 I'm greatly honored to introduce our speaker for tonight, Dr. Joseph Boyd. He is Associate Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs, also a Political Science Professor. He received his degree from Carroll College in Montana in Political Science, and a Ph.D. in Master's Degree from the University of Notre Dame in Political Science. We are really honored to have them share some of these expertise on the intersections between politics and popular culture. Please give them your full attention, and we will have time for questions and answers at the end of this talk. Thank you very much, Elise. Thank you. I really do have to extend a special thanks tonight in particular. Not only is it wet and it was incredibly foggy, so to venture out, thanks. The fact that you did it on Mardi Gras confuses me. And then, of course, later on tonight, I hear that there is actually something for those of you who are just here for the politics, that there's also something else happening tonight, some kind of joint address to Congress or something. So thank you very much for spending this time here and having this conversation. Hopefully it will be worth the effort and the putting off of the eating of the last remnants of King Cake. The content of this talk actually was something that comes from a chapter that I wrote for the philosophy of Christopher Nolan, looking at the film director, who's famous for movies like Inception, and then, of course, the Dark Knight trilogy, and trying to find a consistency within an approach to the philosophy of Christopher Nolan. I say that primarily because I originally wrote this chapter in 2014 and sort of put together this talk about a week before the elections. And I say that because there are a lot of parallels that folks are going to be able to draw to contemporary events, which is fantastic. It's also completely unintentional. But I think that it shows the importance of this kind of research agenda and this kind of research project, because it's not so much that we use popular culture to say, see this event is explained now. Instead, it's to look at the theoretical framework, what happens when we watch or consume popular culture that begins to frame our ideas, begins to frame our conceptions, and helps us then to start to understand the events that are happening around us through a very particular filter and through a very particular frame. So all of that being said, feel free to draw parallels. I hope that you will. I hope we can engage in that conversation. But to get started tonight, what I wanted to do is just talk a little bit about that research agenda that I mentioned, looking at popular culture as a mode of understanding politics. I've done a number of books and articles related to popular culture as a means of understanding the political realm. And I did so for really a reason. I started off because I had an opportunity to write something for the X-files of philosophy and I was a big X-files geek and so I'm not going to turn that down. And then actually the more I started to explore that, I began to realize I honestly don't believe that there's anything more important that I can study when it comes to politics and political science. That's not to say that there aren't other important questions out there right now. I just honestly believe with where America is in terms of its overall consumption of entertainment, the way in which we engage politics through entertainment forums and through forums of popular culture, whether that be social media, through the films, television, the songs that we watch, when football becomes political, when all of those things become the subject of politics. I think it's incredibly important that we understand what is it that people are consuming, how are they consuming it, and what is the implication that that might have when it comes to the formation of values or of identity. And so I'm going to actually start back and I have that famous picture of Plato and Aristotle sort of juxtaposed with Superman and Batman and actually it was for a reason that I chose. Supposedly in this famous picture of Plato and Aristotle, you have Plato sort of pointing up to sort of describe the forms, the ideals as it relates to politics, whereas Aristotle has his hand down almost like it's bringing us down to earth and to think about the practical and that's certainly something that becomes represented in these two iconic figures. The heroic ideal that is not even of this planet, right, is of the aether, is the Superman and then the one who engages in the much more practical down to earth. This is what has to be done in order to accomplish that. So that's why that image, by the way, was selected. And it's there actually that I want to start in thinking about the ancient Greeks to sort of think about why even talk about Batman? Why spend time on these films? Why is this even interesting? And in part it's because when we think about some of the early writings of individuals like Plato, he talks about art as being a form of imitation or mimesis. That there is the form, the ideal that is out there. That we can think of an ideal that is justice. Then there's the construct, right, how we form laws or how we form society in order to try to represent that justice, to try to represent that ideal. We have an abstract understanding of what justice is and then we write laws. We build judicial systems to try to then impose that justice or create a vehicle for that justice to exist. And then Plato says there's also the artistic rendering which he feels is an incredibly far removed horrible representation of what that form is. That rather than even being an actual physical representation, it's a mimic of even that. That art removes us farther and farther away from the form that is justice. He writes in the Republic that imitation is far removed from the truth for it touches only a small part of each thing and a part of that itself is only an image. But it's also interesting to note that Plato's criticism of art was not because it was irrelevant. It was not because it was unimportant. It was actually so relevant and so important that he felt that things like poems, songs, plays, all had to be sanctioned and edited or completely banned if they imparted the wrong kinds of ideas. And the reason for that is because he felt as though that while this art is imitating, while it is mimicking society around us, it also appeals to a very raw place in us, right, in a rational place but a place where we can be moved, a place where we can actually form identity and see value, even if it's not based on rationality. In other words, Socrates' big fear was that if we told the wrong kinds of stories, then the implications of that are going to be that we're going to have the wrong kinds of citizens who are going to pursue the wrong kinds of goals in a society that is horribly improperly structured. In other words, art becomes so important that it can begin to trump reason, that it can begin to move us down a path where it's entirely based on emotion, and it can actually then become more influential in public discourse and deliberation than even rational thought. So in that regard, Plato is saying that it's really critical for us to think about artistry, to think about entertainment, because we have to then understand the implications that that entertainment is going to have on an overall society. In my mind, that becomes all the more critical within a democratic society when what we're consuming, if in fact it is as powerful as Plato suggests and as numbers of political thinkers have suggested sent Plato, if we're relying on democratic discourse to lead us to making decisions, then what happens when our art, when our popular culture, when our entertainment begins to form our conversations more so than rational deliberative thought about evidence in public conversation? Now I say this as if somehow I'm going to sit here and tell you that then movies are entirely bad, that it's all horrible, and that's just not the case, because like with almost everything that's out there, there are positive sides to that same kind of dark side that exists. So just as art might persuade us to think irrationally, there might actually be some value to that. And one of the thinkers that I often reflect on in being, somebody who represents some of the positive things that come out of those emotional peals, is a philosopher who comes of course much, much, much later than the thinker like Plato, Richard Rorty. And Rorty talks about something known as sentimental education. He links it to the novel and it's becoming more broadly linked to any stories, in particular epic stories that have the ability to get us to think about individuals who are different than we are, to think about things like equality and like justice that may not be able to be represented in a purely rational or reasoned fashion. In other words, Rorty talks about the possibility of democracy being able to feel yourself in the struggles of others, to be able to see yourself represented in the struggles that other individuals are going through, because then and only then can we start making decisions not in our interest, but in a public interest, because we begin to see the human connection rather than just whatever my self-interested or rational ends happen to be for me, I can begin to see that extracted onto others. So Rorty actually makes very controversial claims about things like the novels, where he got in a lot of trouble at one point in time where he talked about how a book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, did more for civil rights than any direct action politic movement did. I think he's overstating the case, by the way. But I think he also has a point about the power of those novels to be able to enable us to see ourselves in other individuals, to be able to feel their struggles and to make those our own. And those same kinds of things happen when we start consuming films, when we start consuming television, when we feel a song for its politics, as much as it is that we think deliberately about evidence that might be presented to us. And so from that respect, popular culture does have the ability to make people think and to make people feel, to move individuals towards conclusions, and therefore is incredibly important for us to think about as scholars within American political society. Because democracy is really about a defined public sphere, about ways in which we interact with one another. And I had mentioned before that I feel as though this research agenda is the most important one that I can engage in, primarily because so much of politics, of political science, has been focused on a traditional conception of the public sphere, as being a space for individuals to have discussions about public concern, engage in political discussion, and activism with a goal of having outcomes of policy formation. I guess I would ask you, is that where politics stops? Is all politics about people coming together and having conversations within an open public forum in order to try to influence policy formation through activism? It's part of it. What are some other examples that you might raise about other types of political activity? Social media pops to mind immediately. Discussion, literary discussions can border on it. I think about the music in the 60s and the Vietnam protests. Are there other thoughts that haven't been covered there about where politics is taking place besides just in these direct action activities? Close doors where transactions are being made. Big donors and people with power. Excellent, excellent. We can envision the cloistered rooms where power deliberations and negotiations are happening outside of a public sphere. How about in the home? Politics happening there just as much as it is within these larger frameworks where values are imparted, where structures of power are certainly played out in a wide variety of different forms. You see the public sphere then is, is these things, are these things, is these things? I'll have to think about that. The public sphere certainly does have this traditional orientation. Habermas and others are not wrong about that. But I would argue that there's also an expanded understanding of the public sphere that deals as much with the policy oriented activity, the protest direct action politics as it does about the formation of political identity. You mentioned social media. And we know hopefully of the studies that have come out of how people become sort of very selective about the kinds of information that they'll get on their feeds that come through not typically as rational arguments but of means, of short videos, of songs, of cartoons that are all reinforcing or in some cases actually forming identity that people have that enabled them to think very specifically about the world around them. So my argument for popular culture and its importance is not to say that traditional direct action politics, the traditional conceptions of the public sphere, the traditional conceptions of democracy are wrong, but instead that we need to expand our understanding of that. We need to see popular culture as performing a political function. In this way, I would argue that popular culture can perform four very democratic, small d-democratic functions within our society that it can expose us to issues that might not otherwise be overlooked, and I should also add on to their or overlook issues, which is also equally powerful. It can legitimize viewpoints that were previously marginalized or it can reinforce values and structures and propositions that are held at the mainstream, that are held at the core of cultural belief. Popular culture can set agendas, introducing ideas to the public conversation, and it can also frame questions within a political context so that when we begin to think about questions, we're thinking about it not from some kind of objective or removed framework, but through a filter of how we've come to understand the world based on these images, ideas and values that are imparted through the kinds of things that we're consuming through popular culture. How do we address the issue of popular culture being a blend of entertainment and fact and almost becoming that, quote, unedited art that was discussed earlier where people accept popular culture as fact when it is a blend most of the time. It's a blend of opinion, it's a blend of fact, and then it's a blend of pure entertainment times. We don't always have the authors who at the end of the book say, by the way, these are the things that are fact and these are things that are a product of my imagination to make it more interesting. So how does that then impact the way opinions then are formed in regards to popular culture just not being accepted. It's a really great question, and my snarky answer is going to be you could have easily taken the words popular culture and just insert political discourse into what you just said, and it's a mix of fact, opinion, and entertainment. At the end, we don't have politicians who are coming out and saying, okay, here's what I know is fact, here's some of the stuff that I'm just kind of making up, and here are things that I'm just throwing out there as red meat to appeal to constituents. In a lot of ways, the reason why then the other sort of half of this is not to just say, hey, popular culture is really important. It's also then to start to decontextualize what's happening within popular culture so that we can understand the threads going through so that as then consumers of this entertainment media, entertainment culture, widespread, ubiquitous consumerism, we can become more critical thinkers, more critical consumers, so that we know what we're seeing when it's being imparted to us. So a recent example that I can think of that I'm struggling with, and Elise and I were talking about this, was just at a conference where a graduate student who is a native Hawaiian was presenting about the Disney film Moana, and went through here's what's happening in the story, and then she went through and said, now here all of the ways that Disney has taken these different Pacific Islander myth narratives lumped them together in a way that doesn't make any sense from a traditional cultural perspective, and more importantly is incredibly damaging to the culture and the way that it perceives itself. So in that way what she's doing is she's saying Disney has this power, and on the surface they're actually seeming like they're doing this sort of very inclusive, multi-ethnic, progressive kind of programming where they're going to take a Polynesian myth and represent it with heroes that don't look like traditional Disney princesses. Doing things that traditional Disney princesses didn't do, but also doing it in a way that really undermines some elements of Pacific Island culture, in particular the idea in spoiler alert, I do this a lot by the way, when Maui steals the heart that causes this whole thing to happen, but first of all that's not part of their myths, Maui is essentially a Pacific Islander Hercules, I mean that's the kind of myth that Maui is to represent, but moreover, and this I found really powerful when she presented on this, was that essentially then once Maui does that, that's what leads to a lot of the natural devastation then in the film, and it has to be restored, essentially saying that it wasn't through colonialization that the native populations within the Pacific Islands were decimated, but that they did that to themselves, it was their gods, it was their culture that was destroying it and that had to be reset somehow. And so in that way then there is this element to where these stories can introduce us to thinking about cultures differently, and it can also distort it in a way. So this project, and that's a very long story to say, that this project is really designed to get us to consume entertainment, that's going to happen, but to become really critical consumers of entertainment to ask what's really happening here, what are the implications of that. And to bring it around to why I think you all are here tonight, and I was going to do this like this the whole night, but I wanted to keep my voice once I switched over to Batman, so I'm not going to even try anymore. But this idea that popular culture is critical for us to understand is represented in the popularity of the image of the Dark Knight, the image of the Batman, which helped to actually propel a resurgence in consumerism centered around the superhero movie, the superhero epic films. So now we have almost every movie it seemed like that's being made is some new superhero spinoff, or some continuation of superhero stories. And so whether we're talking about really one of the resurgence of Batman with the Michael Keaton film that sort of initially rebooted Batman and initially sort of brought superhero stories back in to then Alan Moore's comic The Killing Joke, really helping to kind of reframe what the modern superhero is, Batman becomes a representation of what almost all of these superhero films are doing, whether we recognize it or not. In other words, Batman becomes quite literally a symbol, but in this way not necessarily of just these stories, but of a symbol that becomes a way that we can understand the superhero narrative and almost all action films as superhero films are a subgenre of the larger action hero framework. Because there are a number of elements that are present within a film like Batman that are ever present in our action hero genres, in our action hero films and movies. See Dark Knight is, as an action film, falls very strongly and very heavily into that action hero genre, where Carl Bergets, who had contributed to the Homer Simpson Ponder's politics looking at the action hero film, sets a theoretical framework for understanding the politics of the action hero movie that I think is best summarized in this quotation. The action hero movie values emotion over reason, intuition over empiricism, order over rights, uncompromising action over debate and due process, suspicion over tolerance. The genre does not redeem or validate anything fundamental about American judicial or political ideals or enlightenment values. Rather, it repudiates foundation of American liberal political theory. Think about that for a minute. What's more quintessentially American than John Wayne and John McClain? These action heroes who are essentially doing everything to violate the foundational principles on which American political culture is allegedly based. And Batman, as a representative of the genre, is perhaps one of the worst when it comes to violating rights, placing order over any consideration of rights, willing to torture, willing to engage in extraordinary rendition, willing to act over international lines at any point in time, never placing himself to actually considering due process of law, but instead just doing what needs to be done to restore order and to protect the people. And so Batman in a lot of ways reflects this ongoing conflict in our own political discourse because it really is setting that action hero narrative up against the liberal values that are America's political core. I should stop for a second and say, when political theorists refer to liberal values, who wants to take a stab at what that means? What is liberalism? The law is seeking the rights, respect for individual liberty. And that is represented in that top one. I should ask the questions before I advance the slides. Absolutely. I mean, at the core of liberalism is the emphasis on individual rights, on the individual's freedom, on an individual's liberty. And the notion that no individual, by their birthright, is better or more entitled than any other individual. That instead we have the right of law, we have due process of law that makes everyone equal under the law and that we are to have those rights that help us to engage individually in the pursuit of our own understanding of the good within a social framework. I have what I believe is good. Each of you have your understandings of what are good. Sometimes we might intersect and find that we share commonalities in our perceptions of the good and other times we're going to differ radically in how we understand the good life and what is good and what is valuable. Liberalism is a political theory that establishes a framework in which we can all have those different conceptions of the good and pursue them. Now that makes liberalism sound pretty sweet, in part because that's what a lot of our American political traditions are rooted in. Either this Lockean, then Jeffersonian, Madisonian understanding of individual rights as being incredibly important enshrined in public documents. But as much as America has a liberal foundation, America also has very strongly defined conservative traditions. What do I mean by conservatism and don't just, I should cover that up. What does conservatism mean as a political theory? It's exactly what you're talking about. Respect for tradition. We go all the way back to the 18th century, the importance of monarchy in place and social order over the upsurge of disruptive liberal civil rights. Why emphasize tradition? What is it about traditionalism that is important for a conservative thinker? Is it just keeping things the way they are for keeping them the way they are? I believe that traditionalism is a good thing that gives moral order and public order. And I guess because it works. Conservatives argue that the reason why traditions exist and the reason why traditions survive and thrive is because of practical experience. That these things worked and so there's a preservation of that tradition because they see society as being this repository of cumulative wisdom. In other words, that we have gone through a lot over time. We've gone through numerous changes, evolutions, revolutions, and that we begin to learn as human beings very practical ways of being able to solve political and social problems. And they say that those are largely solved not through sort of forcing through top-down change, but instead in preserving those traditional institutions that we value primarily because they work to the ends that we desire those institutions to work. So in that way it's not just we're resisting things because we're stodgy or because we're somehow rooted in or stuck in our own ways. Conservatives feel it's critical that we preserve those institutions for the sheer fact that they do work, that they help us from making the big mistake. And then they'll point to revolutions around the world and say see what happens in Russia when there's a revolution and what results from that. See what happens in China when there's a revolution and what results from that. See what happens in Cuba when there's a revolution and what results from that. They talk about what happens in their minds as being detrimental when those traditional institutions and cultural repositories of wisdom are not preserved. And within the United States, when you just think about the political founding, it's clear to see the tensions in liberalism and conservatism. The tensions between individual rights and the sense that localism and religion and traditional cultural groups and communities should ultimately make decisions. So American political values are caught up in this tension between liberalism and conservatism. It's America in conflict, and that's where the appeal of the superhero genre and the appeal of the Dark Knight becomes, I think, very interesting to consider. Because the Dark Knight is certainly very, very different than the Adam West sort of campy throwback. I hear that Dan Anhalt dances a really good bat-to-sea, by the way. So after it's all done, get him to give you the little cape and cowl moves. I understand that the only ones have watched the Adam West movies when they came out was not in the movies. I feel so badly because I think I was the only person in the Lego Batman movie who actually knew that Egghead was, indeed, an actual villain in the ancient Batman movies from the old texts. It scares me more than if you had the Lego version on your own. I have children. I have children, and I wanted to tell them all about it when I got home. That's a joke. They came with me. But played by Vincent Price, by the way, if you're wondering about Egghead. So Christopher Nolan gives us a version of Batman that is very political and is centered around this tension of liberalism and conservatism in America. How many of you are familiar with the Dark Knight trilogy? Okay, so several of you are. How do we get Batman? How did we get Batman? How did Batman start, right? Isn't that the first one, Batman Begins? How did Batman begin? I hear actually that Dr. Cullen won't give extra credit unless people respond to these questions. What does the bat has this symbol of fear? Well, what happened to him that he needed a symbol of fear? He fell down a well from that. He fell down a well and all these bats came. And it was terrifying to him, which is why ultimately he chooses that symbol of fear. But what else happens? For a while when he grows up, he's still Bruce Wayne. And in fact, Bruce Wayne is going to go seek revenge on the individual that killed his parents, right? He goes to the courtroom where he's going to actually gun down this criminal who shot his parents. But unfortunately, the crime boss, Carmen Falcone, beats him to it because Joe Chill, of course, is going to rat out the entire mafioso organization that's running Gotham. And so Bruce Wayne feels deprived of this revenge that he was going to seek. And so he goes and he goes into the mob boss's restaurant in this really seedy part of Gotham and he's going to stand up to the mafia and the mob boss makes fun of it. Look at Prince of Gotham walking in here thinking he knows anything about what criminals are and what this element is or that this action is going to mean anything. And in fact, it's really Falcone in throwing him out that inspires Bruce Wayne then to go and actually learn what it means to be a criminal because what he begins to see in that moment is that he is completely powerless. This billionaire who has seemingly everything is powerless to be able to restore order within the state because he needs to become something larger. The state is ineffective. The police are corrupt in Gotham. The institutions are impotent or also corrupt. They're run by crime. People live in fear. Bruce Wayne needs to become something more. And so he goes and he travels around with a bunch of criminal groups. He never becomes a real criminal himself because he'll only ever steal from Wayne Industries. So he's just stealing from himself but he's learning about this criminal element. And it's actually, I believe it was in a Turkish prison that he was approached by a man representing Raza Ghul in the League of Shadows where they're going to teach Bruce Wayne how to become something more. It's where then Bruce Wayne ultimately sort of sheds part of his identity to embrace the bad hand and become a symbol of something larger because he's going to impose order back on this community that had been overrun where the state had failed time and again to protect the people of Gotham and to preserve actual order. So this is very different than the Adam West Batman who used to just hang out until Commissioner Gordon would give him a call and say, hey, let's work together on something. This is a person now who's going to be working completely outside of the state and in a lot of ways, countermanding what the state is even trying to preserve. When you think of the original Batman, I always think of the 1960s. The social unrest that existed and the difference in the hero then at that point in a time of what was viewed as social unrest. And it predates most of the real serious social unrest. I have not the Civil Rights Era. No, not the Civil Rights Era. But that kind of calmed down a little bit because you had the Voting Rights Act in the past before this came out. Well, the real Batman was in 1965. So it's only in here after the Civil Rights Act. So that's why I think of it as that it heals like it tries to capture a little bit at least what that era was like in the 1960s and where our social consciousness was at that point versus right now. Well, and interestingly enough, I think when you look at the themes that come out of the 1960s Batman and actually a lot of the comics of that era and what was known as sort of the Golden Age of comics and then what was inspired from that, those are comics that are attempting to actually sort of re-embrace the American idea, right? It was a reinforcing of the state. And when we think about the social movements even at the time, the social movements, although there were some pushing for really exclusionary, more nationalistic movements within the broader framework, a lot of the mainstream sort of Civil Rights efforts were an attempt to make America expand its citizenship, expand its rights, expand the promise, not work outside of that promise because it had ultimately become a failure. I would argue that over time what begins to happen is just as we enter into sort of the second and third waves of Civil Rights and as we enter into really a postmodern political age where our discourse becomes really fractionalized and becomes reinforced in these small sort of echo chambers that seem to all hold that theirs is the only real sort of value and way of looking at the world, that's where we start to get some of these darker images. And so I think that what we see in those films is understandable in thinking about the differences between what the movements were trying to do at one time versus where we are now as a society. So I want to be conscious of time here and get to some of the ways in which the Christopher Nolan's Batman attempts to engage in a political program. I want to make it very clear that while Batman presents, the Dark Knight presents, a theoretical framework for understanding politics, it does not do it from an individually consistent way. And that's the interesting thing about somebody like Nolan is he grabs a little bit of this kind of conservatism, a little bit of that kind of conservatism and sort of remakes a character where we can see a number of these political thinkers and political traditions under the conservative umbrella operating all at the same time. So I start actually with David Hume because I think that it's actually a humane element, a humane strain of politics that we see really underwriting a number of the social conservative movements and social conservative thinking within the United States. David Hume really strongly inspired James Madison's understanding of how social order needed to be based on a humane understanding of what the individual was like. And David Hume talked about the notion of how politics itself should be based on practices that are embedded in common life in our traditions rather than in more abstract concepts like rights or the consent of the governed, right, democracy. And the reason for that is because Hume actually sees those abstractions as working against the principles of political authority, working against social order. That when we have individual rights, that means that there are times that we become more important than a social good. Now think about that for a minute and think about exactly what due process is designed to do. We may have lots of reasons to believe that somebody is very, very guilty of an incredibly heinous crime. But due process means that we have to go through a very strict process in order to be able to try to prove that individual guilty or to even gather evidence to see if we might have made a mistake in our understandings, right? In other words, it places the individual at a position of primacy and that the state is actually trying to work to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this individual is guilty. And for Hume, that can sometimes get in the way of actual social good, of social order. And that rather than thinking of abstract concepts of rights such as freedom of speech, we ought to be thinking about what type of speech we ought to engage in. What are our responsibilities in engaging in communication, right? In that way, he actually looks at saying that sometimes there is a social good that should trump individual rights in that abstract sort of notion. And Hume also feels that legitimacy of political authority rests on the habit of obedience. In other words, that we begin to see things as legitimate in terms of authority because we're habituated to understand systems of order, political structure. And so what's interesting then is that means that authority or the power to control would exist a priori of any kind of willful act that we would have, thus undermining this idea that we entered into a social contract, right? That we came together and that we formed a state based on principles of rights. Hume would say actually authority existed before that was even enabled to happen. There had to be structures of authority and that ultimately we get habituated towards those which undermines this idea of rights as being the core of any kind of political order. And for individuals like Hume, anarchy is a concept that ought to be avoided above all of their things, right? Anarchy meaning the complete dissolution, destruction of the state, the elimination of a social order. And I'll have to qualify it, I guess, by saying Hobbesian natural state of nature kind of anarchy because otherwise Dan's gonna tell me it has too many rules and then it's a completely different discussion. But anarchy is to be avoided because there's virtually, it's virtually a no one self-interest, right? That absent the state, right? We can't form meaningful political bonds. Conservatives like Hume, again, tend to buy into that notion of Hobbesian state of nature where we might cooperate for a period of time but only insofar as it's in our interest and when it stops being in our interest then we end up degenerating into warfare, right? So ultimately it leads to a life that Hobbes describes as nasty, brutish, and short. And that's the kind of anarchy that conservatives like Hume see. And so it's the need to prevent society from falling into disorder that conservatives would ultimately argue that we need to establish authority and to have that operate even if it's against sometimes those very principles that we say we wanna preserve, right? In the film, and I know you can't see the image very well because of the light but the district attorney Harvey Dent who was supposed to be the white knight of Gotham representing all that was good and right about the state. All that was good and right about these institutions. Once his face is horribly burned and his girlfriend is killed, he goes mad. And he loses all belief and understanding in the state as being able to preserve this that you can't somehow solve these problems, these great existential threats by being a decent person or abiding by values or justice or the law. His quotation, you thought we could be decent men in an indecent time. And this is where conservatives actually would argue that you're right. Sometimes there are such threats that it would cause us to actually step outside of those values that we would hold dear because that's the only way that we can preserve and protect order. That's the only way that we can restore order to a society and prevent that existential threat. And that's where Batman then steps in. The state has utterly failed. The institutions are either, as I mentioned before, corrupt or impotent. And Batman, Bruce Wayne as the Dark Knight, steps outside of any of the constraints of the state, even working against those values and some of the challenges they're presented by those individuals that are closest to him. Lucius Fox or Rachel Dawes or even Alfred. Those individuals who would warn him, you can't take on this kind of power because ultimately that is a violation of these principles that you're supposedly there to protect. But he goes against all of those things in order to try to restore order. To try to restore justice where the state has ultimately failed. And those pursuits set him directly at odds with the political institutions that make up Gotham and at his core against the kinds of liberal protections that ultimately define the American political state. Batman as a vigilante figure becomes a representation of anti-statism. The state has failed us. Our institutions are unable to deal with the threats that are all around us. These institutions can no longer help us. His vigilantism is actually an anti-statist argument that as the hero Batman actually takes on and dawns the role of being the metaphorical sovereign. In other words, the state can't provide order. The sovereign is the one who can do that. And the sovereign is ultimately justified in engaging in any action that is necessary to restore order because that's the only way that these principles can even exist in normal times. Now, what's interesting too is when you start to think about the villains that are in Gotham, they are not of Gotham. In fact, as in many, many, many, and I'm not willing to say all because I've not seen every single action hero movie, it's often some time of external existential threat. It's not one of the community, right? It's a threat being imposed on the community. So it's not like Batman's turning against the people of Gotham. There's this existential external threat that he's going to rise up and protect the people of Gotham. The hero, however, right, Bruce Wayne, the son crown prince of Gotham, right? His Gotham said he is of the community. He is part of the community. He is both the elite and his family engaged in numerous charitable actions is of the people, right? He is a child of Gotham. It's the community sort of insulating against external threats. And we can talk a little bit about that, how that feeds into and all of these narrative perceptions of external individuals, people around the world, the quote unquote other, right? And the formation of the other as being individuals who are different from us, who are outside of our community that become a threat in terms of the perception of those who would see that as being villainous. Batman is somebody who's going to see that around him these ineffective liberal democratic actors, right? These state institutions that are ineffective. They're actually just enabling the enemy, right? Because they're enabling the enemy, because they're giving the enemy all these protections of laws and due process. They're not willing to do what's necessary to take the enemy down. So that just enables the enemy to act. And so the hero, right, Batman, declares a state of exception, right? We value, we hold these truths as being important, but not right now because the threat's too great. Declares the state of exception because as the film seems to suggest, the only way to preserve the law is to break it, is to go outside of the law. That's the only way to restore order. And so ultimately then Batman begins to reflect this kind of neo-conservative distrust of liberalism and the principles upon which the liberal state is founded on. So why do I say neo-conservatism? Well that's because ultimately if we are to think of Hume as being somebody and that Hume and Burke, individuals who represent a sort of classical or traditional kind of conservatism, there was sort of a new brand of conservatism, neo or new conservatism, that began to arise in political thinking, that began to take elements that are actually very authoritarian, very reactionary in nature, and wed those two of the principles of conservatism to create this kind of new political thinking. One of those individuals who was very influential in doing that was Carl Schmidt, who argued that the sovereign, or the ultimate political authority, is not what's defined by law necessarily, but instead whoever has the ability to declare the state of exception in a time of perceived crisis. In a time of crisis, the sovereign is freed from the usual constraints of law, from the limits that are imposed on, that it's no longer crippled by procedural limitations, that it must do whatever is necessary in order to be able to establish an equilibrium within the state, in order again to restore order. And Carl Schmidt inspires thinkers like Daniel Bell and Irving Crystal, who were very actually influential in defining a lot of modern conservative political agenda and had an incredible amount of influence on the formation of the Republican Party platform. In particular, during the second Bush administration, there were a number of individuals within the administration who used to cite these two thinkers in particular as sort of a justification for a number of the efforts that were engaged in the war on terrorism. That ultimately, these neo-conservative thinkers argued that liberalism's evolution has gone from one of freedom, of individual rights, liberty and freedom, to one of state control. The modern phrase that I've heard, and some of you may, does anybody know who Steve Bannon is? Has anybody heard that name recently? He's a top-level advisor within Donald Trump's administration. He uses a different phrase than state control. Has anybody heard the phrase, the administrative state? That's one that has become very popularized and it's introduced, it's worked its way into a lot of recent press conferences. And it's this notion that somehow it's no longer really even freedom because the state has become so administratively heavy that it's begun to regulate freedom out of social action. So that, again, is that sort of thread of neo-conservative political thinking within modern politics. And it's this notion that somehow, once the state becomes so administratively burdened, it becomes ineffective to actually deal with problems. That you need something that's outside of the administrative state in order to be able to actually deal with real problems. Now, like traditional conservatives, neo-cons embrace this notion of traditionalism. They actually embrace the notion, preservation of values and of traditional institutions, but unlike traditional conservatives, who were incredibly skeptical of any kind of top-down authority, to preserved localism, right, to preserved cultural institutions as a means of responding to social problems, neo-conservatives embrace top-down state-mandated policy to effect change. In other words, centralization is now a tool of power rather than a tool of vice. That this becomes a way that if we can somehow have centralized power that is unaccountable to the people, then that can actually be used to impose sort of positive responses when crisis arise. And neo-conservatives began to look out and criticize then what's happening with liberalism as it forms into the administrative state, saying that liberalism can ultimately devolve into two primary ways, or two primary ends. First, it either becomes a valueless nihilism where we become so focused on equality and inclusion and multiculturalism that nothing has value anymore because there are no values that are enabled to be placed in a position of primacy over any others, or it becomes what is referred to as brutal statism, that the state becomes such an incredibly decentralized authority that it begins to crack down on any true freedom. So that was coming from the thinker Leo Strauss who also falls into that sort of neo-conservative tradition. And I say that because we see that criticism emerge within the villains of Batman. First and foremost, we have liberalism as valueless nihilism, the Joker, the individual who makes claims such as, the world is only, or the only sensible way to live in this world is without rules. Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it. You know, I just do things, right? There's no value there. There's no there there, right? He's a person that Alfred described as one of those individuals who just wants to see the world burn. And one of his lines, introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I'm an agent of chaos. The Joker is there to destroy institutions, to tear it all down because none of it has meaning anymore. He's the representation of the ends of liberalism from the Straussian point of view. This valueless kind of nihilism in which nothing makes sense. And those other villains within Gotham represent the other end of the perspective that Strauss since reduces. The notion of liberalism as brutal statism. Now, I kid you not, this slide, and you can go back and look, I had this slide in the presentation before the election. This quotation from this movie was actually sort of paraphrased in a number of people, and of course the administration denies it. But the Trump administration, in his inaugural address to the United States, used part of Bain's speech. This notion of right here, the powerful be ripped from their decadent nests. Oh, no, it was this one right here. We take Gotham from the corrupt, the rich, the oppressors of generations who have kept you down with midst of opportunity, and we give it back to you, the people. And Trump said almost those exact words to the point where if you're ever fans of the online comedy, Funny or Die, you can go on and Chris Catan does this wonderful Bain character, and he goes on and he's criticized like, come on, Trump, man, like you had to take that from me too. It was really, it's very, very funny. And again, I think that I don't want to dwell too much on, you know, trying to make the connections between you see how this impacts this, but what I think is really critical is to again think about how ultimately we start to think about some of these principles, some of these ideas, and how those get represented. But Bain, who works as an agent, essentially of Raza Ghul and later his daughter Talia Ghul, they're set out on ultimately raising Gotham, right? They're going to destroy it, but they're going to do it actually in a way that engages in sort of a revolutionary overthrow of the state to impose a very brutal form of statism until inevitably they'll destroy everything, right? Through a giant bomb underneath the city. And I just, I want to finish the rest of that quotation because I think again it captures this idea of liberalism as brutal statism. Gotham is yours, none shall interfere. Please you please start by storming Blackgate, the prison, and freeing the oppressed. Step forward, those who would serve for an army, it should be an army, not an army will be raised. The power will be ripped from their decadent nests and cast out of the cold world that we know and endure. Courts will be convened, spoils will be enjoyed, blood will be shed, the police will survive as they learn to serve true justice. This great city it will endure, Gotham will survive, right? And all of those then, both of those versions of liberalism as an end from that neo-conservative perspective then get represented in these films where Batman as a symbol of the state is as much defined as that which he is battling against as he is an independent character. In other words Batman becomes a response to these threads of perceived threat which are coming from again that neo-conservative perspective are coming from the ends of liberalism. So Bruce Wayne at great personal sacrifice grows a beard, becomes hobbled, I think we're a lot alike in a lot of ways. A great personal sacrifice attempts to preserve this belief and decency of the political elites. What's interesting about the Dark Knight is that at the end of the Dark Knight rises the second film or I'm sorry the Dark Knight no the Dark Knight, period is that he ultimately tries to preserve the image of D.A. Harvey Dent. Not as Too Faced, the villain but as the White Knight, as the savior of Gotham because ultimately that's the way that then he can restore order. But of course a really critical question is what if Bruce Wayne decides not what happens when Bruce Wayne decides that there is no end to the state of exception. What happens when the Batman decides that everything becomes a threat. It's all an existential threat. What happens then? And the films sort of deal with this not in a very historically accurate way but certainly in a way that is intended to sort of laugh off this idea that somehow Batman wouldn't cede power back. D.A. Harvey Dent said when the enemies were at their gates the Romans would suspend democracy and appoint one man to protect the city. And Daz's response, Rachel Daz's response which has never really dealt with is the last man who they appointed to protect the Republic was named Caesar who never gave up his power. And Dent responds then and this is the dismissive part okay you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. And that ultimately is what Batman takes on. He becomes the villain for the people of Gotham for some time so he can preserve order and then step away and then they can have their city back. That's the people of Gotham really turning to a figure that we don't fully understand. When we look to those individuals who are willing to step outside of the traditional order we have to ask them logically where are those lines drawn how do we ensure that we remain somehow protected or that order would ever be restored. These films would celebrate the hero as this anti-state actor who will preserve us from these existential threats really start to impart a conditioning where in the United States as consumers of this kind of entertainment we become much more susceptible to arguments that make those kinds of claims about suspending rights. Where we become more willing to question whether or not individual rights, freedoms and due process are really all that important and if you haven't done anything wrong what do you have to fear kind of thing? And those are very dangerous to any kind of society that ultimately roots itself in principles of rule of law of rights of principles of justice and this form of political equality. I feel that I tried to wrap that up a little bit quickly because I know I've only got about five minutes left and I wanted to make sure that I had enough time to engage in conversation so I'm going to stop with the presentation portion and move to any kinds of questions, comments, feedback that you all have. It's fascinating to me that the neoconservative critique of liberalism echoes very, very closely the Nazi critique of the Weimar system. Wow. So we say it's new but that's 80 years ago now, 90 years ago in the 1920s. Sure. Here's where I agree because they're both rooted in the same kind of reactionary political attitude that there's a notion that somehow there's something great to restore some kind of recovery story and that we're reacting against liberalism or freedoms or the state run amok and that we need to restore us back to a principle in time. Now that being said and of course Strauss is somebody who echoes a lot of fascist political thinkers not just from the Nazi traditions but from other fascist traditions as well and yet it's also something that I wouldn't fully equate the kind of neoconservative perspective with what the intended outcomes of the fascist state are. So they've got very kind of similar critiques of liberalism but then take that to I think very different ends as to instead of trying to move towards sort of an ongoing state where everybody has their place in the social order and beginning to view the state more like an organic body than as some kind of institutional product of human action juxtaposed that with individuals who would use state power to try to dismantle administration and ultimately if the ends are to be fulfilled preserve or to return to some kind of more localized control but that being said I think you're right they're born of the same river in terms of reactionary kinds of principles but I can also say so are Ein Rand and Karl Marx they're both born of the same river as well because they both sort of have the same principle of what it means to produce something to make something of value then they just split it into very different ends as to then well what does that then mean by way of rights as well Yeah I would differ in the one area with the in that they both talk about this idea of the sovereign they might have used that phrase but it fits very much what he saw himself as Yeah absolutely and again I think that there are a lot of really strong parallels and I think that there are at least from a political theory perspective there are different ends of the movement Yeah please One thing that I just kind of found interesting in my other connection was before when we talked about how the people become more important than a new process or rights I can kind of see that happening after like 9-11 we had a huge up front of national security like all that happened where there was more security more monitoring and different things and working with safety and now we've had a lot of orders but like I'm trying to balance on similar ways Yeah and again I think that that's sort of what I think what makes that end more palatable as we begin to think about why is it that people are so quick to want to sacrifice aspects of freedom and protection in order to be able to have that restoration of order in part we understand it through the sort of political history and the traditions that come to form sort of the core of belief in the United States I think another part of it is how these issues get framed time and time and time again so that we begin to see the representation of when the state is ineffective it can lead to all these horrible ends, remember after September 11 I remember people walking around saying this is terrorism now this is the new normal from that attack so people were seeing that as this existential threat that would be perpetual unless the state did something immediately to react and we were willing to accept almost anything the state was willing to do as long as it made us feel safe and so there were a number then of very rapid political changes that really set up questions of security and individual rights and due process and I think at least in part one of the reasons we can understand that is because again how these issues of existential threats are constantly framed through that consumer entertainment how we've been socialized through our stories to begin to perceive the world around us so any reason to have you seen the vein where the pop culture genres that depict the U.S. or whatever the society is is always in the state of war because the idea is power take away rights like Alex was saying because it's a crisis or it's a war you know if we think about our U.S. recent history from cold war to war on terror even the 90s Paris concerns the war on drugs so do you see that in your research that it's like all this time war so we always need to extend within the action hero genre and the sub-genres that go with that even when I think I was really hoping that for example Captain America Civil War was going to set up a complex argument of trying to balance what do we do with these super humans that are not answerable to any state but instead that argument which it was building up to it's just sort of like but then a crisis really emerges again and now we're all on board we can deal with that again and let them try to come get me and I'll stand up and take the law on my own hands again and so I think that within those action hero genres it's always a state of crisis it may not be full blown war but there's always some kind of breakdown of the state there's an inability of the state to really engage in these sort of extra status measures and that either is from some kind of individual acting outside of the state or the elimination of the barriers within the state that enable heroic figures like a president for example to stand up there's a reason why we never see congress as the hero in an action film one it wouldn't be interesting and two because institutions aren't heroic people are symbols are ideas are and so what then you do is you always create these sort of barriers and in fact one of the things that I'm hoping to work on next is looking at the way that in any kind of political movie congress is always set up as the enemy and as something that creates problems for the heroic president and not just as a we've got differences of opinions that we need to work through committee and compromise but instead there's a real enemy creation anybody who opposes the presidency somehow is demonized, vilified and we usually find out that they're corrupt and doing it for wrong kinds of ends so in any time the presidency is sort of elevated to that heroic status bureaucratic agencies and congress are always seen as an obstacle to be eliminated never something to be worked through and I want to work through that a little bit more so one it depends on the genre and and two if we're talking about these kinds of films absolutely there is always that state of crisis and there's always the replacing of the sovereign somehow by this other force any? Like I might be going out on a limb here but when you're saying like congress a lot of different people I can kind of connect that to the justice league perfect or it's not just one hero it's multiple heroes coming together and working together to solve a problem I don't know what problem is of a face and a movie so I just kind of think that maybe we might see some representation of that but maybe in the program Well and again I think that you're going to see a different version of what we already see in the Avengers just with darker lighting and because it's a DC movie but you know within that sort of the I almost said super friends that dates me within the justice league narrative Batman once again does a little something interesting and you see this actually introduced even before some of the you know in some of these other films I think it was at the end of Suicide Squad which I think I'm one of six people who didn't think that was a terrible movie and Batman gets files on everybody and in some of the justice league sort of narratives Batman has actually assembled together all of the weapons that will take down every single one of the other superheroes because even within that framework Batman sees that there is a necessary moment in time where he may have to step in and reimpose order because he sees himself as being sort of again that sovereign that has to sometimes declare a state of emergency even amongst the exceptional he makes like a little kryptonite bullet right well that's right he just has really interesting gadgets I started actually really worried about myself when I realized for a long time my two favorite superheroes were Batman and Iron Man and then I was just like I just have like a thing with like billionaires with gadgets right it's some probably Peter Pan fantasy that I've got I grew up so any final questions I know I've really imposed on your time tonight so I'm sorry but the people that say that they would rather have the overall people's rights rather than individual rights what happens when somebody has said that they're guilty and they're not I mean if it's all about the citizens right it doesn't you don't have any individual rights or purpose I mean doesn't that kind of just make us all I mean I don't have to go but to an extent that we're all just kind of doing what we have to do rather than being part of a bigger picture that's interesting I think what the again coming from a political theory perspective what I think a conservative would argue is you know there's nothing wrong inherently with the idea of rights per se most of the time rights are just fine right it enables us a framework in which we can act in some kind of social area but we shouldn't let that abstract notion of rights get in the way of us doing what needs to be done in times of crisis right and so the conservative political thinker would say that rights only have value in so far as they're practical for achieving some kind of collective communal good right and in their mind that community good is what should be strived for and that rights as a concept are devoid of any real value except as tools that help us to achieve the common good but in times where in rights can step in the way of the common good if for example I were to start using I you know incredibly this is probably not the best example but really just vile rhetoric all the time where it was really tearing away at sort of a social order and then I just say freedom of speech right the true political conservative right from a political theory perspective would say we ought not let that individual claim to some kind of license or liberty reign supreme all the time that sometimes we need to censor activities for the social good and so that's where you'll see conservative arguments for example that align in a lot of ways with the number of feminist arguments against pornography the notions that somehow individual's ability to just kind of do whatever they want and say it's a form of expression and the market accepts it they see that as individualism run amok and something that ought to be censored and pushed out of society because it's devoid of social benefit and it actually leads to social harm and so in that way then a conservative would say most of the time right at least a conservative within the United States or even most of the time freedom of speech freedom of expression is what helps democracy work but that's not universal and it ought not be treated as a universal that trumps the social good where's the conservative then take or the line on the crisis that does never end so you mentioned you alluded to a little bit kind of with the Harvey Dent comment and I think of course I'm a German history specialist I think of the Reichstag fire we have this crisis we've got to get old communists we've got to get all these people arrested but that crisis never ends it just sort of continues and this is where I also have and what I hope comes out of this is the sense that whenever I say liberal I say we whenever I say conservative I say we whenever I say fascist I tend to say we and so I will admit though now to a personal aspect of my politics I'm Orwellian in the sense that Orwell has that really beautiful line in 1984 that no revolutionary movement ever captured control just to then later see it back to the people that the real danger here is that threat of once someone takes over then the crisis in order to continue to justify the legitimacy of power is to continue to manufacture crisis after crisis after crisis so as to never leave that state of exception and that becomes the danger that ultimately Harvey Dent says well then you're either the hero because you've done something and then you step away or you live long enough to become the villain where you then become that thing that you were battling against now what makes Batman of course a hero as opposed to many movements throughout history is that ultimately once that existential crisis has been completely eliminated Raza Ghul is gone, Talia Ghul is gone Bane is gone, all of these existential threats are gone then Batman fakes his own death and moves to Paris with Catwoman because that was he fulfilled his responsibility orders restored, people believe in the state he's not there to tear down institutions, what becomes dangerous is when we can't trust individuals to act like stories do, when we can't trust them to become the heroes and that becomes I think the danger and I'm happy to stay and chat with people individually, I also want to let folks drive home I do want to leave you with one last anecdote one of my favorite moments in all of the primaries in this last presidential election was when now President Trump flew his helicopter into Iowa for one of the early sort of primary events and this little kid walked up to him and saw a billionaire just hop off his plane to come around and have people gather around him and he just said are you Batman so I'll leave it up to you to whether or not he actually was Batman