Rightwing gangsters: without God or the people
Commonplace book
"...from the right-wing perspective, that's all that the law ever is. It is a means of controlling the very violence that brings it into being, and through which it is ultimately enforced.
"This makes it easier to understand the often otherwise surprising affinity between criminals, criminal gangs, right-wing political movements, and the armed representatives of the state. Ultimately, they all speak the same language. They create their own rules on the basis of force. As a result, such people typically share the same broad political sensibilities....
"So what does this all have to do with costumed superheroes? Well, everything. Because this is exactly the space that superheroes and, super-villains, also inhabit. An inherently fascist space, inhabited only by gangsters, would-be dictators, police, and thugs, with endlessly blurring lines between them. Sometimes the cops are legalistic, sometimes corrupt. Sometimes the police themselves slip into vigiantism. Sometimes they persecute the superhero, at others they look the other way, or help. Villains and heroes occasionally team up. The lines of force are always shifting. If anything new were to emerge, it could only be through such shifting forces. There's nothing else, since in the DC and Marvel universes, God, or The People, simply doesn't exist."
- David Graeber (2015). "On Batman and the Problem of Constitutional Power," in The Utopia of Rules: On Technocracy, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Technology. Melville House: 215-216.
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Well, unless you count Thor et al. Or Galactus and the Silver Surfer. Or probably other people I don't know about.
And you might say, well, Tony Stark is just a guy is a high-tech suit! and Peter Parker and other Spider-persons are very much Of The People! Tony Stark has the US superpowers of wealth and “technological genius,” though, and paradigmatically flies far above the streets. Spider-man and Spider-men* and very in-the-streets— and yet their concerns and the inspirations of their wit are all supervillains.
But I get what Graeber's getting at.
And heroes’n’villains is such a poverty-stricken way of looking at law and its maintenance crews. All about asserting and maintaining power through violence.
Some laws are about public understanding of morals and/or ethics. The vast majority of them are simply set to coordinate the actions of many person.
I have periodically heard waves of people sneering about a law or set of laws as ridiculous to maintain because they've got nothing to do with morality.
But you know, there's no moral imperative about driving on the left (right) side of two-way roads, but it's definitely a more efficient world when drivers all share an understanding of which side they're expected to drive on and can expect others to drive on. And people can be arrested for driving on the wrong side of the road not because it's wicked, but because its disruptive effects can be serious and costly.
* There are so many Spider-persons across the universes, though, that I might be wrong. I’m not an expert, and Spider-persons can multiple infinitely, it seems to me.
Furthermore, temporal planning horizons must be extended.
Illustration: By Marvel Comics; see also Pinterest and BleedingCool.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58738358