Has America Become a House of Cards?

Watching the latest season of House of Cards from Netflix, I am troubled. Frank Underwood, the protagonist, is not just a perfect political opportunist, a man with no principles, but a murderer. In the first season, I wondered whether he was meant as a portrayal of the devil incarnate. Yet by the current season, he has become a sympathetic character, merely a guy who plays fast and loose with the rules in order to achieve what he sees (and the audience too seems meant to understand) as the higher good. Most troublingly, he also seems completely untroubled by any of his previous deeds. His “toughness,” his “ruthlessness,” seems to be intended as admirable.

Ban Linus of Lost, as portrayed by Michael Emerson

I saw the same evolution in the characters of Ben Linus and “Sawyer” in the long-running series Lost. (Although it is now a few years old, I only saw it recently.) Linus was a mass murderer, Sawyer a con man; yet they ended up as mostly sympathetic characters. At worst, Linus was portrayed somewhat in the manner of a naughty child.

One might say the same of Nucky Thompson in Boardwalk Empire. I actually saw an online complaint about his ex-wife, an Irish woman, Margaret, being unreasonable and unsympathetic because she was not properly accepting of her husband's means of making a living—i.e., by bribery, protection rackets, bootlegging, and political corruption.

Kevin Spacey as Frank Underwood.

Something seems to have gone terribly akilter with the American moral compass. The average American seems to have lost any allegiance to right over wrong. More, they seem to have become on the whole rather hostile to moral right. The black hats are the real good guys.

This is something we probably saw beginning in the 60s, with the rise of the “anti-hero.” Films like Bonnie and Clyde, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Papillon, and so forth. At first, it seemed a refreshing corrective to the older American Calvinist tradition of black hats and white hats; a proper realization that the bad guys were human too, and everyone was capable of redemption. Now it has segued into a denial that anyone is in need of redemption.

Steve Buscemi, who plays Nucky Thompson

This is the worst possible sign for the future of the US. Public morality is the only thing that keeps any society working. Lose it, and dog-eat-dog chaos ensues. Sound a bit like Baltimore tonight?

At the same time, can you imagine what these public examples of pure amorality look like to Muslims in the Middle East, and others outside the magic circle of the modern West? Can you wonder that there is a backlash against “Western values”?