Cover art by Juan Ferreyra
“My name is Nathan Domini,” a mayoral candidate tells the crowd. “I believe in Seattle. But we’re a mess right now, folks. We’re a mess. I’m old Washington. A timber family. That’s how we made our money. Through hard work. Sawdust in our hair. We looked out for ourselves first. And then other people who benefitted from it. These days, everybody’s so worried about somebody else. So we’re taxed more to help the homeless. Foreign refugees, drug addicts, the mentally ill. Even the losers who won’t take care of themselves because they don’t want to put in hard work. Seattle needs to start thinking of its economy first and everything else second. Let’s reward the people who work hard.”
Someone in the crowd interrupts. “Nobody worked harder than my dad!” she exclaims. Yet her father was laid off from one of Nathan Domini’s lumber mills nonetheless, along with hundreds of others. “Somebody get rid of her, would you?” Domini merely replies. “And don’t be nice about it.” As the women is dragged away through the crowd, the candidate concludes, “Thank you for your vote! We’re in this together! It’ll be beautiful!”
In 2016, DC Comics rebooted their entire lineup under the “Rebirth” banner and handed over writing duties on the Green Arrow comic book to horror novelist Benjamin Percy. Given a fresh start with the character, Percy began crafting a multi-year story arc that served as a reflection of its times, with Green Arrow and partner Black Canary finding themselves in a fictional Seattle divided between the haves and have-nots of society, as well as a mayoral election that mirrored the real-world presidential campaign of 2016.
When real estate magnate Donald Trump launched his quest for the presidency on June 16, 2015, he focused on what would become one of the central issues of his campaign – immigration. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump told the crowd that gathered for his announcement. “They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
He then added, “I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for it.” Trump’s comments dominated the news cycle afterwards, more from the shock value of his statements than anything else. His appearance on a debate stage two months later had the similar effect.
“The big problem this country has is being politically correct,” he replied after accusations of sexism were raised by Fox News moderator Megyn Kelly. “I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness – and to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either.”
The same type of rhetoric was uttered within the world of Green Arrow. “The city’s an absolute disaster,” Nathan Domini tells the crowd at a high-end political fundraiser. “Because of bad legislation and years of loser leadership. Look at us. We’re living in fear. People are dying in the streets. And that’s not right. It’s not right. We need law and order. We need to empower and – maybe you don’t want to hear the word, but I’m going to say it anyway – militarize our boys in blue.”
Domini’s words inevitably lead to the Vice Squad, a right-wing vigilante group intent on eliminating what they consider the undesirables of society. “The thing you don’t seem to get is, the so-called disenfranchised are in the gutters and alleyways for a reason,” their leader tells Green Arrow. “There’s no point spending time and energy trying to help people who don’t want to be helped. If you see a toadstool growing in a pristine lawn, you don’t wish it into grass. You rip it out.”
In his 2017 book Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, journalist Joshua Green writes that Donald Trump promoted a form of American nationalism that was influenced by Steve Bannon, chairman of the alt-right media juggernaut Breitbart News. Bannon believed that Western civilization was the dominant culture in the United States and considered the influx of Muslim refugees and other migrants into the country a threat to that dominance.
In Bannon’s mind, the nation needed to return to its traditionalist roots as opposed to embracing modern global views that endangered U.S. sovereignty. Trump echoed those beliefs – during a rally late in the campaign, for instance, he told the crowd, “There is no global anthem, no global currency, nor certificate of global citizenship. From now on, it’s going to be ‘America first.’”
Like Nathan Domini in Green Arrow, Trump was appealing to a segment of the American populace often overlooked by politicians and the media – the alt-right. “The term ‘alt-right’ itself had no fixed meaning,” Joshua Green explains in Devil’s Bargain. “In its broadest sense, it encompassed the spectrum of groups left over if you took everyone to the right of center and subtracted mainstream Republicans and neoconservative foreign-policy hawks,” What then remained included “immigration restrictionists, reactionaries, paleoconservatives, white supremacists, and full-on neo-Nazis.”
Although Steve Bannon never personally embraced anti-Semitism or white supremacy, he was tolerant of their inclusion in the new political order he was trying to build nonetheless. “When you look at any kind of revolution – and this is a revolution – you always have some groups that are disparate,” he said shortly after Donald Trump was elected president. “I think that will burn away over time and you’ll see more of a mainstream center-right populist movement.” In the minds of many, however, that shift never materialized.
“It’s time for a change,” Nathan Domini tells his supporters on the eve of the mayoral election in Green Arrow. “A rearrangement of power. The city has grown more and more dangerous, and I’m the best person to keep you safe and fatten your bank account.”
Oliver Queen – aka Green Arrow and a former friend of Domini – approaches the candidate afterwards and tells him, “You’re going to lose, Nate. You’ve run a campaign based on fear and hate. But the cops and Green Arrow rallied today and took down the sort of extremists you’re encouraging. There’s plenty of hope out there.” That hope quickly evaporated after Seattle Police Chief Westberg was murdered in his home, resulting in the election of Nathan Domini as mayor.
A similar event occurred in the real world as well. By the time October 2016 rolled around, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton appeared headed towards a landslide victory. Then on October 28 – eleven days before Election Day – FBI Director James Comey announced that he was reopening an investigation into Clinton’s use of private email servers when she was Secretary of State.
Clinton’s lead in the polls began to shrink afterwards. In the end, she still won the popular vote but lost the decisive Electoral College – ensuring the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States.
Anthony Letizia