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alt title(s): Strawmen Politicals; Straw Political
The Dracula/Voldemort presidential ticket: coming next election year!
"I OPPOSE EVERYTHING"
Protester's placard in Dominion Tank Police
Imagine a boxer steps into the ring and declares that today the crowd will watch as he pulverizes the reigning world champion; to their bemusement, he then produces a straw dummy that looks a little like his supposed opponent, beats the hell out of it, and declares himself the victor. This is the essence of the Strawman Fallacy; a debater constructs a weakened form of an opponent's argument, and in defeating it acts like they have defeated the real argument.
A strawman, therefore, is a caricatured and deliberately crippled version of an opposing viewpoint that the author uses to try and support their own position. A strawman differs from a parody in that in the latter case the viewer is intended to regard the exaggeration and distortion as humourous and thus recognise it is not a valid portrayal of a real point of view; the strawman is exaggerated purely for the purpose of making it easier to defeat or mock.
A strawman can be made of pretty much any political or religious stance; why bother addressing the real issues of, for example, firearms advocates, when you can instead portray them all as bearded, racist lunatics ranting about black helicopters and wanting to own their own nuclear warheads? And so it goes with all examples; capitalists literally worship the bottom line, liberals are all secret communists aiming to destroy morality, scientists shake their fist at God while plotting to surpass him, the religious are wide-eyed, superstitious madmen, feminists want to kill all men, and so on. This is not to say that such extremists don't actually exist, but the Strawman Political presents extreme or minority views as the typical beliefs of a group rather than those of a tiny subset of it.
A sub-type of Strawman Political is the sounding board, a character who makes points on their side purely so a character the author agrees with can reply with devastating comebacks that prove the first character's foolishness. The Strawman Political is left stumped by the author's obvious wisdom, and will struggle to reply, leave, or explode angrily to show how unreasonable they are. This will frequently backfire, however, since often the author insert tends to be so sanctimonious about their points that they are far easier to dislike than their opponent.
Characters of this type are extremely one-dimensional, since every aspect of them is geared towards the goal of advancing the political or religious views of the author. 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.
Of course, it should be pointed out that, sometimes, a strawman is the only way to avoid Misaimed Fandom.
Sub Tropes:
Some types of Animal Wrongs Groups may also be included, but, ironically, not so much the ones killing or recklessly endangering people in order to "save" the animals, because those really exist.
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.
Additional note: Avoid adding Real Life or Truth In Television examples. While there are some people with views so extreme it's hard to believe they're not a joke, these people are not in themselves strawmen, as they were not made by someone else for the specific purpose of mocking them.
Examples
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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?
- Jack Chick outdid himself in a Crusaders and Alberto comics, where the main characters meet new political strawmen 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; make your own decision 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 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 others side.
- Later taken to extremes when Hawk murdered Dove and became a brutal militaristic dictator.
- This all becomes rather strange when you consider that the peaceful, pacifist, Dove constantly telling Hawk that not all problems are solved by running around in spandex and punching people in the face is portrayed as unfailingly right by most writers, when the entire setting pretty much revolves around people running around in spandex and punching people in the face.
- Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns went both ways: 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.
- Miller's portrayal of each proves that he was rather deliberate in his constructing them of straw. The Shrink was a shameless self-promoter to the point even the Joker was annoyed by it, while the sequel had the President exposed as a holographic mouthpiece for Lex Luthor. Anyone's guess if the Reagan parody was one, too, but the implication is certainly there...
- 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.
- In one story, he gives a taxi driver "the best tip you'll get all day!" Which amounts to telling the driver to buy his new book. Real class act, this guy.
- Armstrong was symptomatic of the same dork age in the Superman books which gave us the blue energy Superman. Thankfully, soon after that storyline ended, he was put on a bus and has not been seen since.
- 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 Well Intentioned Extremist rather than a self-centered fascist prick.
- The problem here is that fascists were well intentioned extremists. Maybe not the leaders, but the rank and file honestly believed in their cause. Simply because you have good intentions doesn't mean that you aren't a fascist.
- 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 hopelessly 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!"
- 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.
- And people have complained from the very beginning that these people being so unequivocally wrong doesn't make much sense. Blacks, gays, uggos, Jews, etc. don't have the ability to make buildings explode with their minds.
- 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. This is treated by many of the others with a reaction generally equatable to "Sure, man, we all would have loved to have done it, that doesn't mean you should have."
- Green Arrow Oliver Queen was shown as a hero for the people in his earlier stories, and had a majorly left-wing agenda, referring to rich conservatives as fat cats. Occasionally though, in more recent stories writers will let Queen's negative qualities such as his self-rightiousness or his contempt for aforementioned "Fat cats" get the better of him, and he comes off, intentionally or not, as something of a Straw Liberal. This is taken to extremes (and possibly played for laughs) in The Dark Knight Strikes Again.
- Miller went overboard rather strongly in DK 2, but in Queen's case it should be noted that Queen had taken to cynically gaming the system in The Dark Knight Returns, which might explain his later histrionics as a means to keep a smokescreen up lest his cohorts turn on him like Superman had when he burned off Queen's arm with heat vision in the backstory. Like Ollie said, "You have to make the bastards work for you."
- An early Garth Ennis issue of The Punisher had the titular vigilante (of all people) threatening President Bush, claiming the US brought 9/11 on itself, and ranting about the military industrial complex a mere few weeks after the attacks happened in Real Life.
- Pretty much any politician who appears in The Authority will be depicted as corrupt, greedy and too dumb to live. They also will be all Strawman Conservatives - and the more vocally they are opposed to the titualr gorup of superpowered sociopaths, the more Straw they get.
- In an issue of Preacher, Jesse was listening to a late-night debate between a Straw Feminist and a Straw Conservatist wich was so stupid he got pissed off, called the radio station, and used his Voice to make them confess what each really wanted. They both said they want cock.
- Silver Age comics had some Straw Man communists, especially in Iron Man with guys like Titanium Man and Crimson Dynamo. Now communism is a flawed ideology that deserves a lot of the criticism it gets, but these guys come across as cartoonish caricatures of a what a communist is supposed to be rather then part of any criticism that has any depth. Your average communist villain in the Silver age was about as deep as a Captain Planet villain. Since the focus was on their ideology rather then their characters they have remained Flat Character types and kinda pointless after the Berlin Wall fell.
- According to Y The Last Man, what's the only thing worse than insane Amazonians who run around essentially randomly blowing crap up and slaughtering people? Republicans, of course!
- Well, the Republicans did have us in Iraq running around around while blowing stuff up and killing people, so it's kind of the same. Also, Iraq was just as innocent.
Film
- In Penthouse Pictures' Caligula, Mc Dowell's titular role takes this one VERY literally, as he leads soldiers into Gaul, has them cut down reeds there, and returns claiming to have conquered Gaul.
- 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 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 rhetoric of the Bill Clinton era and he was attacked on his alleged lack of "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 the 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.)
- 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.
- 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.
- While the Senator in The Birdcage is pretty strawmannish, it's easy enough to view it as just a sign of the ridiculous exaggeration and silliness that pervades all the characters. He's a kooky, over-the-top example of far-right politicians because the family of his daughter's fiance is a kooky, over-the-top example of a gay couple.
- 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.
- Harold And Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay. Almost every time a political opinion of any type is expressed.
- Blue State is actually more politically complex than the concept (two people moving to Canada after Bush gets re-elected) would imply, but the protagonist's father is a definite conservative Strawman Political: he greets his son by calling him "Comrade Lenin," locks him for voting for Kerry, and begins to act like a deranged Bill O'Reilly on mushrooms when his son argues with him, screaming out to "cut his mic," and eventually throws his son out of the house.
- Mexican film Un Mundo Maravilloso was deliberately made as a giant leftist Take That to the liberal economic policies of recent governments in Mexico (but more specifically Vicente Fox's administration), the protagonist (a homeless, jobless hobo) and his friends several times blame "the system" and "the government" for his situation, and the minister of economy (the antagonist) in the end decides to outlaw poverty and for this he wins the Nobel Prize in Economy.
- Similarly, La Ley de Herodes (which is set in the 50s) from the same filmmaker has these two exchanges between an opposition party member and a strawman U.S. citizen:
Morales:Do you think democracy is the solution for poor countries like Mexico?
Robert: No no no, we Americans also like dictatorships like yours.
Morales:Is it true that your countrymen are still angry from the Mexican oil expropriation?
Robert:Well a little... yeah. But my countrymen know that one day we will recover all of that, and in time more, much more.
- In Hiding Out, Jon Cryer is an adult accountant hiding out as a high school student. In a history class, the strawman conservative teacher gives a weak and histrionic defense of Richard Nixon as Cryer's character struggles to bite his tongue.
- Team America World Police features gung-ho, collateral damage causing Strawman Conservatives taking on Strawman Liberal actors who help terrorists.
- But Im A Cheerleader involved straw-conservatives trying to teach gay teens to recover their "true" sexuality via acting out stereotypical 1950's gender roles. Of course, everyone in the movie is a stereotype of some sort.
- Most American action films from The Eighties were hostile to Straw Liberal or Straw Feminist views, with two typical varieties. In both cases, a female character has a limited number of roles: Victim Of The Week, Distressed Damsel, or butchy ball-busting harpy, and will never be as important to the hero as his partner.
Literature
- The novel Battlefield Earth features a group of liberal "politicians" (recent stone age 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.
- 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 implementation of total war, 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.
- 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.
- His Rainbow Six had strawman environmentalists, who wanted to save the Earth from humanity by killing off 99% of it. Though in reality, people like this do actually exist. Just google the 'Voluntary Human Extinction Society' for example.
- 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 are at least two exceptions 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.
- The Graysons aren't really strawman types: they're very highly conservative, but it's a fairly natural development of their history and the extremely harsh conditions they live under.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 political purges 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 Coast Guard 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.
- Being a staunch socialist, 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 Kissed, 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.
- His Dark Materials makes out that the Church is a dominating, overbearing, malicious institution that likes to break children away from their daemons... to save them from themselves, of course.
- 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. Its also a possible subversion as neither of the two are shown to be working particuarly well as they are overrun with armed religious extremist militias, ravaged by global warming and are being invaded by both Mexico and Canada.
- 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 (though this was all set up by a conservative Magnificent Bastard).
- 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 stereotypical (extremely so in the case of the red states) red/blue lines.
- Galileo's Dialogue On The Two Chief World Systems has a Strawman Geocentrist named Simplicio. Part of what got Galileo in trouble was that he put the Pope's words in Simplicio's mouth.
- Heinlein's books all have obvious Strawmen— if not the entire "jealous" or "ignorant" human population— against the Mary Sue protagonists, since his political philosophies presented not only are insanely black-and-white— but they also jump between various extremes on the political spectrum, depending on the year they're written, to the point of being bi-polar. For example in Farmer in the Sky, Earth faces a state of starvation due to Chinese overpopulation, while Heinlein nevertheless advocates An Aesop policy of "share and share alike," by other countries— a Strawman which even the most extreme liberals would consider absurd. In contrast, in Starship Troopers, Heinlein jumps to the manic-depressive opposite, advocating not only disenfranchisement— as well as sterilization— (What?! It would be... good, to read the book first, then criticize it) of all non-veterans, but also corporal punishment for convicted criminals, as well as capital punishment for even insane persons who commit homocide. (This is all justified with various hamfisted Strawman-arguments comparing people to dogs— which draw near to arguments for animal-abuse.) Then, in later stories such as "Stranger in a Strange Land," Heinlein once again jumps to ultra-elite liberterian views involving a rich and famous Mary Sue writer/doctor/lawyer, protecting an even more rich and famous Mary Sue Martian/Changeling/cult-leader, from an entire human society of fascist-politicians and religious-fanatics who want to stop/control/kill him— but by doing so, are about to get the Earth blown up by Martians due to their dangerous and ignorant views: sort of an interplanetary version of Atlas Shrugged, along with simplistic Strawman arguments comparing humans to monkeys— but at the same time, strangely, equating them to God. (It's rumored that the latter novel was written on a bet between Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard, over which one could start an actual religious cult-- clearly, Heinlein lost: just ask Tom Cruise).
- Senator Sedgewick Sexton from Dan Brown's Deception Point, a Republican senator who starts out as an obvious scumbag and becomes more and more of a Complete Monster as the book progresses.
- Strawmen can be found in all manner of classical literature. Plato regularly used strawmen as opponents to Socrates in his Socratic Dialogues, making this trope Older Than Feudalism.
- The Illuminatus! Trilogy has strawmen left right and centre. In the end, the authors have an Anarcho-Individualist lean, and its representives are protrayed as completely insane... in a good way. Various strawmen include Knights of Christianity United in Faith and Simon Moon's parents (militant anarcho-syndicalist dad and anarcho-pacifist mom, which leads to embarassing situations such as Simon telling his third grade teacher that the US isn't a democracy).
- Mike Carey's short story Face is about a judge from a fictional empire who has to issue a decision in the case of two desert people - father and daughter. Their race (obvious Muslim analogue), for religious reasons, uses magic to take their women's faces, which are returned to them after they're married. The daughter doesn't believe in her people's religion and wants her face back. The judge decides that this tradition is disgusting and detrimental to women and orders the desert people to return all faces to women under threat of punishment. Everything is told from the judge's perspective, making the desert people look like strawmen. However, at the end of the story, we find out how big a hypocrite the judge is when he mercilessly hammers down his own daughter's dreams about being an explorer by saying that her destiny is to marry a man and become a mother.
Live Action TV
- Sue Sylvester from Glee, "Not everyone is gonna have the walnuts to take a pro-littering stance. But I will not rest until every inch of our fair state is covered in garbage."
- 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.
- These were token Strawmen, who usually got the last word and/or were proven right by the end of the episode, leaving Archie with An Aesop which proves it.
- 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.
- 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 center or even the left of the political spectrum nevertheless — for example, the sixth-and-seventh season Republican Presidential candidate, depicted as a genuinely honorable 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.
- The CSI series (especially Miami) are a breeding ground for these characters.
- In a case of twisted irony, BBC's Bonekickers had an episode where fanatical Christians behead Muslims. Go figure.
- 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.
- He did tell the aide to the McCarthy stand-in that he was so conservative he made McCarthy look like a New Dealer.
- Winchester changed with the Character Development episodes, becoming far quite liberal, supposedly "becoming wise" by the harsh realities of war compared to his earlier sheltered lifestyle— particularly after Alan Alda took over the show's writing and production for Larry Gelbart. This making him the perfect mold of the Strawman Political, i.e. first a pompous ass, and then converted by the show's political bias.
- Frank Burns became so over-the-top that his strawman behavior was justified by the Rule Of Funny. Towards the end of his run on the show, it had gone so far that Frank was almost a parody of a strawman conservative.
- Parodied/lampshaded in the first episode of That's My Bush:
George W Bush: You must always remember that she believes what she does because she thinks she's right.
George W Bush: And you must always remember that he believes what he does because of a strong moral imperative.
- Parodied on The Young Ones with the character of Rik; so over the top, it actually seems to be making fun of conservatives who see liberals this way.
- Averted in the episode "The Salon" of The Drew Carey Show. The issue of Internet censorship is brought up during a debating salon started by Drew and friends to impress Drew's boss Mrs. Louder, who is a devout conservative. Mrs. Louder appears to be a Strawman Political, as she responds in the affirmative, claiming that "any good conservative" would be in favour of Net censorship, and even fires Drew's friend and fellow employee Kate over her disagreement. However, conservatives as a whole are not painted with this brush as Kate herself claims that she knows many conservatives who do not think that way, and later in the episode Rush Limbaugh (whom Mrs. Louder is a huge fan of) makes a guest appearance, reveals that he actually agreed with Kate on this issue - and convinces Mrs. Louder to rehire her.
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.
- Poes 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.
- It gets absolutely ridiculous. It's stated they're forbidding women to work, have genocidal bands of Christians killing non Christians in certain suburbs, they make their soldiers take drugs to both combat the drug the evil neocons poisoned everyone with (yes, that's what they did) and get Special Forces to take even worse drugs that forces the body to equate killing with sexual excitement, the local Mega Corp exploits drug addicts to boost their profits, and they make up "terrorists" by creating a virus.
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.
- However, it is hinted that he acts conservative in order to irritate Satchel and Rob, both Liberals
- 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.
- In the notes to the treasury collections, artist Stephan Pastis indicates that Rat is simply himself with less self-restraint. Whether that still qualifies Rat for Strawman status is debatable.
- Royboy in "Soup To Nutz" is also used as a conservative strawman. This usually doesn't work too well, because he's often just used to spout whatever the writer believes are right-wing talking points, such as anti-vaccine propaganda, while the other characters laugh at him. The character rarely actually acts like the 8-year-old boy he is. His younger sister is often used as a left-wing straw man, making anti-war, pro-vegetarian comments. The strip is rather Anvilicious in its politics.
- 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).
- Use of the trope in newspaper editorial cartooning is satirized by The Onion's "Kelly" (actually, Ward Sutton). In the persona of a cranky conservative, "Kelly" returns again and again to caricatures like the New Age Retro Hippie (here), Teens Are Monsters (here), using The Grim Reaper to symbolize disliked trends (throughout) and so on. Actually not too far off from the technique of newspaper cartoonist Chuck Asay.
- And of course
half almost all the comics have the Statue Of Liberty crying (when things are going well for Kelly, she's weeping with joy)
- The reason we have newspaper comic strips is that during the 19th century editors discovered funny, topical, easy to read drawings helped sell more papers—and the artists were expected to adhere to the paper's editorial slant.
- This proving that old habits die hard.
Theatre
- Louis Ironson of Angels In America reads very much like a Deconstruction of the Strawman Liberal stereotype.
- Mr Birling from An Inspector Calls is a prime example of a British conservative straw man. J.B. Priestly givea the audience no doubt that he is wrong about everything, including his political and social opinions.
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 Grand Theft Auto 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.
- GTA: Vice City had a talk show where right and left-wing strawen tried to out-straw each other, though admittedly comments like "Your father made lots of money, which makes him a great man" are more memorable than whatever the other side had to say.
- 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?
- Also, at one point, a bartender asks what your darkest secret is. After passing over several opportunities to own up to things you've done over the course of the game, one of your options is "I voted Republican one time." The bartender says she can't help you with that one.
- 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.
- 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.
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 two people because "they looked like terrorists" (luckily for him, they were) 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.
- 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.
- Of course, since having her go through an obligatory Opposites Attract romance with Damon, Jan has increasingly shifted to being a Fox News Liberal, with her position of Straw Liberal taken over by Sam's sister Skye, who has nearly no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
- In Questionable Content, being a professional Strawman is Angus's occupation. This means that he gets paid to appear on debates with ludicrous arguments and lose... must be awesome. When he goes up against another professional Strawman, they end up actually competing as to who can give a worse argument.
- 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.
- Hackles has Marcus, their marketing mouse. He is used to support anything uncool, such as some conservatism (although they don't really get into politics, everyone is "moderate"), Windows users, poor web design, poor software design and marketting. He would be a Butt Monkey if he didn't deserve what happens to him (he is a mouse, and some of the characters are mice...including his nurse/date).
- Better Days has...Well, everyone who isn't Fisk.
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 featured an over-the-top Rob Reiner as such an out of control zealot that he actually tries to kill Cartman just to ban smoking. Conversely, the tobacco industry is portrayed as being without fault: when the boys learn that tobacco plantations used African slaves, one remarks "so without tobacco, many of our black friends wouldn't be here!"
- 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.
- Given that they're evidently Libertarians I doubt that counts.
- 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.")
- More recent episodes of Family Guy are also doing this to an almost insane extent. Conservative Americans or people from the Deep South (which the show seems to define as anyplace outside of 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. The basic message: if you're a conversative, you must be (literally) retarded at best. One joke was nothing but three characters repeating the words "Laura Bush killed a guy." No joke, no satire, no possible reason for why that should be a joke even if it did happen.
- 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. The local Republican Party's usual meeting place is in a sinister castle, and their members include a vampire and Mr. Burns. In "Sideshow Bob Roberts", the Republicans nominate multiple-convicted attempted murdere Sideshow Bob as a mayoral candidate.
- They did this to the Democrats in a more recent episode
Democrat: With Ralph leading the party, I don't know how we will screw it up, but we will, because that's what democrats do!
- They even mistake a water cooler for the candidate at first.
- The Simpsons use to take several at Democrats in the old days. Mayor Quimby was originally an expy of the Kennedy's, being a Composite Character of JFK (the voice), Ted Kennedy, and the corruption that tends to be involved in Chicago politics.
- In one of the earlier episodes, Bart's elephant Stampy runs through a Republican convention and gets cheered. A sign at the convention says "We want whats worst for everybody!" and then when he runs through the Democrat convention, one has a sign that says "We can't govern!"
- Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law featured some Animal Liberation Nut Strawmen in "Free Magilla"; they freed all the animals from Mr. Peeble's pet store, even though this seemed to cause the creatures more anxiety than relief. When Magilla Gorilla later reunites with Mr. Peebles, he asks him to "Take me home- home to my nice, safe cage", the group who stole him splashes red paint on him and shouts "Animal freedom now!"
- In Awful Comics, the leader of conservatives was revealed to be Lord Zedd.
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