Daniel
McCarthy expanded upon his New York Post editorial, the one I responded to previously, in the pages of his journal, Modern
Age. His expansion—“Superman After Liberalism”—isn’t a rebuttal to my response,
but he tagged me nonetheless, so I’m going to take the opportunity to respond
once more…particularly since the way McCarthy is pursuing his case against
James Gunn’s Superman provides me with an important contract to Vice
President J.D. Vance, who recently, on the occasion of receiving an award from
the Claremont Institute, gave a speech on citizenship which was about as antithetical to
the deeply American moral sentiments of Superman as I can imagine.
McCarthy’s
argument against Gunn’s vision of the Superman character isn’t changed by his
expansion, but he does elaborate on his thesis in some interesting ways. He’s
not wrong that “the problem of reconciling the exceptional with the egalitarian”
has been a subtheme to telling super-heroes stories ever since Jerry Siegel and
Joe Shuster essentially evented the genre (and if McCarthy had either the pop
culture knowledge or inclination, he could have made the obvious point that
recent comic, cinematic, and television incarnations of Superman—from
Christopher Reeve in Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman: The Movie to Henry
Cavill in Zack Snyder’s 2013 Man of Steel to many, many others—have all
taken different positions on how to address this narrative problem). Nor is he
wrong—though he is, I think, incomplete—in suggesting that Siegel and Shuster’s
original solution, and the one that supposedly served the character so well for
decades, was to write Superman as motivated by a New Deal-era confidence in
liberalism as a form of patriotism, the result of his, through his adopted
parents, “assimilation into Kansas and America as the land of the free.” I
don’t see how anyone remotely online—to say nothing of comic books fan over the
past 85 years who have (likely unlike McCarthy) actually consumed Superman
media—could be unaware of this aspect of Superman’s history, especially given
how relevant it is to debates that McCarthy (and Vance) are deeply involved in
today.
McCarthy
sees the Superman of the James Gunn film as having abandoned this confidence,
as American liberalism has also abandoned it (or maybe, depending on how much
and what sort of postliberalism McCarthy embraces, it was fated to turn away
from it, in favor of identity politics and government-managed pity). Instead, he
sees the Superman played by David Corenswet as unexceptional, bland, and weak
(McCarthy makes much of how Superman’s unwillingness to kill makes him reliant
upon other heroes capable doing the necessary “dirty work”). And while he
allows that there probably could have been, even within his framework, a way of
telling the Superman story that asked the “right questions,” this one
absolutely isn’t it; in Superman, he sees only a left-liberal film that
is so frightened that “fascism has already taken over this country” that its
titular character lacks “a place of his own,” leaving him to articulate only
lame liberal sentiments with no moral strength of their own.
I’ve already talked about how wrong this argument is. The
lame liberal sentiments that McCarthy sees in Superman’s wonderful final words
to Lex Luthor—
I’m as
human as anyone. I love, I get scared, I wake up every morning and despite not
knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the
best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human! And
that’s my greatest strength.
—could,
I suppose, be understood as validating a kind of moral individualism and even
fatalism. That they lack much by way of realpolitik thinking, and thus arguably
open the door to a hypocritical Machiavellianism, showing a face of kindness
and sympathy to the crowd while justifying self-interested actions behind your
back, is also perhaps true. (Superman didn’t seem too worried about the fate of
his clone, for example.) But of course, it’s not like the downsides—the
exclusionary classism, racism, sexism, and more—so frequently present in more
rigorously particular moral systems are difficult to identify either.
More
importantly, to fail to understand the moral strength—and, on an admittedly
somewhat attenuated level, what I think can only be understood as an aspect of self-sacrificing
Christian love—that is just as possible to be found within this kind of
compassion-driven ethical universalism is a major mistake. It’s one that has
been made by haters of Rousseau and every attempt within the context of
modernity to follow the path toward moral legitimacy—a civil religion based on
rights and consent and small-d democratic efforts to build communities of action
and legislation—which he suggested for centuries now. I have no idea if James
Gunn or David Corenswet have ever heard of Moral Therapeutic Deism, and I definitely
reject the idea that what viewers of Superman saw on the screen is just
another version of some self-centered, MTD, make-it-up-yourself-morality. But
denying that there is any moral substance, any heroism, to someone who puts
forward, first and foremost, kindness and concern and sentimentality and good
deeds, absent any explicit patriotic attachment or sectarian confession or
nationalist vision, is simply a complete misreading of the moral thinking at
work in this long, centuries old, deeply important liberal Christian tradition.
It’s a complete misreading of the religious sensibility that, as a resident of
Kansas, I still see plenty of evidence of all around me, obtaining in
communities and families that are interconnected and wired and far less
self-sufficient that many who prattle on about “heartland values” insist on
making them out to be, but which issue in friendliness and service and charity
nonetheless. And finally, frankly, it is a complete misreading of American
republicanism as well.
So now let’s
turn to Vice President Vance’s partly thoughtful, but mostly pedantic speech,
one that Superman would never be pretentious enough to give. In talking about
citizenship, Vance starts by making a serious, complicated point:
Social
bonds form among people who have something in common. They share the same
neighborhood. They share the same church. They send their kids to the same
school. And what we're doing [in the Trump administration] is recognizing that
if you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow that
social cohesion to form naturally. It's hard to become neighbors with your
fellow citizens when your own government keeps on importing new neighbors every
single year at a record number.
That
social bonds and civic strength develop organically over time through the
routines of ordinary life is an undeniable communitarian truth; the whole
notion of “social capital” is built upon that understanding. And hence, it’s
not unreasonable to see the challenges of ethnic, religious, racial, cultural,
and (I think especially) linguistic diversity as genuine ones, ones which
immigration restrictions might be an at least partial solution to. There is good research in support of this—but also evenmoregood research that challenges it,
making the argument that the obstacles posed by diversity are actually, when
one controls for technological distractions and economic barriers which prevent
people from interacting as humans (anthropologically social creatures that we
are) normally would, quite small, and in any case that such obstacles, absent
political polarization, actually fall quite fast.* Robert Putnam, the scholar
who developed the idea of social capital, essentially concluded in a later
study that the
difficulty Vance highlights is a short-term one, one that—in immigrant
societies like the U.S.—is always being negotiated by the emergence of “cross-cutting
forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities.”
Presumably,
Vance—or at least his speech-writers—are smart enough to know all this. Which
means that in holding to this argument, he unintentionally (or, who knows—maybe
intentionally!) reveals that his hope through serving in the Trump
administration isn’t to fine-tune immigration policy, but rather to change
America away from being an immigrant
society at all. And his case for this is plainly ideological—or even, I think,
theologico-political, and not in a good way. In the most notorious passage in
his speech, he claims:
If you
were to ask yourself in 2025 what an American is, I hate to say it, very few of
our leaders actually have a good answer. Is it purely agreement with the
creedal principles of America? I know the Claremont Institute is dedicated to
the founding vision of the United States of America. It's a beautiful and
wonderful founding vision, but it's not enough by itself. If you think about
it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let's say, of
the Declaration of Independence, that's a definition that is way overinclusive
and underinclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of
all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens
who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit
all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal
nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the
same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would
label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their
ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to
think that it's absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to
saying you don't belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism
in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell
of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong.
Some of the
reasoning here is obviously puerile. (“Must we admit all of them tomorrow?” So,
you’re assuming that “hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens
who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence”—perhaps in
part because their own French or Japanese or Canadian or British or Italian or
Australian or Norwegian political cultures have long socialized them to accept
similar principles of government by consent and natural rights—actually would
all want to come to the United States in the first place?) And some of
it worryingly strange. (As John
Ganz pointed out, the Anti-Defamation League is hardly a “woke” entity
these days, but somehow Vance nonetheless thinks it important to insist to
castigate them, suggesting that he really does think that anti-Semites, neo-Nazis,
and others so-inclined should be given a pass, presumably because they had ancestors
who fought for the Confederacy.) But the parts of it which bother me the most
are, I think, anti-republican in the most malicious way.
The
republicanism of Thomas Jefferson has been endlessly analyzed, and no doubt
will long continue to be. But broadly speaking, Jefferson’s republicanism was a
fascinating—some would say incoherent—mixture of the aristocratic and the
democratic, a mixture of Enlightenment confidence, agrarian sentiment, and noblesse
oblige. Jefferson’s
Declaration of Independence is not a crystalline distillation of all those
ideas, but it does hit all the main points of it, especially as its ideas were
later amplified and refined through centuries of American experience and
practice. Jefferson’s vision was one of rational human beings exercising their
natural right to collectively achieve independence, not solely or even
primarily in order to remain virtuous farmers, or to instantiate through the
power of a new social contract their own preferred res publica, but
simply in order for their personal and communal development, as productive
citizens, to be free from the interfering interests of powerful others in their
civic spaces. Whatever the inconsistencies one might find in this theoretical
framework, it is a substantive one, reflective not of unstated
assumptions about some natural necessity regarding borders and identity, but
rather of the explicitly stated assumption that a God-and-nature-given sensibility
will show the rightness of a free people being able to work out their independence
as part of civil order they choose for themselves, absent any distant hierarchy
(whether spatially or temporally).
No one
actually familiar with the philosophical and historical arguments here can deny
that notions of sovereignty—of the right of a people to collectively define and
govern their communities, including the borders thereof—were an important
component of these republican visions that shaped America’s political culture.
But Vance would have us believe that sovereignty needs to be the central
concern of anyone concerned about citizenship and freedom:
What
does it mean to be an American in 2025? For one, I think it has to mean
sovereignty. More precisely, American citizenship must mean belonging to a
nation that guards the sovereignty of its people, especially from a modern
world that's hellbent on dissolving borders and differences in national
character.
The
Declaration is by no means a culturally placeless document; among the
particulars that Jefferson levied against King George were claims that his
actions were stirring up the continent’s native
inhabitants to war and allowing the Catholic French to establish a dangerous
foothold in Canada. Jefferson was not so idealistic as to ignore all concerns
about security and identity. But the power of the document—and really, the
power of this kind of liberal republicanism in general—is the way it connects
with sentiments of liberty whose natural rightness were, in Jefferson’s view,
becoming undeniable with the transformations which moved Western civilization away
from the ancient and medieval worlds, and towards a more rights-based one. Jefferson’s
embrace of the Enlightenment is hardly defensible in every particular,
especially when it comes to race and religion. But the fact that America’s
political culture became entwined with Jefferson’s hopes—his belief that, as he
put it in
one of the final letters he ever wrote, “the mass of mankind has not been
born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready
to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God”—is inseparable from what this
country has meant to the history of the world. To reduce that all to obsessions
over sovereignty (and apparently not so much, in Vance’s mind, popular and
democratic sovereignty, which is a crucial aspect of self-governance, but
rather martial sovereignty, since he seems especially worked up about the fact
that “so many young people…say that they would not die for their own country…[or]
put on a uniform and sacrifice their lives for our common nation”) is a serious
conceptual loss.
Fortunately,
the history of America is filled with people who have understood this country’s
civic self-conception more accurately than Vice President Vance does. President
Abraham Lincoln, for one, who in perhaps
his greatest and most influential speech, emphasized that the carnage of
the Civil War, and the kind of community those who waged it were motivated by,
was one characterized by a simple, singular “proposition”: “that all men are
created equal.” But also, how about the political theorist, and refugee from
the Holocaust, and naturalized U.S. citizen, Hannah Arendt? There’s isn’t a
smidgen of flakey idealism to be found in her writing—and yet, her whole
understanding of her adopted country began with her
appreciation of the power of the demos to build civic spaces and secure
liberty through revolutionary action, action which is not dependent upon
some kind of prior security, but upon a spontaneity available to all. There is,
of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights leader, devout (however flawed)
Christian, and democratic socialist, whose commitment to all three of those
collections of moral principles formed the pillars of the “beloved community”
that he believed all free people ought to and someday would be able partake of,
with Jefferson’s words in the Declaration guiding
him towards his refusal “to believe that there are insufficient funds in
the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.” And what about Zohran Mamdani,
the likely future Mayor of New York City? On July 4th, he
posted his sentiments: “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I
am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to
protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every
person who calls it home.” And Vance—kind of like McCarthy, come to think of it—found
that bland statement of liberal patriotism simply horrifying. “There is no
gratitude in those words, Vance ranted. “He dares on our 249th anniversary to
congratulate [America] by paying homage to its incompleteness and to its, as he
calls it, contradictions?....Who the hell does he think that he is?”
Well, for
one thing, he appear to think—if only in terms of structure, not substance—pretty
much the exact same way Vance himself thinks, if he were only honest or
self-reflective enough to notice it, since our Vice President actually ends his
own speech saying “we must get to work”—which I think must mean that even he
agrees that the work of American citizenship is, well, “unfinished.” But that’s
just more puerile rhetoric from angry man, or at least a man who knows his
position in the Trump administration and the plaudits he receives from the MAGA
base depends upon his performative anger.
A better
answer, of course, is that Mamdani, like all good Americans this summer, may
not think he’s Superman, but he’s surely been inspired by Malik Ali, the
falafel vendor who believes in Superman, jumps into a crater to help him up
during his first tangle with the Hammer of Barovia/Ultraman, and then is pointlessly
murdered by Lex Luthor while the latter tries to get Superman to tell him the
location of his home. Because Superman does have a home, a place—a place
of homely, maybe even “bland” liberal republican and Christian virtues, all
that not particularly sovereign stuff about doing good and feeling compassion and
treating everyone equally and trying again and again, despite all his and our
limitations and mistakes. It’s the sort of place that teaches a person to, when offered a falafel by a
vendor after saving someone from being hit by a taxi, accept it gratefully.
Did the
Kents introduce Superman to falafels while he was growing up? Probably not—probably
he came to like them because he’s just another struggling modern person, appreciating
the good food and other good works human beings can achieve. There is a substance
to this very American, very liberal, very “bland” struggle. It’s a substance I’m
happy to admit is in some ways parasitic upon, and therefore must necessarily
connect to, all sorts of deeper traditions and values and visions; there’s a
reason why I call myself a communitarian and a civic republican and a Christian,
after all. But to allow the fact that the Christianity and republicanism and
community attachments of modern Americans (like, I think, James Gunn’s Superman)
tend to be rather liberal to become a reason to reject their sources entirely is
the worst sort of cutting off your nose to spit in your own face. Of course,
when you’re talking about a political movement that’s all about reacting
against the America that actually exists, not to reform or improve or correct
it but rather to just reject its reality, then maybe that kind of cutting and
spitting is what passes for respectable thought. It wins awards from the
Claremont Institute, apparently.
I met Glen
Henshaw 39 years ago, in the late summer of 1987, presumably in one of the
hallways on the 4th floor of V-Hall in the old Deseret Towers
student housing complex at Brigham Young University, where we had both moved in
for our freshman year. I don’t have a memory of that first meeting, but I have
a memory of him. He was thin, smart, funny, athletic, and with a background in
nature and agriculture I could relate to (even though Virginia forests aren’t
at all similar to Washington wheat fields). Above all though, he was a geek,
and it was on that level we truly connected. Not that our geekeries were entirely
similar; mine ran towards Dungeons
& Dragons
and comic
books and super-hero
movies
and getting
philosophical about all of the above, while his ran towards the technical side
of science-fiction and fantasy: he was a born tinkerer, a student of taking
stuff apart and putting it together again, and his obsessive questioning
expressed itself differently than mine did. Thank goodness we had our mutual
passion for Star Trek (including the novels and comic books, but particularly
Star
Trek: The Next Generation, which premiered that year, and which he and
I and a few other fellow geeks would crowd around whatever television sets were
available in the freshman dorms and watch together); who knows how our
friendship would have developed otherwise.
But
develop it did. We weren’t inseparable friends—he had his gang, staying up to
ridiculous hours and hitting Radio Shacks and assorted warehouses around Utah Valley,
searching for parts for a robot dog they were determined to build, whereas my
gang was mostly just a bunch of politically and culturally malcontented scribblers—but
we hung out together pretty often, doing the Blues Brothers thing as the mood
struck us. When Ray Bradbury came to campus to give a guest lecture, he and his
gang staked out seats close to the stage; they kindly let me squeeze in beside
them, and it turned out to be one
of my fondest memories of that whole year. But whereas what I got out of it
was a great story, Glen got a mission. As he wrote to me:
Currently,
industry designs satellites to be completely reliable, with zero room for error
or unexpected failure, over their entire lifespan. Think of it like a car. If
you had to build a vehicle to drive 1 million miles without a single breakdown,
it would cost an astronomical fortune. But we don’t do that because we can
easily take our cars to a mechanic. Because that safety net exists, our vehicles
don’t need to be over-engineered to last forever. Satellites are so expensive
because they lack that safety net; they must be built to survive that grueling “1-million-mile”
journey alone. But if we had a mechanic in space, we could build satellites
much more affordably, without the need for such extreme, hyper-exquisite
engineering.
