Truth, Justice, And The American Way

“The State,” Max Weber once wrote in Politics as a Vocation “ is the human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Indeed, throughout the history of civilization, the means of force have been systematically taken away from private citizens and become monopolized by the state apparatus. Superheroism is, by its very nature, the concerted application of force to solve a problem, (If there’s one thing that comic books teach kids, it’s that violence solves everything) and it’s not too much of a stretch to make the statement that Superheroes are mechanisms of coercion. Thus, superheroes pose somewhat of a problem to the state in the Weberian definition.

Indeed, if one were to use Weber’s definition and define the state by means, it would logically follow that the state would be constantly acting to bring Superheroes “into the fold” so to speak. Taking this into account, it’s somewhat surprising that it took so long for the governments Marvel Universe to bring superheroes under their umbrella with the Superhuman Registration act that kicked off the Civil War crossover. Watchmen, the preeminent “what if superheroes were real” book, had the Keane act passed not long after superheroes became active. Nothing of the same sort of thing exists in the DC universe, but that is unsurprising, considering DC is all about subverting anything that would keep super heroes from super-heroing.

Of course, the state in the comic book universe exists, to borrow a phrase, at the speed of the plot, and it would probably be more clunky than necessary to think about how each state formation would react to this dispersed coercive power. However, this dispersion of coercive power goes a long way in explaining why superheroism seems to be such an American phenomenon. America is fairly unique among states in protecting the right of people to keep and use firearms, thereby making it difficult for the government to monopolize coercive force. After all, America has a very high rate of gun-related deaths compared to other developed countries. What’s more, America has a history of vigilantism—from the armed militias of the revolution, (less heroically) to the KKK and the Minutemen Project dispersed coercive means is a defining characteristic of the American state.

Thus, it’s unsurprising that America would have the most force-wielding superheroes operating independent of the state within its borders; Indeed, while most “foreign” superheroes are under employ of the state—the Great 10 in the DCU is under the umbrella of the Chinese government, while Marvel’s Union Jack is an operative of MI5—American heroes are unique in the extent at which they operate independently of the state apparatus.

Thus, It would seem that the "American Way" in the phrase, “Truth, Justice and the American Way” is more than just a cause for superheroes to espouse—Rather, it represents the modus operandi by which they act..