Superheroes an Undemocratic?

 I decided to give The Other History of the DC Universe – John Ridley by Shane Burley a read more out of curiosity about what sort of other history it was documenting when I read the following:

Superheroes themselves, despite what their creators say, have a certain conservatism to them. Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist who provided legal rationales for the Third Reich, thought about law and order in a similar way. He thought that democracies required an outside force to come in, unaccountable, to sustain the boundaries. Otherwise the excesses would collapse the democracies since they have few safeguards to them. Superheroes reflect this Schmittian perspective: they come in without accountability, engage in violence against outsiders, and help to maintain the system. Their presence sends the message that democracy, a proxy for self-organization of the masses, is unable to care for itself. We need strong men, those who are unequivocally superior to ourselves, to protect us from the rot at the core of our humanity. When people like Alan Moore or Frank Miller deconstructed the superhero myths and took them to their logical conclusion, they had dysfunctional bands of misfits staging mass casualty events or had Batman staging a reactionary coup on the city. Those were superheroes as they would exist in our modern morality play, not the aspirational Superman of Kurt Busiek or Grant Morrison. Superheroes are not the property of the right. Many, many creators have taken then into inspired directions. But we also can’t simply assume neutrality to the figure of the superhero.

I gave up reading comics almost 20 years ago. I did keep on watching superhero movies. They were spectacles and pretty much empty-headed amusements, but reading Burley I must agree with his opinion about them representing someone coming in from the outside setting aright the world. I might quibble that was always what they did - as did the pulp heroes like The Shadow. My second thought was does the right of Marvel not also track the rise of Trumpism with its oversized hero coming with power to reset the world from its carnage and other dangers?

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