The Politics of The Dark Knight

There has been a good deal of discussion about the politics of The Dark Knight on liberal blogs today.

For me, the movie could have been far more political than it actually was, but I feel like its quick pacing prevented the sort of reflection and dialogue that would have been needed for it to make a truly coherent political statement. Ultimately, it just sends mixed messages. Is Bruce Wayne right to build the eavesdropping device? Or is Lucius Fox right to destroy it? (Iron Man, in my opinion, was the same way.)

I feel like there's two key points I still want to make, however.

First, does Batman equal Dick Cheney as Spencer Ackerman claims? And does the Joker equal Al Qaeda?

The answer to both is no.

I would say Batman doesn't equal Cheney for several reasons:

• Batman views this as moral quandry. Cheney doesn't appear to do so.
• As shown in Charlie Savage's excellent Takeover, Cheney had wanted to seize extrajudicial powers for the executive branch long before September 11 happened. He simply used that as an excuse. Batman only becomes Batman after his parents are killed. For Cheney, the trauma was an excuse. For Batman, it was a cause.
• Lastly, Batman never actually breaks his "one rule," as the Joker puts it. While he does other immoral, risky things, he never breaks his established moral code in the way Cheney has trampled over the Constitution.

There is one main reason the Joker doesn't equal Al Qaeda. I'll let Bruce Hoffman explain (italics mine):

Terrorism, in the most widely accepted contemporary usage of the term, is fundamentally and inherently political. It is also ineluctably about power: the pursuit of power, the acquisition of power, and the use of power to achieve political change. Terrorism is thus violence -- or, equally important, the threat of violence -- used and directed in pursuit of, or in service of, a political aim.

Whereas Al Qaeda has a specific goal/ideology and is at least a pseudo-rational actor, The Joker is insane. He doesn't want power - he just doesn't want anyone else to have it. He wants to ruin the plans of the schemers of Gotham City. He has no desire to acquire power - although he certainly does end up acquiring a good deal of it. This actually makes him a much more significant threat than Al Qaeda, who need to make political progress as well as terrorism progress to acheive their goals and to stay popular in the Islamic world. The Joker has no need for the political system.