In January 1933, in the pages of a little-known sci-fi magazine, a little-known writer/artist duo named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster published a little-read story called The Reign of the Superman.
In this first version, Superman was a homeless man named Bill Dunn who tried to take over the world using his telepathic powers. Unfortunately for him, the powers were only temporary and he ended up back on the streets.
Four months later, Siegel and Shuster tried again. This time, they gave Superman superhuman strength and bulletproof skin. And this Superman was a crime-fighting hero instead of a villain.
Still no luck.
Over the next few years, Siegel and Shuster continued to refine the character, inching him closer to the Superman we know and love. They added the Kryptonian origin story, the ability to fly, the big red pants, but while these changes attracted more interest, they also created a dilemma.
How do you make a super-powered, morally perfect alien into someone ordinary people can relate to? How do you humanise a character whose name is Superman?
Well, for starters, you give him a salt-of-the-earth Mom and Pop who raise him on their farm in the American Midwest. You have them teach him universal values like “truth and justice”.
You give him enemies your readers will happily root against. Superman fought the Nazis during WWII, the KKK during segregation, and the spectre of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War.
Most of all, you make him a beacon for the idea that everyone is worth fighting for, that it’s good to care about other people, that values and principles are important, even when it’s inconvenient to uphold them.
Because if we have all this in common, who cares if he comes from another planet or shoots laser beams out of his eyes or occasionally causes billions of dollars worth of property damage?
Superman is one of us. And that’s all we need to know.
This “the good guys are humble, earthy folk” shorthand is so ingrained in our storytelling that most people don’t even notice it anymore.
There’s Luke Skywalker, the plucky farmhand taking on the faceless, shiny-suited Vader, the simple, hard-working inhabitants of the Hunger Games’ districts rising up against the pampered, orange-haired weirdos of the Capitol, the humble, slop-eating heroes of the Resistance taking on the soulless, digitally generated perfection of the Matrix, Elon Musk even tried to leverage this trope during Trump’s 2024 election campaign:
You watched “The Hunger Games” and sided with the resistance. You watched “Star Wars” and sided with the resistance. You watched “The Matrix” and sided with the resistance […]
When it’s fiction you understand. Yet you refuse to see it when it’s the reality you’re living in.
And as much as I’d like to spend the next six hundred and forty-three words making fun of Musk for trying to frame Donald Trump as “the resistance,” there’s no escaping the fact that millions of Americans, many of whom also fit the humble, earthy trope, see Trump the same way.
In 2024, Trump won the majority of votes among the poorest third of Americans, the first time a Republican candidate has done so in over fifty years, he made gains of over ten percentage points among Americans earning less than $100,000, and all this despite Trump’s administration being lousy with billionaires.
Trump, Witkoff, Lutnick, Ramaswamy, something has gone seriously wrong if voters think these guys represent their interests better than you do.
But how exactly do you turn a draft-dodging, daughter-sexualising reality TV star, a man who writes his name in giant gold letters on the front of skyscrapers, into someone ordinary people feel like they relate to?
Well, for starters, you create a climate of fear and distrust by lying about “fake news” and DEI and pet-eating immigrants, anything to stop voters from thinking about the various ways billionaires are siphoning money out of the economy.
You make him a beacon for the idea that only certain people are worth fighting for, that nobody cares about anyone but themselves, and that values and principles should be abandoned the moment they become inconvenient.
Most importantly, you give him enemies who are so insufferable that his fans will stick with him, even if he transfers their retirement funds to his billionaire buddies and deports members of their families, as long as he “owns the libs” in the process.
Call it petty or weak or “fragile,” but it’s impossible to overstate how deeply those years of cancelling people for wrongthink and yelling at people for being “privileged," radicalised the MAGA faithful.
And just like them, Trump has spent years being “attacked” for his casual racism and corruption, and shamed for grabbing a few women by the pussy.
And if they have all that in common, who cares if he hangs out with sex traffickers or pardons pedophiles or is leading exactly the kinds of assaults on free speech and democracy and the constitution that the Right is constantly fantasising about taking up arms against?
Trump is one of them. That’s all they need to know.
The most frustrating part of watching the Democrats’ failure to contend with Trump is that there is no universe in which the Right represents ordinary people more faithfully than the Left.
Healthcare, social security, wages, the economy, crime, the Democrats are far from perfect, but Republicans are objectively significantly further.
The problem is, the Left has become so abstract in the way it talks about these issues, so comfortable with using identity to decide who is worth fighting for, so formulaic and insincere in its messaging, that for millions of Americans, they’re indistinguishable from the authoritarians of the Empire, the soulless veneer of the Matrix, the out-of-touch, blue-haired weirdos of the Capitol.
Luckily, there’s an easy solution to this dilemma.
You talk about universal issues like crime and immigration and the economy, not as identity issues or moral purity tests, but as issues that affect everybody.
You talk about your successes, and demonstrate that you have genuinely good ideas on how to solve problems.
Most of all, you stop “reaching out” to women and trying to “get out the black vote” and “appealing to the LGBT community,” and become a beacon for the idea that everyone is worth fighting for.
Because if you offer a viable, coherent alternative to Trump, it gets harder to manipulate people with fear-mongering and lies, it’s harder to convince people they should be divided by identity and not united by class. And once people start thinking about class, well, it’s easy to see that Trump was never one of us.
He was always one of them.
This piece is funny in how the attempted explanation actually demonstrates the real explanation without self-awareness.
The attempted explanation is that Trump created this division... fomented the anger of the working class against the upper-class Democrats. However, the underlying tone and implication is that these Trump supporters are just dolts that have been manipulated by a master manipulator (while also being a stupid idiot like his followers... go figure).
There is the lacking self-aware REAL explanation. The working class was done having that upper class liberal Democrat jackboot on their neck, and Trump simply joined them in agreeing with their position. Hilariously the upper-class liberal Democrat hive is now fond of screaming protests of fear about a working-class jackboot on their necks. When the truth is simply that we will turn back the clock on their power and money looting enterprises.
I think that there is something you are missing in this. Democrats display unveiled open contempt for the working class. Criticism of Trump coming from the mouths of people holding you in contempt falls upon deaf ears. If you want people to not give a damn about anything that you have to say, call them stupid, uneducated, privileged racists, etc. It goes beyond not caring about anything you have to say, it leads them to support people like Trump. If you say that is stupid, you prove my point.