The Age Of The Anti-Hero

Rules And Norms Are For Suckers and Losers; Just Win

In the Summer of 2012, I went with a friend to see The Dark Knight Rises. As we walked out of the theater, I was stopped in my tracks by something my friend said to me.

“I hate to say it, but I’m with Bane,” he told me.

“But Bane’s the villain?” I thought.

When I pressed him further as to why he felt that way, he had trouble explaining it, but his argument landed on “he is for the people.” I pointed out that he must’ve missed the part about it being a ruse, and he shrugged. “I mean, maybe Gotham needed to be destroyed.”

I’ve often thought about Tom Hardy’s Bane and that reaction, including Sunday night after President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter for his tax evasion and gun crimes.

I was planning to avoid writing anything about the pardon because I think most people will completely forget this by Christmas. However, the reaction to the pardon got me thinking about Bane and some of the persistent societal and political vibes these past few years.

The initial reaction to the pardon from many of the loudest people online, liberal, progressive, and right-wing, has been almost unanimous disgust and disappointment. Notably, some Trump people seemed relatively pleased, believing it would expose the Democratic Party as the craven hypocrites they always argued they were and make it easy for Trump to get away with some of his cravenness – as if he needed any help with that.

I think the reaction comes from multiple different places. For many pundits, the Nate Silver types, Biden is so hated that they are angry they won’t get the emotional satisfaction of watching the old man see his last surviving son go to prison. For others, there is still some delulu belief that we can still salvage the norms, rules, and the rule of law, and Democrats are abandoning their role in preserving them. As one person said, “This only opens the door for Trump to commit even worse infractions.”

Except the door is no longer on the hinges and has been chopped up to fuel the fires of the coming MAGA inquisition.

Donald Trump was impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors. He was indicted 91 times in four jurisdictions for a multitude of crimes, including retaining classified documents, which he stored in the bathroom of his Florida resort, where he canoodled with Chinese spies. He also faced charges for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election he lost. He was convicted of 34 felonies related to inflating the values of his properties to get preferential loans from banks. He got away with all of it.

America decided cheap eggs, mass deportation, and keeping trans girls out of sports are more important than the rule of law. That’s fine. They’re free to make that determination. Like the mythical Cassandra, I warned Democrats and progressives as early as 2021 that Americans had a very low threshold for what they were willing to endure before they would overlook discretions, both minor and significant, in whom they put in power. No one believed me, confident that Trump’s blatant disregard for rules and laws and his central role in the January 6th riot ended his political life.

I was repeatedly told that most Americans would be angry that he got away with it and would see it as a blatant miscarriage of justice. It would show that in our society, the rich and powerful are above the law while the common man is not, and it would turn the country against him and his oligarch allies. It all seemed wishful thinking to me. He seemed to be personifying the type of morally questionable, totally unaccountable antihero who has dominated the zeitgeist in the 21st Century.

Take a look at popular culture in the last decade or two. We are in the Age of the Anti-Hero, where the person who breaks the rules and challenges the norms and society’s expectations is rewarded with attention, money, and power, not scorn and punishment. It started with Reality TV. You can go back two decades to Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian becoming household names because of sex tapes. The medium was so lucrative that a few D-list celebrities like Tom Sizemore and Dustin Diamond (Screech from Saved By The Bell) made sex tapes of their own as publicity stunts. The antics of rich housewives became so popular that Bravo! did multiple spinoffs of the Real Housewives series. Flipping tables and pulling wigs made a person a bigger success than working at an assembly line at a factory. We watched people eat rats on Survivor and swim in crocodile-infested waters on Amazing Race, all for a chance at some money. On The Apprentice, we watched people shamelessly grovel to a billionaire. Where’s that billionaire now? We gave away husbands on a game show and made women, and later men, engage in the most disgraceful acts in hopes of getting a fiance.

After Barack Obama’s election in 2008, conspiracy theories became a lucrative business. Alex Jones made tens of millions of dollars after he called the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre “crisis actors.” That billionaire people groveled to a game show found a new life as a celebrity by spreading racist conspiracies about the sitting president.

This was all around the same time I went to see The Dark Knight Rises. Over the next decade, the concept of the anti-hero, or someone who engages in morally questionable actions or pursuits, often for what appears to be subjectively moral reasons. This type of character dominated the popular zeitgeist: Deadpool or Kilmonger; Boardwalk Empire’s Nucky or Breaking Bad’s Walter White; Dexter Morgan or Annalise Keating. All these people had one thing in common: they could easily be seen as heroes or villains, depending on how you approached their situations. As a society, we became more and more desensitized to the idea that what is moral is not strictly black and white, and we became more hostile to anyone who tried to draw a line. Social media made the wound fester even worse. How many likes we get on Instagram and TikTok is now a barometer for success, and there is no moral line one can cross in how to get those likes. You can get tens of thousands of likes and monetize it by using racial slurs and demonizing women, Jews, gays, Muslims, or anyone, frankly. Society’s moral code is now a garbled mess.

If Trump were to pardon Eric or Donald Jr., he would likely get a lot of flak for it. He would also run ads and give speeches, saying, “I will fight for you like I fought for my sons.” It would be effective. Liberals, Democrats, and the media would express shock and disgust that he would politicize such a thing, but you would hear voters say, “I don’t agree with it, but he’s a fighter, and I respect that.”

Have we considered that Trump being a lawless, unapologetic rule breaker is not a problem for him but an asset? Just as it is for the many others who have made careers out of being professional contrarians, anti-social assholes, and unapologetic bad boys? I have. As I said ten months ago, Trump is everything every American truly wants to be: Rich, Powerful, Worshipped, Unafraid, Unbowed, and Unaccountable.

Have we also considered that the Democrats’ ongoing righteous obsession with “rules,” “processes,” and “norms” makes them look not only weak but untrustworthy, feckless, and fair-weathered? Who do you want on your side when you’re in trouble and believe you are being mistreated? Someone who tells you, “Sorry, but the rules say I can’t help you,” or someone who says, “fuck the rules, this is bullshit?” What people love about Donald Trump is that he is unaccountable, and they hope he can create a world where they also can be. Democrats appear to create a world where the opposite is true, where every indiscretion is treated like a mortal sin, where society’s stringent “rules” and “norms” that are no longer relevant to the public are enforced at any cost. In a time when everyone feels aggrieved, how can you trust someone like this to stand by you? You’re going to side with those willing to break the rules for you, not the ones who value rules more than outcomes.

It’s still early to fully understand, but the 2024 Election may become a political watershed moment. Before the election, Democrats felt assured that their rules-based, norms-defending persona would ultimately win the day, even if it took a hard fight. They branded themselves as the rules-followers, even to a fault. When the Senate Parliamentarians said they couldn’t pass a minimum wage hike through reconciliation, they agreed, choosing not to implement the policy rather than fight over the process. Biden had to be dragged kicking and screaming to forgive student loans and then dropped blanket forgiveness when the Supreme Court stopped it. Attorney General Merrick Garland proceeded with the utmost caution in prosecuting Trump, choosing to avoid any politicization allegations. The result was an investigation that took long enough for Trump to get himself elected president and wipe all of it away. In the end, half the country thought they were just as immoral and corrupt as the Republicans – just without the results to effectively argue their corruption and immorality were a means to a righteous end.

If we are indeed living in the Anti-Hero Era, Democrats were doing it wrong. Being the bigger person is no longer a winning strategy. People don’t respect the “bigger” person. They respect winners, and if you have to bend some rules and shatter a few norms to win, then the actions won’t ultimately matter. In the future, we may see a different Democratic Party, and the Biden pardon might be a sign of it. Ignore the Parlimenarian, expand the courts, destroy the filibuster, and ignore the media critiques. To paraphrase Jamie Lannister in the final season of Game Of Thrones about his sister Cersei’s inhumane and immoral actions:

“When people are living peacefully in the world they built, do you really think they’ll wring their hands over how they built it?”

That is the world American voters ushered in on November 5th. Hopefully, the eggs will be cheaper.