What Does Alan Moore Mean When He Associates Superheroes With Fascism?

In his recent interview with the Guardian Alan Moore reiterated his discomfort with the way contemporary culture has received the idea of the superhero, with this including what he saw as the political implications of the development, namely that their popularity (or at least, what he thinks is behind their popularity, an "urge toward simpler times, simpler realities") can seem to him a "precursor to fascism."

Of course, "fascism" is a highly controversial term. Recently taking up just the more substantive of common usage in a working paper I actually found it worthwhile to differentiate between how the left, center and right all use it--while along with the differences in its usage across the ideological spectrum I find myself thinking about a different distinction between what one could call the more "materialist" and the more "idealist" understandings of the term. The more materialist observers understand fascism in terms of economics, class and state power, while the more idealist often emphasize fascism's aesthetic element, and especially its tendency toward certain kinds of narrative. One thing they often discuss is fascism's propensity for myth--in the sense of simple stories that presumably tell us how things have always been and always will be--and how its simplicities compare with, for instance, a more complex understanding of the world offered by history and social science (or simply more modern forms of fictional storytelling). For example, they point to how fascist movements often offer a narrative of a golden age now lost due to corruption due to corruption by evil outsiders, but which will be brought back through some act of redemption.

This seems to me to be what Moore has in mind, though one could speak--and others have spoken--of other aspects of the genre as fascist, or at least "fascistic," just as easily. There is, in line with those myths, the worship of demi-god heroes, and the reduction of the rest of the public to passive objects, easily identifiable with fascistic leader-cults in totalitarian societies. There is the reality that superhero fiction is overwhelmingly action/adventure fiction--which, especially when set in this world, easily looks fascistic in both its story structures (centered as it is on self-selected warrior elites and their martial-type values, and extra-legal violent action against enemies of a status quo as its appointed guardians falter, it does not take too much imagination to detect the whiff of the Freikorps here) and its aesthetic (which can seem taken right out of Filippo Marinetti's old Futurist Manifesto: "We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness . . . the beauty of speed . . . glorify war").

Of course, for all that superhero stories have at times been more complex in their content--going back all the way to the genre's beginnings, with Moore acknowledging that in his early days Superman was a "New Deal American," and a populist figure rather than an elitist, anti-popular demi-god image. Even if one can argue for the elements that so easily lend superhero hero stories to fascistic narrative having also been there from the start I would also argue that our being so much more attentive to those elements and their implications reflects society's present moment, in which what was harmless fun not so long ago has become a matter of playing with fire.