It is time for a serious conversation about Green Lantern.
Trump posted a clip depicting himself as the superhero Green Lantern, using his energy-projecting power ring to harass immigrants and personally conjure up new American manufacturing. As has by now become typical with Trump, this is wrong on multiple levels, but his most ardent and trollish supporters see the wrongness and its layered nature as all the more reason to be delighted, as if a beloved toddler who’ll always be applauded has not only produced feces but deposited it on a Van Gogh for added mischief.
The irony! The genius! And he might be racist! Who knows! Let the haters hate! O, to be alive at this time!
Green Lantern has meant a few different things in the 86 years since the first character by that name was created—usually some respectable combo of fearlessness, willpower, and justice—but there’s a reasonable chance, given past “accidental” implications of this sort the professional Trumpers have produced, that they’re suddenly in love with the long-running character at this precise time because Green Lantern has just in the past few weeks become a symbol of sympathetic aggrieved white racists.
That is, amidst the thousands of fictional members of the galaxy-policing Green Lantern Corps from numerous planets, two of the best-known to fans are the white Hal Jordan and the black John Stewart (not to be confused with the former Daily Show host). DC Comics has touched on politics and race before, but on the current HBO show Lanterns, it has for the first time been overtly suggested that Hal Jordan’s ineptitude and ingratitude have been undermining John Stewart’s heroism for years. The white man: always impeding black greatness. That, apparently, is the Green Lantern story we always needed without realizing it.
And you wonder why DC Comics parent company Warner Bros. is going bankrupt and desperately hoping its merger with Paramount is finalized. I’ve previously suggested calling the merged company Paramax or Warmount, but maybe they should call it Parallax, the name Hal Jordan used in the comics when he briefly transformed into a villain. I’m available for branding advice.
Despite the reimagined, more police-like Green Lantern Corps of the 1950s being in some ways imitative of that decade’s Lensman sci-fi novels—which were unapologetically eugenicist in tone, with proper breeding and posture being prerequisites for membership and the granting of a psychic-power-projecting Lens—the last two times Green Lantern had an impact on real-world politics were when Hal Jordan and his buddy Green Arrow back in the 1960s debated issues such as the place of black people in American society and when, 20 years ago, pundit Matthew Yglesias likened George W. Bush’s assertion of American power to defeat Muslim totalitarianism to a bogus “Green Lantern theory of geopolitics” in which anything you believe hard enough will hopefully come true.
Somehow, Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan seems to get the lion’s share of the credit online for the concept, for applying it to presidencies in general a few years later. Soldiers from outer space might accuse him of “stolen valor.” If we’re abstracting, though, I strongly suggest applying anti-Lantern skepticism to government in general, in its foreign and domestic manifestations, since for all the summoning of “political will” we hear about in the news and in politicians’ speeches, very little that government or political activists claim to be willing into existence actually happens, certainly not at the low cost and on the short production schedule it all could have been done by the private sector—without all the political angst, conflict, and waste.
I should probably disclose that I wrote a comics story or two featuring Green Lantern myself around the time of Yglesias’ metaphor, though I swear that doesn’t bias my analysis. Basically, nothing does. I forget my own strange resume sometimes, which helps keep me objective.
My friend Kyle Smith, a film critic but not really a sci-fi/comics nerd at heart, may have stumbled onto the truth in all this with his crack that Trump looks more like an Orange Lantern. In the comics, unbeknownst to Kyle, there really is a Lantern Corps for each major color, each corresponding to an emotion, but the Orange Lantern is unique: There’s only one ring of that color, powered by greed and possessed by a lone, ugly alien named Larfleeze—except for that time he loaned an orange ring to villainous businessman/president Lex Luthor. Maybe life imitates art.
It would be easier to believe that art is merely art and thus harmless, whether on HBO or the President’s social media account, if not for the fact that Trump is meanwhile trying to bring to life Starship Troopers, another 1950s space-military novel that flirts with fascism despite (and it is despite, not because of) being written by more-or-less libertarian Robert Heinlein. Trump has just this month proudly unveiled uniforms for his fledgling U.S. Space Force that look straight out of Troopers—albeit with Star Trek-style chevron symbols on the shoulders, which might help win over a few liberals. The Wernher von Braun-like parts of Elon Musk’s brain must be elated.
As it happens, I saw the movie adaptation of Starship Troopers almost 30 years ago with the man who edited my aforementioned DC Comics stories (Green Lantern and all), Dan Raspler. I told him then that I liked the film but was worried that the most enthusiastic people watching it wouldn’t understand that it was a satire of fascism (and in particular of recruitment propaganda) and would instead take it as an occasion to join the military and set off on some fascist overseas mission or launch some domestic crackdown. The 1990s were fairly peaceful, though, and the Troopers film franchise never became all that popular. We were safe, I dared to hope. Three decades later, I’m not so sure.
But morality shouldn’t be just a matter of which technical political or strategic lines you can’t cross but whether you hunger to impose your will upon others at all. If you like doing that, you’re an authoritarian no matter what party or army you’ve formally signed up with, and the world would be better off if you stood down and learned to live in a civil fashion with others. That’s the most moral element of libertarianism, liberalism, conservatism, moderation, and anarchism to boot. Accept no authoritarian substitutes.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey