Jack Bauer Conservatives

Not surprisingly, Christopher Orr’s TNR essay on 24 is clever, insightful, and well-written. Orr is an expert cultural critic and a keen observer of film, and in some respects, that doesn’t fail him here. His claim—that the show isn’t “conservative,” but is mostly impartial to political ideology—is generally correct. The show’s politics resemble what he calls “the contours of Bauer’s characters,” which “have far less to do with the demands of geopolitics than with the demands of genre.” 24 is subject first and foremost to the action and spy film tropes by which it is driven; ideology is always secondary. And it is true that the show rarely dabbles in explicitly partisan squabbling. If it is not quite a world “from which political belief has been banished altogether,” it is hardly the leftist fantasy universe of nothing but politics that is The West Wing. Where The West Wing is both explicitly liberal and explicitly Democratic, 24 is neither explicitly conservative nor explicitly Republican. But if it lacks partisanship or ideological policy positions, it reveals a distinctive, if low key, conservative slant in its cultural values.

As Orr explains, the show revolves around a constant interplay between family and work, and, as he also points out, it often prizes the decision to protect the home over the decision to protect the society. Orr sees this as emphasizing the personal over the political, but it seems to me that this plays out as an awareness of the tensions between individual families and society at large. Often, in fact, the two are conflated. The bad guys in season one don’t just attack the U.S., they attack Bauer’s family. It’s a significant revelation, in fact, when we discover that the threat to one is the threat to the other. And when the show sides with Bauer for protecting his family first, it’s recognizing that you can’t save society without first saving your family. Putting family first, and understanding that saving one’s family is they key to saving society, well, that sounds strikingly conservative to me.

If Orr is right to say that calling Bauer an action hero stand-in for Bush is a whopper of a misunderstanding, he is too quick to dismiss Bauer’s man of action pose as little more than a genre demand. Orr claims:

Put simply, the heroes of action films, books, and TV shows are almost always decisive, aggressive, and disinclined to play by the rules. One does not find many of them obsessed with rumination and consensus-building for the same reason that one finds few impetuous he-men in drawing room comedies: It doesn't work dramatically. It is no coincidence that, when political meaning is imputed to iconic action stars--John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger--that meaning is nearly always "conservative."

It’s true, of course, that action heroes are usually the aggressive males he suggests. Drawing direct parallels between Bush's pro-war stance and Bauer's violent theatrics is probably a stretch. But action heroes serve another purpose, a cultural one: they help us to define male roles in society. In this sense, Bauer, a supremely honorable, self-sacrificing man of duty who is willing to take violent action to defend his family and country seems more conservative than not.

And of course, there is the show’s central understanding that America—its cities, its families, its political systems—is under attack, and that fending off that attack will require courage, sacrifice, strong wills, perseverance, and probably violence. Negotiation is not out of the playbook, but it is only one tactic amongst many to deal with threats. Violence is never good, but it is an unfortunate necessity.

Orr is correct to brush off claims that 24 is a right wing show in terms of partisan politics and explicit ideology. But at its core, 24 is a show that values those things that conservatives value: family, men of strength and duty, self-sacrifice, active defense against threats. And as we have heard over and over, values, not politics or policy, are what concern many voters on the right the most.

PS-Orr and I agree, of course, where it matters most. No matter what its political or cultural inclinations (or lack of them), 24 is loads of fun.