alt title(s): Strawmen Politicals; Straw Political

"Why am I forced to walk the Earth with this conscience? Maybe, if there's such a thing as reincarnation, I can come back down to Earth and just trample all over people without giving a damn about anyone but myself. That would be awesome. That's it — in my next life, I'm coming back as a conservative."

— Mick Foley, The Hardcore Diaries

"Some people say that running attack ads is just bad for our country. I say that those people have voted to raise taxes 95 times, and are probably from Massachusetts. In fact, a certain magazine recently ranked those people the number one most incorrect and probably gay people in Massachusetts, and the number one most personally against John Hodgman. So who are you going to trust? Me, or the probably-gay Massachusetts residents who are against me?"

— lifelong Massachusetts resident John Hodgman, The Areas of My Expertise

In the real world, everyone is the hero of their own story, and this extends to their beliefs, especially political. There is a tendency to demonize the competition, though, even when it goes against one's own self-interest.

Seriously, nobody who is Pro-Choice thinks of themselves as "baby-killers", and nobody who is Pro-Life thinks of themselves as "wanting to control women's uteri." You wouldn't know this from just looking at how the other side is described, though. Thus a character who has the "wrong" view is construed to be a total idiot and/or evil for the sake of being evil.

For example, the Strawman Liberal, a character ostensibly meant to represent someone with liberal political views, but who appears to be based more on conservative criticism of liberal belief rather than on anything liberals actually believe. Common in right-leaning religious programming or in fiction with a strong ideological bent. Expect a hypocritically wealthy and/or impoverished freeloading hippy, with pacifism, political correctness, and free love sorta thing. May or may not be doing it all because they hate God. There also tends to be a focus on letting obviously guilty folk go into the wild. They're doing it for the innocent children, though. Compare Straw Priest.

Its counterpart, the Strawman Conservative, is likewise found frequently in fiction with a left-leaning ideological bent. The Strawman Conservative is either ultra-religious or very traditional, and rabidly afraid to the point of intolerance of anybody who doesn't fit said criteria, and will try to have the law of the land rewritten to exclude, marginalize, or imprison them. Oh, and they always hate anyone who is different them — no exceptions for family or cross cultural friendships. They're doing it for the innocent children, though.

Another type of Strawman Political is a greedy, Machiavellian Smug Snake-esque character who cares only about the bottom line, while a third type can be both at once. While the first two varieties can at least be said to have "good" intentions, the third can lay no such claim, and thus can serve as a primary antagonist as well as a simple obstruction.

Characters of these types are often extremely one-dimensional — every aspect of their characterization is tied to the (mis)representation of their political philosophy. While always adversarial to the heroes, their role is usually obstructionist rather than outright antagonistic, and is usually played in a "It would be so much easier to get things done if it weren't for these pie-in-the-sky so-and-so's" sense. Sometimes, the character may, through his "good" intentions, actually be doing the bidding of the Big Bad. The Granola Girl may fall under this. Black Shirts can be be used this way too, as they fanatically embrace whatever politics the main antagonist faction espouses. Some writers go the whole hog and have President Strawman elected to high office; depending on whether the writer agrees with President Strawman, he'll either be a flawless saint composed entirely of pure virtue and honor or he'll be a baby-eating psycho — or, if they're feeling generous, possibly a clueless jackass.

The presence of such characters is often jarring and sometimes offensive to people who actually hold the beliefs that are being misrepresented. This is especially annoying when a normal member of the cast suddenly loses IQ points to deliver An Aesop.

Another type of Strawman Political is someone who is unable to effectively argue their side. The hero makes a statement and the Strawman Political who is on the other side of the conversation is unable to make a decent rebuttal. This "proves" that the hero was right, because their opponent's statement is obviously incorrect or naive. This can overlap with the Straw Hypocrite, by showing that those with opposing views don't have the moral strength to adhere to them (however "wrong" or "misguided" they were to begin with).

What's truly disturbing is on the occasions when audience members begin to support such a character's views... You'd think this would be far from Truth In Television, but with people like Fred Phelps

and Jack Thompson in existence, the far fringes of both sides can make you reconsider.

Of course, as the Master said: "For a lie to work, it must be shrouded in truth"

A Scare Campaign will probably use massive amounts of this.

Sub Tropes:

See Strawman U for an entire university composed of Strawman Politicals. See also Fox News Liberal for varieties trotted out for or by the media.

If you want to write realistic people of differing viewpoints to your own, watch this

Additional note: please try to keep Truth In Television examples to a minimum. There's a very thin line between an actual Strawman Political and a troper trying to paint someone as being a Strawman Political. This page is Flame Bait enough as it is.

Examples

Comic Books

Almost every evangelist tract by Jack Chick features strawmen liberals as villains. Often he "proves" his arguments by having a character argue down a Strawman Political.
- A particularly bad one is "Big Daddy", which is consists mostly of a blatant Gary Stu debating evolution with a Strawman Political science teacher. Guess who wins?
- Actually I think where Jack Chick outdid himself in this Crusaders and Alberto comics, where the main characters meet new Strawman Politicals every issue who make such brilliant confessions as the Catholic Church is really a front for the Illuminati or Communism is actually a form of Satanism.
- Chick himself would probably be a Strawman Political were it not for the fact that he actually exists.
Comic book example: Goldilocks, from the Vertigo comic Fables, seems to be this at first, with just about every negative stereotype about liberal feminists you can think of, spouting Communist rhetoric, exclaiming "Oh my Goddess!" at every turn; however, it turns out it's all an act to cynically manipulate her followers.
- Also she's batshit insane.
The Corrupt Corporate Executive version of Lex Luthor occasionally edged into Strawman Conservative territory, though when the character actually ran for president the writers were careful not to describe his political leanings at all. Though it's worth noting that at one point, Green Arrow decries something President Luthor has done with "This would never happen with a Democrat in the White House!" (Green Arrow's own leftist strawman status is debatable, considering how the majority of comics writers tend to lean his way as well. Take your own guesses on whether his statement there was meant as a strawman's or dead serious.)
- In his defense, approximately 100% of Democrats aren't Lex Luthor, so he's probably right. Although the whole "supervillain" issue is probably more relevant.
The DCU super-duo, Hawk and Dove, were created to exemplify this trope. In the original stories, penned by arch-conservative Objectivist Steve Ditko, Dove, the pacifist, is portrayed as weak-willed, vacillating, and ineffectual, while his aggressive brother Hawk is the only one who manages to accomplish anything. Almost every writer since Ditko has portrayed Hawk as a thoughtlessly belligerent borderline berserker, with the rational, thoughtful Dove providing the only rational check on his action. Only rarely do we see a story where both viewpoints are treated with anything approaching equal regard, or a writer who admits the possibility that the different approaches might be appropriate in different situations. Ironically, this mainly came to the fore when Ditko was working with Steve Skeates, the more liberal co-creator of the duo. Characterization veered from side to side depending on who was doing the main plotting, until Skeates finally left the book over how Dove was being made into a wimp. When Hawk and Dove were later revived, the whole "conservative vs. liberal" thing was quietly dropped in the dustbin, and the two were recast as agents of Order (Dove) and Chaos (Hawk) meant to find a balance in tumultuous situations.
- Bonus Points: their father was a judge and always told them that they needed to see and understand each other's side.
Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns was notable for balance: it had a straw liberal psychiatrist who helped two super villains escape and blamed Batman for their crimes, and an unnamed straw conservative president drawn exactly like Ronald Reagan who used Superman as a tool for militarism.
- That's "balance"? The straw liberal caused several dozen deaths. The straw conservative twisted Superman into a tool of imperialism and colonial exploitation and capped things off by causing a nuclear war. Not exactly evenhanded...
- Dude, he pardoned THE JOKER! That takes some severe stupidity.
The Daily Planet columnist Dirk Armstrong in Superman was created as a strawman conservative, though later writers gave him more depth and sympathetic qualities, such as having to raise a blind teenage daughter.
- His strawman status should have been obvious, given his physical resemblance to Rush Limbaugh.
Many argue that Iron Man (and many of the pro-registration heroes, such as Mr. Fantastic) became one of these in the Marvel Comics Crisis Crossover Civil War, which dealt with superhero registration; originally, both sides were to be intended to have equally valid and reasonable justifications for the positions they adopted, but writers penning anti-registration stories kept having Iron Man — who was leading the pro-registration side — commit atrocity after atrocity after atrocity in order to make their preferred side seem better. This ended up turning the pro-registration heroes into borderline fascists who were little better than super-villains themselves.
- This idea is pretty much left broken and bleeding on the curb when you realize that many of the atrocities Iron Man committed — cloning Thor to give the pro-reg side moral authority (and keeping the clone around even after it killed Black Goliath), setting up an extradimensional gulag for unregistered heroes, and giving villains like Norman Osbourne, Venom, and Bullseye authority to track down and "restrain" unregistered heroes — took place in the main Civil War miniseries. Which was written by Mark Millar, who claimed in a Word Of God interview that he agreed with Tony's course of action, and most people in the real world should, too.
  - Euthanasia of one of his dearest friends (Iron Man), attacking Washington DC while impersonating a communist super villain (Amazing Spider-Man), hiring Baron Zemo and his Thunderbolts to capture super villains, and letting him keep them to build his own private army (New Thunderbolts), Attempting to defeat and capture Spider-Man, who saw him as a father figure at the time, for not selling out his fellow heroes (Amazing Spider-Man), Appointing Ax Crazy Magnificent Bastard Norman Osborn as director of the Thunderbolts (Civil War Frontline, Thunderbolts)... we might have even missed a few. It is safe to say the other writers weren't actually rooting for Tony.
  - Made worse when the same writers started using Tony as a punching bag, for example JMS, the writer of most of the above, would later have Thor beat up Tony.
  - Invincible Iron Man has been averting — or maybe reverting? — this trope by portraying Tony in a sympathetic enough light that it's plausible to write off his most Anvilicious moments from Civil War as the actions of a WellIntentionedExtremist rather than a self-centered fascist prick.
  - And as of Dark Reign, Stark is now a pathetic figure, in that everything he's tried to build has simply allowed psychopathic opportunists like Norman Osborn to usurp control of Stark's apparatus and become a vastly corrupt secret dictator. Granted, its not Stark's fault that he wasn't able to anticipate the entire population of the United States being reduced to having the intellect of algae, that being how stupid you'd have to be to give Norman Osborn control of anything, let alone everything.
- Not to mention characters like annoying twit Sally Floyd, who would be an obvious strawman liberal under most other writers (If you don't know anything about NASCAR or Myspace, you're hoplessly out of touch with the American public? Really?). Word Of God says we're supposed to take her seriously.
  - Captain America writer Ed Brubaker delivered a well-deserved Take That in Young Avengers Presents: Patriot, in which Cap's sidekick Bucky points out how stupid this line of reasoning is to fellow Cap-inspired hero Patriot. Amusingly, his phrasing matched something he said in an interview word for word.
Liberality For All is summarized as such: It is 2021, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. America is under oppression by ultra-liberal extremists who have surrendered governing authority to the United Nations. Hate speech legislation called the “Coulter Laws” have forced vocal conservatives underground. A group of bio-mechanically enhanced conservatives led by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, and a young man born on September 11, 2001, set out to thwart Ambassador Usama bin Laden's plans to nuke New York City. As hard it may seem to believe, this series does contain one or two strawman liberal depictions.
normalman has both a Strawman Liberal and a Strawman Conservative, and they're technically the same character. That is, the malevolent, overzealous reactionary nutjob Ultra-Conservative, and his alternate personality, the radical, chaotic anarchist Liberalator. Ultra-Conservative eventually suppresses the transformation by thinking about "commie agitators", "pinko faggots", and the "death penalty" while shouting that he "will not change!"
Its getting blatantly obvious how Marvel editorial voted in the last election, given the Word Of God that the President who did the incredibly asinine and amoral act of appointing Norman 'World-Class Psychopath' Osborn as director of all US government superhuman-related activities (including the Avengers, the Initiative, SHIELD's replacement agency HAMMER, and the entire Super-Hero Registration apparatus) was the outgoing President (President Bush), while the wise and honorable incoming President that Osborn will be working to bring down or kill is President Bush's successor, President Obama. Thunderbolts writer interview here.
- Did we say blatantly obvious? We meant really really really overwhelmingly blatantly obvious.
The various X-Men and spinoff series semi-regularly feature intolerant, hate-preaching fundamentalist groups obviously based off televangelists and Southern Baptists with some Ku Klux Klan thrown in for good measure as villains. Several major arcs featured a Reverend Stryker becoming a major threat to the X-men. Less common, but still present on rare occasions, are religious folk shown opposing the extremist fringe. (Note also that anti-mutant discrimination is often played to echo historic discrimination against Blacks in America. That the actual emancipation movement first took root in religious circles is not similarly reflected.)
- They also, especially in the last few years, represent gays, so religious persecution makes perfect sense. That's the X-Men - they stand in for every minority group ever. And remember, just about any political view can be justified with the right interpretation of a religion.
  - To be sure, since mutants are an oppressed minority, and since the writers have mostly the same kind of real-life reference of people who would oppress minorities... So Yeah.
Carrie's mother, Margaret White, in the movie but more pronouncedly in the book, is a psychotic religious nut who believes periods are punishments from God.
Watchmen kind of fits this, with the Comedian as a red-blooded conservative hero taken to the point of being a Psycho For Hire and Heroic Sociopath Rorschach similarly has a conservative, Vigilante Man mindset criticized by the author. Ozymandias has the personality of a liberal do-gooder and gets mocked by the previous two for his idealism while he does fit the good intentions of the liberal strawman, he is far from ineffectual and is a true Magnificent Bastard.
- Of course all three of them are absolutely bonkers; Ozymandias is just the only one who's smart about it.
  - In fairness, Rorschach could also be viewed more sympathetically. At the end, he is the only one who finds it unacceptable to use millions of human beings as a means to an end. It does restore some nobility to him.
- The opening credits of the Watchmen movie is particularly gratuitous. Approximately four minutes in, you will see a scene flashing back to the 1960s where peaceful hippie protesters, standing in an orderly line waving their signs, are confronted by a line of National Guardsmen with rifles leveled and bayonets fixed. The entirely peaceful protesters, committing absolutely no violation of the law save possibly holding a public demonstration without a parade permit, then have one of their number — a pretty young woman — shyly creep forward and tuck a peace lily into one of the soldier's rifle barrels. At this point, the soldiers volley fire directly into the crowd. Regardless of your particular opinion of the 60s and the antiwar protests, showing the US Army unhesitatingly committing mass murder of an unresisting, unarmed crowd in the opening credits of your movie has to be a new world's record re: lack of subtlety. Especially given that unlike the content involving the Comedian, which at least was a part of the original graphic novel, this little moment was inserted into the movie out of nowhere apparently just for the strawman lulz.
In Warren Ellis' Black Summer, Well Intentioned Extremist John Horus assassinates the US President, who's actions bear a striking resemblance to the accusations leveled at George W. Bush.

Film

The "pacifist" Army journalist character from Saving Private Ryan is an ~~egregious~~ ahem, notable example of the first type.
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace had a cadre of strawmen conservatives, and a William Hootkins, as Lex Luthor's henchmen.
- In a film that names a solar powered villain Nuclear Man, this hardly comes as a surprise.
  - Wait, isn't Superman himself solar powered?
The film version of "The Shawshank Redemption" featured and evil, Bible-toting conservative warden as the villain. The character was not Christian or conservative at all in the original Stephen King story.
The film "Ultraviolet" featured and evil, religious straw-conservative in a suit as the Big Bad, whose ruling party's symbol was similar to a cross. It reportedly offended 2 of the 3 people who saw the movie.
The Film Actors' Guild (FAG), from the film Team America: World Police, is a parody of strawman liberals, to the point where they ally with Kim Jong-Il (the film's Big Bad) in a misguided attempt to bring peace to the world. The 'heroes' approach the conservative side, although they are clearly a bunch of bungling destructive idiots.
The American President, the movie upon which The West Wing based, doesn't mention what party the President or his opponent represent. The opponent, however, is portrayed as a pretty standard strawman conservative who sits around with his cronies smoking cigars and plotting evil. At one point he sings, "It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas" when he discovers that the incumbent President's girlfriend has a checkered past. It was pretty clear President Shepherd was a Democrat. His opponent's methods were based on the Republican noise machine of the Bill Clinton era and he was attacked on his "family values", right-wing Newspeak par excellence.
The Contender stars Joan Allen as a U.S. Senator (formerly moderate Republican, now a Democrat, and a pro-choice atheist to boot) who is nominated for the Vice Presidency after the incumbent veep is killed. A Republican Congressman tries to block the nomination by dredging up her sexual past, but is unsuccessful, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the (Democratic) President. The "good guys" and "bad guys" are easy to spot. (Gary Oldman, who played the Republican Congressman, and he film's producer subsequently accused Dream Works Pictures executives of re-editing the film, which came out three weeks prior to the 2000 election, to make the Democrats more sympathetic.)
The movie Shooter had the cartoonishly evil Republican Senator Charles Meachum.
The fascist government in the V For Vendetta movie is a good example of a strawman conservative. Note this is only The Movie, as in the original comic book they were fascist but still competent and V was shown to be a psychopathic terrorist.
- Having heard the political positions of British nationalists, especially the BNP and its sympathizers on a few accounts, it's more likely that the Christian fundamentalist, Islam-hating, homophobic, authoritarian, nationalist and racist Norsefire government was a not-all-that-strawman portrayal of them.
  - Doesn't show? Apart from the contemptual references to immigrants, and the fairly obvious straw-arab-muslim-fundamentalist in the "Storm Saxon" TV show, there is the rather more noticeable point that there is not a single non-white person on-screen in the entire film, until the symbolic unmasking at the end.
Shoot Em Up featured both a Strawman Conservative and Strawman Liberal. Both of them quite literally kill babies, but like the rest of the movie their portrayal is pretty tongue-in-cheek.
- Though the Strawman Conservative was portrayed as being pretty much absolutely pure evil, and for extra anviliciousness had a monologue about how America having guns was great because it let cowards feel powerful, and seems to enjoy the idea of killing babies. The Strawman Liberal, however, was portrayed more as just having lost his way, and wound up begging to be killed as an atonement and to help outlaw guns. So it's a Complete Monster on one side versus one treated so sympathetically at that point he's almost The Woobie. Not all strawmen are created equal, it seems.
- Doesn't change the fact he was harvesting babies for their bone marrow, though.
La Cage aux Folles, and its American remake The Birdcage, feature an obvious strawman conservative in the father of a gay man's son's fiancee.
- The French version has deputy Simon Charrier being played by Michel Galabru, who turns the straw into pure comedic awesomeness. And keep in mind that this being a French movie, Sarrier was not meant to be a strawman conservative, but a religious extremist: unlike the US and its Two Party System™, French religious extremists do not get along well with French conservatives and usually French conservatives do not feel they are targeted when watching the movie.
Forrest Gump depicts the '60s counterculture and the antiwar movement as being naive at best and smug, hypocritical, and violent at worst.
In Nick of Time, a prominent Republican governor suddenly switches to the Democratic party. The result is her entire staff, including her husband, conspiring to have her killed.
[1]. Almost every time a political opinion of any type is expressed.

Literature

The novel Battlefield Earth features a group of liberal "politicians" (recent stoneage tribal leaders who found some old books) who play an obstructionist role for the hero, unknowingly doing the bidding of the villain in the meanwhile.
- Not forgetting the Catrists, Strawman Psychologists.
The global government in the Left Behind series starts out on the Straw-Lib end of the scale.
- Since the head of the Global Community turns out to be Pure Evil Incarnate (literally), this is either a) not a true example of the trope or b) the ultimate example of the trope.
Ayn Rand, as a Writer On Board promoting her philosophy of Objectivism, generally made the villains of her fictional works Strawman Socialists. In particular, not only does Atlas Shrugged have lots and lots of Strawman Socialist villains, but their political beliefs are repeatedly blamed for every single disaster that happens in the story. In one episode, a passenger train is held up just short of a tunnel unsuitable for its steam locomotive, but is ordered to proceed nevertheless by a corrupt politician who is late for a rally and unwilling to wait for a diesel locomotive to carry the train through the tunnel. This means death for every passenger on board — What A Senseless Waste Of Human Life, right? No — the Strawman Political beliefs of the doomed passengers are illustrated to show how their catastrophic demise was justified, because they were allegedly each Not So Different than the politician.
- Even worse is Anthem, where the Strawman Socialists have eliminated the use of the word "I" in favor of "We," where everyone sobs themselves to sleep in despair, and where the protagonist is ostracized after rediscovering electric lighting both for stepping out of his assigned role as a janitor and for threatening the jobs of candlestick makers. Yeah.
In a particularly Anvilicious case of Writer On Board and Author Filibuster, in the Sword Of Truth books author Terry Goodkind has done the strawman routine on everything from liberalism to socialism to traditional religion to democracy in order to show that true freedom and enlightened rule can only come about under the rule of an Objectivist benevolent dictator who exhibits his fine morality with acts such as ordering the murder of entire cities of his enemies, (specifically including civilians and especially teachers), riding down peace protesters "Armed with only their hatred of moral clarity", and arguing how they must live their lives free from backwards religious beliefs because there can be no proof of life beyond death...despite the main character having extensive experience with spirits.
- Hence why Steve Ditko made sure magic did not exist in any of his Objectivist works. WALLBANGER INDEED!
Tom Clancy's books are chock full of strawman liberals. Many people with liberal tendencies are either stupid, evil, or more likely, both. In his book Executive Orders, Vice President Ed Kealty is the ultimate evil strawman liberal. However, there are some non-stupid non-evil liberal characters in prominent roles in the later Clancy novels, President Roger Durling and Senator Trent being two examples.
- Senator Trent is a particularly notable example, given that he's gay. None of the cast, however conservative, find his sexual orientation to be in any way objectionable, remarkable, or any of their business (even if Jack Ryan pretends to be a homophobic bigot to him once, with Senator Trent's cooperation, as part of selling a CIA disinformation campaign.)
- He avoids the Strawman Liberal when it comes to his Presidential characters. He has a corrupt Republican, an incompetent Democrat, an honorable Democrat , and independent Author Avatar Jack Ryan.
Most politicians in the Honorverse get this treatment in some way - the good guys fall almost entirely into the Crown Loyalist or Centrist parties, while the bad guys and just plain nutcases/cowards are generally Conservatives and Liberals.
- There is one exception in the later books - Catherine Montaigne, who is a Liberal and yet not a total nutcase (though many of her views overlap with those of the C Ls) though she first appeared in a side story written by Eric Flint. That being said, Weber's more recent books have been rather more evenhanded in portraying political opposition, making a significant plot point out of Montaigne's reconstruction of the Liberal Party around sincere ideology instead of Countess New Kiev's hypocrisy.
  - Her views overlap with the Crown Loyalists'/Centrists because their views are, obviously, in the center. The only way to avoid finding at least some common cause with them is to be on either the extreme right or left, and extreme views rarely turn out well. It should be noted that CL's and Centrists are lumped together because the Queen herself is just right of center (when she isn't royally pissed), and you wouldn't be a CL if you didn't mostly agree with the queen, or at least think that what she says goes.
- A second major exception comes in the form of Michael Oversteegen, notable for having the mannerisms of an aristocratic twit. He's the cousin of the leader of the strawman Conservative party, sincerely believes in the importance of a hereditary aristocracy (the Conservatives' main reason for existence)... and despises the corruption his cousin tolerates in the party. He's also a very talented and extremely brave naval officer.
- And of course there are the Grayson's who early on are strawman conservatives, but are at least mildly open to new ideas, and whose views shift closer to center for fairly realistic reasons (many of which center around Honor saving their asses, though their leaders had designs on reshaping the society even before she came along and gave them a symbol to rally around). The Grayson ultra-conservative faction are Strawman Conservatives, but look sane compared to the formerly-Grayson ultra-extremists of Masada, who are effectively the Space Taliban.
In another David Weber example, the Starfire novels (which, admittedly, are collaborative works) make it easy to tell who the sniveling mush-brained idiots of the Terran Federation are - they're the ones with 'Liberal' in their party name. The first novel written, Crusade, gives them the Idiot Ball, and it seems they're still playing with it decades later. Although the Liberals' staunchest political allies (for reasons of pure self interest) are the Core World business interests, who are Strawman Conservatives to a man, and carry the Villain Ball just as often as the Liberals carry the Idiot Ball. A rather ironic reversal of the standard 'stupid party, evil party' joke as it relates to the American political divide.
In any novel by J.T. Edson, any character described as 'liberal' will be a coward, a hypocrite and a homosexual. They will also be ugly and not bathe.
- Ugly and not bathe? Then CLEARLY they can't be homosexual... (Yeah, it's sarcasm, but I'm gay, so it's allowed)
Pick a book, any book (but even moreso is solo work) by one Tom Kratman. A State of Disobedience is a classic study with a Liberal, Pro-Abortionist cabal led by the lesbian president Wilhelmina Rottemeyer launching police actions against a priest and other enemies of the state.
The S.M. Stirling series Island in the Sea of Time and sequels have straw liberals: hippies who can't believe in Evil Natives who therefore die horribly at the Evil Natives' hands; and straw conservatives: who complain about the lesbian Coastguard officer. His other books have other straw opponents, who exist solely to make ineffectual trouble.
- Not only do the straw liberals in Island die horribly, they accidentally wipe out the very Mesoamerican natives they want to protect (by infecting them with mumps, to which the natives have no immunity).
- Should be pointed out that the worst of the straw conservatives take themselves out Jonestown style rather early in the first book and that the black, lesbian Coast Guard Captain is the hero of the series.
Upton Sinclair's books are chock full of capitalist straw men.
Mercy Thompson has coherent and dangerous hate groups spring up every time a new supernatural species leaves the masquerade. Often overnight. They are always religious, conservative, and popular enough to push a federal bill to declare werewolves — at this point, going out of their way to only out their everyday heroes using their curses to help others — as non-citizens and non-human. That's right, a bunch of inherently homophobic, sexist, hierarchical werewolves, most of whom seem to be suburban or rural men and their wives, who tend to work for the military or government, that's what conservative Christians would rail against. Possibly subverted in Iron Bound, where Mercy infiltrates a hate group in search of a murderer. Her expectations and their posters bring up the typical nutjob concepts, but it's really just a small group of folk worried (justly) about The Fair Folk. Two of them are the murderers, but one killed the first time over getting dumped, and the latter murders are over money.
His Dark Materials makes out that the Church is a dominating, overbearing, malicious institution that likes to break children away from their daemons... essentially for shits and giggles.
- The Magisterium's motivation for intercision is clear: they believe it to be a remedy for original sin. At best, it produces obedient drones with no free will; since disobedience and free will are precisely the source of sin, that's intentional. (That in the more common case it produces Mind Raped wrecks is ... well, that's why they're the bad guys.)
In the novel Prayers for the Assassin, nuke attacks on American cities as well as Mecca result in blue America converting to Islam out of fear and compassion for the poor victimized Muslims, forming the Islamic Republic of America. Meanwhile, all the conservatives in those territories emigrate to the red Christian States of America.
The Guardians series is chock full of Strawmen of every possible political stripe, including some of the viewpoint characters— the original author seemed to be trying to be making the point that extremism of any form is bad (and if that's his message he sure did it in a muddled and confused way), but as new writers came in and the series got sharkier, it just got to be straw for straw's sake.
In Orson Scott Card's Empire the Blue states attempt to secede from the Union, funded by a Straw Liberal Billionaire obviously based on George Soros.
Piers Anthony's Bio of a Space Tyrant is chock full of these, especially the Nixon stand-in.
Dante put many of his political/religious enemies in Hell, making this Older Than Print
Richard K. Morgan's Th1rte3n breaks the United States up into three countries along streotypical (extremely so in the case of the red states) red/blue lines.

Live Action TV

All In The Family had the character Archie Bunker, who was created by producer Norman Lear to be a Neanderthalesque caricature of working-class conservatives. It backfired.
- Bunker was based on Alf Garnett of Till Death Us Do Part and its sequels. Creator Johnny Speight claimed the character was based directly on his own father's opinions.
- Archie Bunker was balanced out with the strawman liberals of his daughter Gloria Bunker-Stivic and her husband Michael Stivic.
24 has featured both types in its run. Two examples include a lawyer for "Amnesty Global" in season 4 who exempts an arrested suspect from interrogation (having been paid by a terrorist leader to do so), and deputy chief of staff Tom Lennox in season 6, who detains thousands of innocent Muslim Americans without presidential authorization and openly talks of "suspending liberties" to safeguard the country. (In later episodes, however, Lennox becomes more of a Magnificent Bastard than an Idiot Of The Week.) In quadruple irony the show is always ultimately geared towards the President's liberal and Protagonist's conservative values turning out to be correct. Detaining citizens of a radical religion HAS to be wrong, torturing terrorists HAS to be right. A restrained response to a downtown nuke HAS to be the right thing, despite the proven response to the much lower death toll of real life 9/11 being two wars and bloody hell in response to an errant nuke being the more likely consequence than a rogue maverick detaining citizens.
The Colbert Report, as a satirical pundit show, has had both. Steven Colbert's entire purpose for existance is to serve as a strawman conservative. In the early days of the show he was occasionally contrasted with liberal strawman milquetoast Russ Lieber, played by comedian David Cross. More recently, he has begun imagining his liberal opposite from a mirror universe, who wears tweed jackets and has a mustache, among other things.
This recent article in Entertainment Weekly bemoans former Strawman Conservatives on shows like Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip turning into liberals as they gain Character Development.
Averted in Family Ties. The producers had every chance to knock down the views of either the liberal parents or the conservative Alex, but instead, both ideologies were given positive looks. The liberals were made to look noble for their grassroots ideals, and the conservative was shown to be a hard worker. The show was reportedly one of President Reagan's favorites.
The entire premise of the 2005 CBC series Jimmy MacDonald's Canada was a Strawman Conservative current affairs show host trying to cope with the 1960s, until he went Ax Crazy in the last episode and crashed a plane into Northern Ontario. Since everything that bothered Jimmy happened several decades ago, no one feels offended by his over-the-top right wing leanings, as (most) modern conservatives have no objection to zambonis or Italian food.
CBC comedy Little Mosque On The Prairie includes Fred Tupper, an offensive radio host who doesn't trust Muslims, as well as Baber, who believes that winegums, liquorice, and rye bread are part of a plot to trick Muslims into drinking alcohol. In one episode, Baber was able to patch up his religious differences with an ignorant redneck because they both felt equally strongly about same-sex marriage, or, as Baber called it, "The Abomination."
- It gets even more subversive when you consider that the imam, who would never conduct such a marriage, encourages the Anglican minister to.
Considering that it's on the whole a pretty idealistic depiction of a Democratic Presidential administration, the writers of The West Wing clearly attempt to avoid this trope and make an effort to present both sides of the issues fairly for a large part of the series. How successful it is in this respect tends to vary according to the mileage, however; most Republicans who appear still tend to be Strawmen Conservatives and those who the audience is expected to like often tend to have beliefs towards the centre or even the left of the political spectrum nevertheless — for example, the sixth-and-seventh season Republican Presidential candidate, depicted as a genuinely honourable and decent man like his opponent, is a pro-choice secularist who appears to be a hidden atheist, viewpoints that would be unlikely to secure him his party's nomination in Real Life. Furthermore, when the main characters are proved wrong or lose it's usually less because their actual positions are wrong than they were stuck holding the Idiot Ball that week or that they got overconfident.
- Ainsley Hayes was a clear Take That of sharp-tongued conservative pundit Ann Coulter, and as such is a Blonde Republican Sex Kitten.
The selfish, borderline evil Senator Kinsey from Stargate SG-1 has No Party Given, but he's still depicted as a stereotypical strawman conservative what with all his raving about God and patriotism (he gives loud lip service to these concepts, but it seems pretty clear his true god is Power). On the other hand, he also seems to be decidedly anti-military (if only because our heroes are in the military) and, in fact, his views seem to have no guiding principle behind them, aside from always being wrong.
The CSI series (especially Miami) are a breeding ground for these characters and seem to be based on whatever the writers were morally outraged about during that particular week.
Cold Case featured an episode where modern day Christians in an abstinence group are actually perverts and sex maniacs, who stone a girl to death for trying to rat them out.
- Stonings aside, this is mildly Truth In Television—the abstinence groups at this troper's school were very promiscuous after-hours.
  - Mildly is putting it mildly. Imagine if the episode had been about evil, murderous abortion rights advocates.
Stephen King's The Mist has as an antagonist a crazy old lady, Mrs Carmody, who rallies the scared people to offer a 'human sacrifice' to appease the deadly mist... Apparently as demanded by God in the Bible, citations of actual verses be darned!
In a case of twisted irony, BBC's Bonekickers had an episode where fanatical Christians behead Muslims. Go figure.
- Sadly, except for the cause of death, that's not a strawman anymore. Crazy knows no creed, I guess.
On M*A*S*H, Major Frank Burns was a jingoistic, hypocritically pious, John Birch-style conservative Jerk Ass, while his successor Major Charles Winchester was a snobby Boston Brahmin type and Establishment Republican. (Then again, most of the series was mocking anyone who was pro-war, including MacArthur and just about every other general in the Army, as well as quite a few conservative celebrities of the time. Of course, in the actual 1950s, conservatism was even more conservative than its modern incarnation.)
- Winchester tended to waffle back and forth between conservative and liberal traits (as well as a number of other, non-political traits), depending on how sympathetically he was supposed to be viewed in the episode. Basically some writers attempted to make him Frank Burns with a New England accent, while others wrote him as a distinct character with his own set of foibles, not all of them negative. Though overall he's still a pretty textbook example, since the less positively-viewed he was supposed to be, the more of a conservative strawman he seemed to become.

New Media

The You Tube Video Beware the Believers plays the straw evolutionist for laughs.
Conservapedia: "The Trustworthy Encyclopedia". All articles on Democratic/Liberal/Evolutionary topics are built of straw.
- RationalWiki is a direct reaction against Conservapedia that takes constant potshots at conservatives, fundamentalists, Conservapedia, and especially its founder, Andrew Schlafly. Unlike Conservapedia, though, they make no claims to objectivity.
Poe's Law describes the difficulties inherent in separating applications of Strawman Political by certain evangelical Christians and parodies of the same.
Propositon 8: The Musical. You tell a group of Straw Conservatives when you see them.
The Year Zero ARG, which promotes the Nine Inch Nails album of the same name, depicts the United States after 15 additional years of rule by Strawman Republicans.

Newspaper Comics

Pretty much any liberal, Democrat, liberal Democrat, or member of a minority group that appears in Bruce Tinsley's Mallard Fillmore.
Doonesbury often features straw conservatives, as have Bloom County and its spinoffs.
Candorville features strawmen of both liberal and conservative varieties, and then lampshades them all to heck.
Get Fuzzy uses Bucky Katt for a conservative-as-idiot strawman, with Satchel Pooch as his Vitriolic Best Bud counterpart on the left.
Rat in Pearls Before Swine is also used as a conservative strawman. Given that Pearls creator Stephan Pastis and Fuzzy's Darby Conley are close friends, it's hard to guess who's copying who.
Winslow the coyote pup from Prickly City. In one early story, he suggested that he and his human companion, Carmen, get married, so that the author could equate gay marriage with bestiality.
Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks had plenty of these. (The strip's protagonist, Huey Freeman, could arguably be deemed a Strawman Black Radical, except that we're clearly meant to sympathize with him.)
Going further back, Little Orphan Annie and Li'l Abner frequently served up liberal versions, while Pogo featured them on both sides (though more often as conservatives, given Walt Kelly's politics).

Video Games

Andrew Ryan from the game Bioshock starts out as an Objectivist straw man, for those folk that the greedy conservative straw man just can't sate. Later on, its revealed that the downfall of Rapture occurred as a result of a political opponent's scheming and Ryan becoming a rather twisted Knight Templar, but at the beginning the whole thing seems rather Anvilicious.
The Weasel News Network of GTA IV is pretty much a direct Take That against Fox News Network. (Get the pun?). Everything about the network is portrayed as Crossing The Line Twice.
- For that matter, 90% of the satirical media in GTA IV is Straw Conservative. Its to the point that it's not even very funny anymore.
The radio messages in Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines. They add nothing to the story, and serve only to portray a fictional right-wing politician as a sleazeball. To be fair, the radio is purely there for comedy and everyone who appears on the radio is presented as a complete idiot. Most of Bloodlines doesn't really look favorably on anyone, except the liberal Nines, the conservative Bertram, and the independents Beckett and Jack. Or you could flip the first two, as Nines views government as needing to be small and Bertram as large.
- Real Life Liberalism and Conservatism have flipped their views of government size and responsibility a couple of times over the centuries, so why shouldn't their fictional followers?
In a very early example, Infocom's A Mind Forever Voyaging was intended as a critique of the Reagan era of conservative capitalism. The part where they didn't remotely use any of Reagan's actual policies, save for tax cuts, didn't help it any. It also didn't help that Senator Ryder, the Big Bad, was written as so psychotically evil that when the aforementioned psychohistorical forecasting shows that the end result of his plan will be that within 20 years the country will be bankrupt, within 40 years his hoped-for government will be overthrown by an apocalyptic religious cult and he will be either a powerless serf or dead, and that within 50 years human civilization will cease to exist, he isn't deterred a bit — just so long as he wins the next Presidential election, who cares if he's dooming the human race and himself personally? A more cartoonish straw man you would be hard-pressed to find.
- And the vaguely explained social welfarism that the game's ending provides seems to create a utopian society. It's a shame as it's otherwise an excellent game, if anvilicious to the extreme.

Webcomics

Just about every political webcomic features an abundance of nameless straw men politicial opposing the author's opinion. Occasionally, they will try to add in straw men of their own demographic in an attempt to show that they're not biased, but these straw men are either too subtle and argue about very minor points, or are ridiculously exaggerated in a way that makes them not even remotely believable.
Cecania and Fairbanks in Sore Thumbs are hilariously exaggerated strawmen of liberals and conservatives respectively. Each of them seems to have taken their ideology to a ridiculous extreme, and then taken the ridiculous extreme to a ridiculous extreme, leading to such things as Fairbanks having once killed a man because "he looked like a terrorist" and Cecania having been known to demonstrate outside abortion clinics because they won't offer drive-through service. Cecania is still presented as being a lot more sympathetic, though.
- I'd say Fairbanks has shown moments of being a bit less extreme or otherwise hypocritical to his views to the point of potentially being Character Development. And it shows Sawyer going against Cecania's vegetarian views, which makes him a character - other than Fairbanks, and is pretty likeable in general as opposed to Fairbanks - to be (kinda) against her opinions which at times I feel the writer's seem to be pushing towards due to portraying Cecania sympathetically, giving a bit of neutrality.
  - Not to mention Cecania thinks she's an amazing writer, claiming to have wrote what is essentially Twilight when she was thirteen, which is now a profitible movie . She even puts in a clear parallel to some AnimalWrongsGroups' attempts to make carnivores survive on a non-meat diet, and an Author Avatar with her first name.
  - http://sorethumbs.keenspot.com/d/20081217.html This isn't biased in the extreme?
  - Sore Thumbs has changed somewhat since its inception. Initially, Fairbanks was a strawman of the worst kind and Cecania was mainly a put-upon protagonist. Later, Cecania devolved/progressed into self-parody (Start sobbing so I can enjoy my hope and change!) and Fairbanks became half Strawman and half Ralph Wiggum (as seen when his response to Charleton Heston's death was to shoot a monkey with a harpoon gun). It's usually funny enough that you forget that the authors are far left enough link to Ted Rall, someone who almost all conservatives and many if not most liberals consider to be a real-life troll.
Chris Muir's Day by Day has characters on both ends of the political spectrum, but the conservative/libertarian characters (including product designer and Special Ops sniper Zed, black Republican Damon, and Redheaded Republican Sex Kitten Sam) are portrayed as both principled and cool, while liberal Jan is often portrayed as being a bit histrionic and over the top; however, the comic itself points out that the characters respect her because she actually believes what she's saying and says it because she's honestly trying to help others. This is pointed out in one comic where it's said Jan is a "dove", and that she's sincere about it (as opposed to many who claim the title and simply "sit around and shit all over everything"). There's even an arc chastising Damon for going too far with his arguing against her, where he acknowledges he needs to be more respectful of her ideals.
In Questionable Content, being a profesional Strawman is Angus's occupation. This means that he gets paid to appear on debates with ludicrous arguments and lose... must be awesome.
- Until he shows up to work to face off against another one...
Ctrl Alt Del had religious leaders from all over the world to temporarily put aside their differences to beat up upon Ethan's new Gamer Religion, and Lucas manages to dumbfound them with some minor piece of wisdom that they are utterly slackjawed to answer.
- Are you sure they were slackjawed, and not just using the usual 'mouth open, eyes glazed over' Ctrl Alt Del facial expression?
  - They had to deliberate and come up with an incredibly stupid reason to counter, instead of giving them this◊ gem.

Western Animation

"Justice League Unlimited" features a sinister, straw-conservative American general who complains about the "bleeding hearts in Congress" and turns himself into a supervillain in order to defend America from heroes. The series also features a cowardly straw-Bill O' Reilly type character.
"Batman, the Animated Series" features a villain not taken from the comic pages, Lock-Up, who is a straw-conservative and vigilante who despises the "liberal media" and enjoys throwing everyone he doesn't like into prison. Lock-Up may have been an attempt to make Batman seem more liberal by comparison, since Batman, a rich private citizen who succeeds where the corrupt public system fails, has been accused of being a conservative-friendly character.
The villain "Looten Plunder" on Captain Planet And The Planeteers, a completely amoral capitalist who dreams of "stripping entire continents" for monetary gain, was a strawman conservative (At least he had a reason, though.)
South Park has also featured both conservative and liberal strawmen. To name just one of many examples, the episode "Goobacks" features a debate on The O'Reilly Factor between a "pissed-off white-trash redneck conservative" and an "aging liberal hippie douche" (who are actually called that) over the titular temporal immigrants. The liberal spouts vapid homilies about how "America was founded on immigration", while the conservative simply rants "Dey turk our jaaaaaaaarbs!"
- That particular example is semi-parodical, though. It's somewhat of a commentary on how shows like The O'Reilly Factor generally feature strawmen who fit into one of those two molds surprisingly well, instead of normal people. 'Cause who wants to watch normal people, anyway?
- "For the War, against the War, who cares! One hundred episodes!"
  - "What. The. Hell. This town sucks."
- The "Butt Out" episode was a big example but confusing. If Rob Reiner (or anyone else) isn't actually faking all the evidence to show second hand smoke causes cancer, the whole premise of smoking being a personal choice only affecting the user doesn't work, so the apparent moral is rather senseless.
- There's no reason to fake it when it's ambiguous enough to drive a truck through, and relies on an ignorance of probability to appear more dangerous than slicing your carotid while shaving... with a safety razor.
- Honestly, it's not just politics. Anyone Parker and/or Stone disagree with or dislike gets this treatment from politicians to writers to movie-makers and will always have bad thing happen to them. The thing is that they make the Take Thats so grotesquely over-the-top (frequently showing said strawmen as such things as megalomaniacs, people who don't even think their own ideas don't make sense, rapists, and literally the world's largest piece of shit) that people find them funny instead of self-indulgent and condescending.
- The 2008 election episode subverted all of this by making all the politicians involved (Except, oddly enough, Biden) rather intelligent jewel thieves.
The Boondocks episode Wingmen featured Dewey Ababaoo Mamasee Mamasay Mamakusa Jenkins, a fake Muslim who writes bad poetry because he's "down with the struggle." Huey, an actual leftist revolutionary, finds him disgraceful.
- Of course, Huey himself is a strawman, but so is everyone else on the show and comic. One thing you can say about McGruder, he's balanced in his extremities. Except Caesar (comics), who is essentially the Closer To Earth Straight Man for whom Huey gets too extreme/obsessed.
- Their portrayal of Ann Coulter is a subversion: she appears on TV as a massively hateful ranter, but it's just an act for publicity.
- By a similar token, Rev. Rollo Goodlove, a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Al Sharpton, is a self-serving liberal hypocrite who intentionally attaches himself to bogus "struggles" for publicity.
- Huey's neighbor Tom Dubois and his wife, though played as decent people, are milquetoast, establishment Strawman Democrats who live far away from Huey's reality. Tom once tried to kidnap Ralph Nader for taking votes away from Al Gore. (Thus earning the title of "the first moderate liberal extremist.")
Stan Smith, the gun-toting CIA-operative lead in American Dad, is a Strawman Conservative, played for laughs. His daughter Hayley is a Strawman Liberal, played for laughs as well. Hayley generally comes across as the more sensible of the two, though.
- The odd thing is that while he consistenly remains a Straw Conservative, he can come off as surprisingly sympathetic at some points.
More recent episodes of Family Guy are also doing this to an almost insane extent. Conservative Americans or people not from the Northeast or West Coast are nearly always built into Strawman Conservatives, and the show rarely misses a chance to take a potshot at George W. Bush or anyone affiliated with him, usually in a manner that is about as Anvilicious as you can get. Although this troper is not particularly conservative, this gets tedious very quickly.
King Of The Hill does that a lot with liberal and intellectuals/elites (such as Professors and Doctors), sometimes combining the two. However, it does have some hilarious moments as during the parodying of pc people, when Hank's whole church is having a whole prayer intervention over Hank's racism, because of his dog.
- You could say that Hank (and in early seasons, Dale) is this trope as well. Dale being the stereotype of the right that thinks the government is watching our every move, while Hank more of the traditionalist right.
The Simpsons uses these on occasion, typically conservative ones. In one episode, the local Republican Party is depicted meeting in a sinister castle complete with a vampire.
- Lisa is occasionally shown as a liberal version, though her views are almost always depicted much more sympathetically.

Tabletop Games

The Imperium of Man, the "protagonists" through whose eyes much of the setting of Warhammer 40000 is seen, are anover-the-top portrayal of fascism taken well past its (il)logical extreme (and let's not kid ourselves here, real-world fascism is pretty terrifying to begin with).
- But only as a whole, planet to planet on the other hand do verty, and most Goverons (which are really more like Kings/Queens, but due to religion can't be called that) are Reasonable Authority Figures.

Truth In Television

No matter who is in office, politicians of the day are frequently portrayed as Strawmen Political in contemporary films, shows, and books. Occasionally the Supreme Court gets this treatment too, but not as often as they're not as outspoken as the other branches of the government. This is actually Older Than Steam—some historians believe The Prince, ostensibly written for a Florentine aristocrat, may have actually been a Stealth Satire aimed at the ruling Medici family.
- Political cartoons rely on exaggerating the subject's characteristics for humor or to make a point.
- Contemporary pundits and fiction writers tend to be downright kindly compared to contemporary political opponents. No person can hold a major political position for more than a few months without some (usually trumped up) scandal being slung at them by opponents. And that's even before the strawmanning - there are people who literally make a living misrepresenting their viewpoints.
  - Yes, Virginia, and in Washington there are 535 of them in one building, 9 in another, and an indeterminate amount in a separate complex of executive office buildings which can't be fully elaborated or disclosed for national security reasons.
After telling a 2008 campaign rally that conservatives have to be careful about what they say, North Carolina representative Robin Hayes sparked a minor controversy that led to his electoral defeat when he announced that "liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God." One only wonders why he didn't throw in puppies, rainbows and apple pies.
- This was echoed by a statement by John McCain's adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer: "I certainly agree that Northern Virginia has gone more Democratic . . . But the rest of the state — real Virginia if you will — I think will be very responsive to Senator McCain's message." Apparently people in and around Arlington who swing to the left are "fake" Virginians. Around the same time, McCain's running mate said in North Carolina that she liked visiting "the pro-America areas of the country," implying that other states were anti-America.
  - This is mostly a by-product of the "Liberal Elite who-do-not-understand-what-the-real-American-think-and-feel" propaganda. At first this attack was targeted at liberal politicians and opinion-makers: but keep relying on this trope a little too much, and you will start pointing fingers at liberal voters.
Police, faculty and staff in New Jersey held a "realistic" preparation exercise where Christian militias invade a school and take everyone hostage.
- Whatever happened to the days when 'war games' would make up entirely fictional names for the Aggressor faction precisely to avoid this kind of problem? Their anti-terrorist drill would have worked entirely as well if they'd had their 'terrorists' calling themselves the "Sith Liberation Army", or anything else.
  - I find your lack of political correctness towards the Dark Side disturbing.
- This troper actually trained in crowd/riot control with the crowd being strawman of some sort when it wasn't simply hungry people wanting to get at a supply truck. It actually alternated between far left liberal ("Hell no we won't go!") and far right conservitive ("Secession!") so that we wouldn't feel particularly shocked, angery at or sympethatic to the crowd and deal with the situation with a detached professionalism.
Richard Dawkins once remarked that he was amazed to learn Ann Coulter "was not a spoof created by the Onion". Take from that what you will.
The freeware game by Tarn Adams, Liberal Crime Squad is entirely built around this. America is slowly becoming incredibly conservative, and you play as the titular group of criminals, who are willing to murder and sabotage society to get everyone to become liberal. Your main enemies are the Conservative Crime Squad, who are just as crazy as the Liberal Crime Squad.