The Alt-Right Playbook: You Can’t Get Snakes from Chicken Eggs

Another aspect is that in general, liberalist states vote for people and parties, and even most referendums and policies are usually coded to side with one party or the other. In America this usually boils down to: tax goes up -> democrats, tax goes down -> republicans, or it’s related to some political hot topic that has already been nationally polarized by the news.

I don’t think it’s really said enough, but there is a fundamental problem with republic democracy, in that when you’re voting for people and not for ideas, the only winning metric is how ‘convincing’ they are. This inevitably leads to a certain type of person getting an edge, and honesty is usually detrimental to their success. People generally know this, but when 50% is all you need to clear, then that’s all you’re gonna care about. Policy and ideology get moved further and further away until they’re boiled down to talking points that can rile up a base, and now you got yourself another corrupt country.

Democracy definitely works in small groups or settings where good faith debate can take place with a reasonably educated and inclusive group, but outside of that, it has problems. I think people are conditioned even more-so than capitalism to believe that democracy is a golden ideal to achieve, but the shortcomings are pretty blatant when you stop to look at it. Better than authoritarianism, sure, but once personality is thrown into the mixture, that’s what you’ll end up with anyway.

I’m not sure I would call Nolan an outright conservative, but there is a lot of state apologia and counter-revolutionary themes in The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. There’s multiple examples including the justification of surveillance for anti-terrorism purposes, stateless anarchy portrayed as monstrous via Bane and The Joker, Alfred justifying imperialist actions in Burma, the protagonist being a rich billionaire, a lot of dialogue that seems to suggest it’s not the system that’s evil, but the lack of regulation against corruption, so on and so forth.

You might say that a lot of what he seems to advocate for seems to be firmly liberal, but Liberalism is a conservative ideology if you’re looking outside America’s shortsighted left/right spectrum. I like Nolan’s work, but I constantly see suppression of revolutionary ideology in his work. I don’t think he hates progressivism, but I do think he’s riding the center, which in America, means right-wing.