'Tony Soprano Syndrome': Writer warns MAGA has an antihero problem

Republicans supporting President-elect Donald Trump have fallen into a trap that The Atlantic's Adam Serwer called "Tony Soprano Syndrome" — comparing the very people they support to run government to fictional characters, unaware they were obviously meant to be the bad guys.

"As Trump reshapes the nation in his image, some of his supporters seem inclined to turn cautionary tales on their head, empathizing with villains or antiheroes to such a degree that they miss the point of these stories entirely," wrote Serwer — including when the writers of the stories make it completely obvious.

For example, "One undecided voter told a New York Times focus group earlier this year that Trump is 'the antihero, the Soprano, the ‘Breaking Bad,’ the guy who does bad things, who is a bad guy but does them on behalf of the people he represents.'"

But the audience isn't supposed to sympathize with the mob boss Tony Soprano even on that level in "The Sopranos," he noted.

"Tony is a murderer whose greed and ambition harm the people he claims to love. He is not a moral exemplar, nor is he intended to be; his selfishness helps no one else and is destructive to all around him. The same is true of Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad, who at one point in the show literally looks at the camera and says of his crimes, 'I did it for me.'"

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Similarly, tech billionaire Elon Musk had another misguided analogy for his enthusiasm about former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) for Trump's attorney general, before he withdrew amid renewed scrutiny into the allegations he committed child sex trafficking.

"He is the Judge Dredd America needs to clean up a corrupt system and put powerful bad actors in prison," he said.

Judge Dredd, a comic book character who has appeared in films and video games, is a "jackbooted fascist" and never portrayed as anything else, noted Serwer.

"Generally speaking, one’s model for justice should not be a fascist invented in part to illustrate the distinction between elite impunity and the brutality that ordinary people face. (Were Dredd’s zero tolerance for lawbreaking evenly applied to obscenely wealthy scofflaws like Musk himself, it would surely be less appealing to him.)"

A major story of the last decade of American culture, Serwer concluded, has been "moral degeneracy" of this sort. "What looks like declining media literacy may be something much worse — an affirmation of the underlying values in dystopian literature that inevitably lead to the dystopia itself."