses the mark. I don’t think there’s a huge contingent of men who secretly want to be murderers and drug kingpins. But there’s certainly a longing for the days when “a man’s home was his castle.”
The shape of Western society has changed radically over the course of the last half century or so. The days when a man with a high school education or less could easily get a job to support his family in a middle-class lifestyle are essentially over. At the same time, our social mores have evolved to take away their presumptive role as head of the household and to constrain behaviors that were once “just boys being boys.”
Most of us have adjusted to these changing conditions and acquired skills that enable us to make a good living and enjoy a certain amount of respect in our day-to-day lives. But there are tens of millions who haven’t. And they naturally resent the hell out of being looked down upon. It’s not shocking that they get some vicarious enjoyment rooting for a Walter White or Tony Soprano.
Trump, who despite a lifetime of wealth and fame, has been a master of playing to these resentments. Partly, I think, because he shares them. Even though he’s by any reasonable measure part of the elite, he feels that he’s never been accepted by them and he resents the hell out of it.
Examples abound. Last year, another heavy-handed comic-book adaptation, the television series The Boys—about a covert-ops group that targets the irresponsible corporate-produced “supers” who kill more people than they actually save—made its criticism of fascism so overt that many of its fascist-sympathetic fans began to get upset. These fans complained that the show had gotten “woke” once the plot began to more plainly illustrate the political points it had been making all along, to the dismay of those fans who were living vicariously through the antagonists’ acts of cruelty.
Similarly, the creators of the murderous Marvel Comics’ vigilante the Punisher have repeatedly clarified, to no avail, that, despite possessing some virtues, the character of Frank Castle is not a good guy. In addition to being a murderer, he is occasionally portrayed as a fascist. During the Civil War storyline, Castle is told off by his idol, Captain America, who describes Castle as “psychotic,” fulfilling a “twisted notion of justice.” The Punisher creator Gerry Conway has called the embrace of Punisher iconography by real-life armed agents of the state “disturbing,” because “the Punisher represents a failure of the Justice system. He’s supposed to indict the collapse of social moral authority and the reality [that] some people can’t depend on institutions like the police or the military to act in a just and capable way.”
The collapse of trust in institutions is one of the stories of the past decade or so. But so is this moral degeneracy, motivated by the need to ideologically justify the place of a corrupt authoritarian strongman in the most powerful government in the world. What looks like declining media literacy may be something much worse—an affirmation of the underlying values in dystopian literature that inevitably lead to the dystopia itself.
So, I agree that some of this is quite disturbing. But it’s not like this is something that just happened overnight. Hell, Batman, one of the most popular comic book characters since 1939, is a masked vigilante who metes out justice outside the law. The Dirty Harry character, which debuted in 1971, was popular precisely because he wasn’t constrained by the rules handed down by namby-pamby judges. For decades, John Rambo (introduced to moviegoers in 1982) fought gunned down corrupt cops and crooked politicians with machine guns.
And that’s to say nothing of the persistence of the Western and its modern counterparts. That Yellowstone‘s John Dutton and Rip Wheeler are mass murderers doesn’t keep millions from admiring their grit and tenacity. Similarly, fantasies about hanging people selling dope (after some panty-waist judge lets them go) and gunning down evil-doers have been a longstanding trope in country music.
There’s a longstanding frustration that our culture has gotten corrupted and that our institutions are letting us down. And it’s manifesting in increasingly violent imagery, rhetoric, and, occasionally, action. And, again, it seems especially among men.
Trump has both exploited and advanced this trend.
