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alt title(s): Strawmen Politicals "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
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 uteruses." 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 misrepresentations of liberal belief rather than on anything liberals actually believe. Common in pro-religious literature and programming and in fiction with a strong right-leaning ideological bent. Expect a 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.
Its counterpart, the Strawman Conservative, is likewise found frequently in fiction with a left-leaning ideological bent. The Strawman Conservative is either heavily religious, very traditional, and rabidly afraid to the point of intolerance of anybody who doesn't fit the first two criteria, and will try to have the law of the land rewritten to exclude or marginalize them. They're doing it for the innocent children, though.
Another type of Strawman Conservative 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 variety can at least be said, like the Strawman Liberal, to have "good" intentions, the second 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.
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 (and Michael Moore) 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.
Includes:
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: 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.
Examples
Comic Books
- Almost every evangelist tract by Jack T. 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?
- 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.
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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...
- 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.
- 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 would, too.
- Euphanizing 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)... This troper might have even missed a few. I think it's safe to say the other writers weren't actually rooting for 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.
- Actually, she manages to straw man both sides simultaneously with that asinine 'NASCAR or Myspace' thing. Given that NASCAR fandom is not traditionally associated with the 'blue states'.
- 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 supresses the transformation by thinking about "commie agitators", "pinko faggots", and the "death penalty" while shouting that he "will not change!"
Film
- Superman IV: The Quest for Peace had a cadre of strawmen conservatives, and a William Hootkins, as Lex Luthor's henchmen.
- 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.
- Mr Potter, the villain of the film Its A Wonderful Life, is the greedy capitalist version of the Strawman Conservative to a tee. However, being a excellent example of the Magnificent Bastard too, he remains thoroughly enjoyable to watch despite being none too three-dimensional.
- Potter also never has a comeuppance, and nothing is really solved.
- Hes also a wizard.
- 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.
- Strawman liberals can't smoke cigars, plot evil, and sing? :)
- Sure they can; just not all at the same time.
- No. Strawman liberals smoke cigarettes.
- Clove cigarettes.
- This troper thought 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.
- And his pet issue was gun control, and his girlfriend's environmental bill.
- 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 English nationalists, especially the BNP and its sympathisers on a few accounts, it's more likely that the Christian fundamentalist, Islam-hating, homophobic, authoritarian, nationalist and racist (though the last part does not show that much in The Movie) Norsefire government was a not-all-that-strawman portrayal of them.
- President Bennett in Clear and Present Danger was something of a Strawman Conservative, pretty much fitting left-wing caricatures of Ronald Reagan.
- 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.
- Many action films of the 1980s were thinly-disguised conservative propaganda. In these films, the legal system was populated by Strawman Liberal judges and police chiefs who let mass murderers and drug dealers prey upon the innocent freely, and only one or two gun-toting vigilantes or renegade cops could clean up the streets by acting as judge, jury and executioner. Other action films held up conservative cause célèbres of the era including American POWs in Vietnam, the Cold War and the War on Drugs.
Literature
- The novel Battlefield Earth features a group of liberal politicians 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/personality cult 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.
- 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.
- Most non-heroic politicians in the Honorverse get this treatment in some way - the good guys fall almost entirely into the Crown Loyalist or Centrist parties, both of which have values we'd reckon as conservative-leaning Libertarians. Incidentally, everyone who is supposed to be a good guy falls into these two categories, with Conservatives and Liberals being nutcases out of hand.
- There is one exception in the later books - Catherine Montaigne, who is a Liberal and yet not a total nutcase, though it almost seems as though she's a Liberal to screw this argument over, as the rest of her values are pretty much Centrist/Crown Loyalist, not to mention her lover's Crown Loyalist. Montaigne first appeared in a side story written by Trotskyite 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 that with the Crown Loyalists because the CL's are pretty much the political center of Manticore. The only way to avoid finding at least some common cause with them is to be on either the extremely extreme right or left, and both of those factions suck.
- A second 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.
- In another David Weber example, the Starfire novels (which, admittedly, are collaborative works) make it easy to tell who the sniveling corrupt cowards 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.
- 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).
- 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.
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.
- It may be that the two only appear as strawman constructs to the modern viewer, though. Remember, they were flower children during the period of flower children. When they were written, there's a good chance the writers were trying to play it straight with them.
- No. Mike "Meathead" Stivic was just as Strawman Liberal as Archie was Conservative. Gloria was slightly less so. Edith Bunker just wanted everyone to get along, and rarely succeeded.
- 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 both. Colbert's screen persona is a ridiculous self-aggrandizing conservative, while his
frequent completely forgotten opponent Russ Lieber, played by comedian David Cross, is a full-on liberal straw man milquetoast.
- 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, rock and roll, 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 a pretty idealistic depiction of a Democratic Presidential administration, The West Wing for the most part manages to avoid this trope, being surprisingly even-handed in its treatment of the opposition (at least in it's early years); the main characters aren't always right, they don't always win, they were often out-argued or scuttled by their own hubris and self-righteousness, and the writers often make an effort to present both sides of most issues reasonably fairly and even-handedly, balancing any Strawmen that appear with more reasonable characters sharing the same or similar positions. In the second series Ainsley Hayes, a conservative Republican, joined the White House staff, and in the sixth and seventh seasons, the Republican Presidential Candidate Arnold Vinick was depicted as being just as honorable and dignified as his Democratic opponent. It's worth noting, though, that the more reasonably-depicted Republican characters still tended to lean more closely to the center and the left than the Strawmen who did appear (Vinick, whilst a Republican, was still a pro-choice secularist), and the series did tend to fall in the trap of any opposing viewpoints being depicted as being unable to come up with a response to the impressive arguments presented to them.
- 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. 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.
New Media
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.
- Anyone who thinks Ryan's a strawman Objectivist hasn't read enough Ayn Rand. They really are that bad. Just look at all the Objectivists out there who think he's a great guy!
- That depends on what time you're looking at Ryan. When he moves to the U.S., for example, you're right. But then when he a) begins hating charity, b) forbids contact with the surface, and c) becomes a parasitic dictator, pro-Ryan Objectivists are a) kind of, b) pretty, and c) very, very rare.
- Even the sorta people who love Atlas Shrugged would be repulsed about the point where he socializes an entire industry.
- The point the authors were trying to make,
I we This Troper thinks, is that they felt that Ryan's objectivist views were ultimately unsustainable — if you follow the timeline closely, it's Ryan who uses violence first against more traditionally non-ideological Corrupt Corporate Executive Fontaine, which ought to be an Objectivist no-no. The problem is that Fontaine was winning fair and square (under Objectivist rules) by developing and marketing the series Phlebotinum, Adam. One of Ryan's non-strawman libertarian-leaning friends tells him early on that the right thing to do is just admit that Fontaine has won; Fontaine's control over the Adam supply is giving him control over the city. But Ryan's Objectivist (or, if you prefer, Straw-Objectivist) views and temperament won't allow the city he created to be taken from him by Fontaine, even though Fontaine is gaining control of it through non-violent, non-coercive methods. Ryan was in a lose-lose situation, which his rigid views simply could not handle; he either had to use coercive force to interfere with Fontaine's Adam empire, or allow Fontaine to peacefully use that empire to steal control over the city Ryan had created. Whether those views are Straw-Objectivism or straightforward Objectivism, and whether or not the dilemma Ryan encountered represents a real issue, is of course up to you.
- On the talk radio stations of Grand Theft Auto games, they have both conservative and liberal examples, almost with activists from various other causes that take their ideas to ridiculous and laughable extremes.
- From his experience, this Troper would say that they tossed out any idea of keeping the Strawman ratio equal in Grand Theft Auto 4, where it comes down very harshly on anyone and everyone that could be considered 'right' and/or upper-class. One highlight that this troper recalls is 'Republican Space Rangers' where three bible-thumping, America loving, gun toting hicks in a penis-shaped ship fly around the galaxy blowing up peaceful aliens and then expressing their secret gay love for each other in their off time. Real subtle work there, Rockstar.
- This troper was quite annoyed at 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 I suppose you could flip the first two, as Nines views government as needing to be small and Bertram as large.
- In a very early example, Infocom's A Mind Forever Voyaging was meant as a critique of the Reagan era of conservative capitalism. Sadly, they incompetently straw-manned, seeing as how even a cursory examination of the Evil Plan proposed by the Big Bad reveals that it does not have one single point in common with the Reagan philosophy (or with conservative doctrine in general, for that matter). As with any good Straw Man the master plan is proven to be doomed to failure (via the psychohistorical forecasting of the titular character, the world's first AI), and after exposing the Big Bad a plan more in tune with liberal doctrine is implemented - which is shown to have turned the world into a Mary Suetopia.
Webcomics
- 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.
Western Animation
- Most of the villains on Captain Planet And The Planeteers were strawmen conservatives, though "Lootin Plunder", a completely amoral capitalist who dreams of "stripping entire continents" for monetary gain, stands out in particular. (At least he had a reason, though.)
- No. Some of the villians on that show were strawmen, but not of conservatives, that was only Plunder. Greedly was unchecked industry. Blight was, obviously, a mad scientist, although almost every other scientist on the show was a good guy, so not much of a strawman there. Sludge was just a rather lazy schemer and liar. All the other villains were just lunatics.
- South Park has also featured both conservative and liberal strawmen. To name just one example, 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?
- The "Butt Out" episode was a big example and this troper kind of got lost. 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.
- 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.
- And 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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 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.
- This troper knows someone who would probably sit through an entire episode of Colbert, not realize it was a parody, and agree with everything he said.
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