The continuing apparent success of Donald Trump's presidential campaign right up to the present eve of the Iowa caucus, has inspired all sorts of teeth gnashing and wailing in public discourse that there is nothing of worth to his campaign and that people have to be incredibly stupid or crazy to put up with him or even toy with the notion of voting for him. But he's not the only such candidate. The major challenger to the presumed nominee in the other party, Bernie Sanders, would also seem to be the most obscure and unlikely choice of the three major candidates. Martin O'Malley has been a reasonably successful executive at both city and state levels, with arguably broader appeal than either of his rivals, as well as being the most photogenic. Instead, it's the extremist who even looks like a lunatic who is putting up the hardest fight. The other Republicans who have been trailing Trump are of a similar nature. His initial rivals were all "outsiders", who, like Trump, achieved success in not-strictly-political arenas, and have little to no experience holding office. The closest rival who is a "legitimate" politician, Ted Cruz, is perceived as something of an outsider himself, with one critic derisively noting that he has few allies in the Senate, due to his refusal to cooperate with his colleagues.

The consistent theme among these races is that no one like the business-as-usual politicians, that voters across both parties are looking for alternatives. And maybe that's just the whackos and political enthusiasts who latch onto campaigns at this early stage in the electoral cycle, but the idea that this meme goes a lot further in society seems to be borne out in entertainment trends.

Now, I have neither the time, the access or the capability or interest to analyze trends across the board. You can sit and pull incidents and examples from dozens of different works, but you can't really say they are indicative of anything, since they are small parts of minor works. But when you get a large sample of connected stuff, that's another thing. People who never notice character traits in a single novel, find it easy to note major issues in a long-running series, so long as the author is consistent, whether in a TV show or book series. And in mainstream entertainment, long-running TV shows or franchises are the equivalent.

The example that comes to mind with the most content is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's a nearly unprecedented set of movies featuring different characters and actors, written & directed by different people, but sharing a continuity and all produced by the same company, an entertainment giant, with a long and successful history of marketing to the general public. They were not created as the work of an auteur promoting a specific vision or message, but in attempt to appeal to as many people as possible and create a profitable brand.

And the brand of the MCU has a strongly anti-government message. Not simply anti-authoritarian, as there are heroic leaders and righteous authority figures a-plenty, nor really counter-culture in any real way, but anti-government. Mainly the military and enforcement aspects of government, but not exclusively.

In "Iron Man" a company introduced as specifically supplying weapons to American troops, is revealed to be compromised, run by a corrupt businessman who is working with the enemies his customers are supposed to be fighting. The message could hardly be said to be anti-business, since the hero who defeats him is an entitled, privileged tycoon in his own right, albeit of a less orthodox, less archetypal sort. In the sequel, the protagonist is facing off against the government itself, preventing them from taking custody of his unique equipment. The villains become the significant threat when the government steals that equipment and entrusts the villains to deploy it, with disastrous results. A good argument could be made for the government's case, since game-changing technology is being used by an irreverent, spoiled alcoholic with numerous personality defects, but the movie portrays him as the superior option to letting the government make those decisions. In case it wasn't clear to the audience that the government is bad, the senator who is the primary face of the government in Iron Man 2, is revealed in another movie to be a part of the villainous network who are a major source of antagonists for the MCU. While the third Iron Man movie has rescuing the President as a major plot hook, the President is threatened, because the villains are in cahoots with his successors, and want to put their patsies in charge. The government itself spends much of the movie chasing a red herring, while the real villains are uncovered by the individual efforts of private citizens, with little to no assistance from their previously established contacts or personal friends within the government.

While the initial Captain America film has little opportunity for such antagonism, being set in an era when nearly any modern audience (including natives of countries that were our enemies of that time period) would say that the US government were the good guys, the second film has a man who is supposed to embody the nation's martial virtues fighting the national security apparatus. The fictitious agency that stands in for the military & intelligence services, though led by good and heroic individuals, is revealed to be rife with enemy infiltrators and traitors, and is preparing to deploy superweapons against American citizens who might oppose their agenda. The villainy of their objectives is never really revealed, nor is their agenda shown to be particularly objectionable, instead they are only held in disrepute by their methods of taking power. The upcoming third film in the series once again has its hero going up against the government, in opposition to a policy of bureaucratizing the actions of the private citizens who have been performing the heroics to this point. Interestingly, this is a story arc borrowed from another medium, which I understand was portrayed as a conflict between two sides each with legitimate arguments for their respective positions. In the movies, by putting the story in one character's movie, they are pretty much staking out the moral high ground for his cause, rather than attempting to seriously portray both sides.

The Thor movies, involving an other-than-human society, would seem not have anything to do with this theme, though the government forces impede him in the first film, despite their general good intentions (the implication being that even well-meaning and capable officials are more likely to harm than help, by the nature o their positions), and are unavailable to assist in a world-wide disaster in the second. Even more damning, is that on the TV show set in the MCU, "Agents of SHIELD" we see the government forces attending to the clean-up and investigation of the aftermath, only to nearly compound the disaster the hero averted by letting a dangerous weapon end up in the wrong hands.

Over the course of that TV show, even more attention is given to the compromised national security apparatus. It is also revealed that the agency performed painful and unethical experimental procedures on the lead character, is concealing his survival from the Avengers, presumably to allow them to retain the motivation that bonded them after his assumed death. Almost all politicians and military leadership on the show are portrayed as corrupt, treacherous or morally deficient, including one character previously shown to be one of the politicians the elite heroes answered to in the Avengers movie. The current on-going season includes among the antagonists, a rival government agency, that appears to be more directly answering to the government, and carries out an agenda of rounding up individuals of a mistrusted group, with a policy to arrest & detain first, ask questions and allow them to prove their innocence and cooperation later. The leader of this suspect agency is, once again, eventually proved to be a good person, and without a sinister agenda, but as in other such cases in the MCU, that is rendered moot eventually by plot developments. The two villains given the most character development and sympathetic portrayals were in one case, perceived to have been betrayed by SHIELD, and in the other, made vulnerable to recruitment by the villains, due to an unhappy childhood, being tormented by his brother, who grew up to become one of the aforementioned evil senators.

In the flagship film series of the MCU, The Avengers, are shown first as answering to a council that includes one of the leaders of Hydra, even as the rest of the government and security apparatus fails to respond to a world-wide threat. In the second film, the same guy taking the side of the government in the forthcoming Civil War story, creates the villain with his unilateral attempts to set up a world-wide security system.

There's also "Ant-Man" which is basically just "Iron Man" with different colors, though I feel it's worth pointing out that the main villain's most prominent prior role was playing a Congressman, and the two cops, while not actually bad or evil, are best known for playing gangsters, while the mentor figure was fired from SHIELD.

While individually, the anti-government-establishment bits in each movie are negligible, as a whole, they get kind of noticeable. It's an element more consistent in MCU movies than actual love interests for the hero. While there is arguably a love interest in each film, there is no t necessarily a romantic story arc. A film set in the MCU is more likely to portray the government in a bad light, than to have the hero get the girl, one of the most prevalent dramatic tropes going back before Shakespeare. And again, these are not counter-culture films or anti-authoritarian. Many leaders, political and otherwise, are portrayed as good and competent, from the President in Iron Man, to Nick Fury, Phil Coulson and various generals, to Odin to the space president in Guardians of the Galaxy. The films' values and morals seem to be aimed at appealing or being accessible to the widest possible audience, rather than challenging their views. But they seem to be reaching out to that broad audience, by picking on the government establishment. Rather than a generally benevolent system that needs the occasional bad guy weeded out, it is a few good guys trying to ride herd on an out of control system, riddled with villains and oppressive interests.

This is a theme we can see in lots of other film franchises. Aside from superheroes, it seems like the major sub-genre of films these days are adaptations of "young adult" novels. The leader was the Harry Potter franchise, which portrays the wizard world's government as incompetent and corrupt, and prone to deal out unjust punishments, while failing to ensure any sort of public safety or containment of real threats. Instead, a schoolmaster & private citizen seems to be primarily responsible for ensuring the safety of the world. Other YA series turned to film includes Twilight, in which I am given to understand there is an antagonistic vampire government. What I have seen of the franchise is hardly a call to revolution. The heroine's father is positively portrayed (as are most family units in general), and is a police officer no less, and the series is often accused of containing messages and themes upholding traditional sexual mores. "The Hunger Games" might as well be an anti-government manifesto, in which even the leaders of the revolution to which the protagonists adhere are shown to be potentially just as tyrannical as the individual leaders they claim are the problem. Similar plots are used in the "Divergent" & "Maze Runner" series, though they are hardly at the same level of general viewing as Harry Potter or the MCU.

While network television seems to have some sort of mental block whereby whenever they create a character with a unique ability or trait, the only setting in which they can think to display these creations is their employment in fighting crime, other, more popular shows tend in different directions. On "The Walking Dead" nearly every society the protagonist encounters is badly run, or oppressive. He first joins a group of refugees, who seek answers from the last remnant of the government, who tells them the situation is helpless, and kills himself by destroying the last known outpost of the government. Later they find a farm run by idiots who keep zombies safe and feed them. After getting their act together and settling down in a safe place, they are menaced by a neighboring town run by a lunatic who keeps zombie heads in fish tanks, and a pet zombie child, and stages gladiatorial games for his followers, before randomly murdering them when his attempts to wipe out the good guys for no real reason fail. Later groups they meet include a settlement of cannibals, a gang of roving murderers, robbers and rapists bound together by an agreement to respect each other's depredations, a hospital run by a group of police officers on a system of debt slavery and finally, an idyllic town with no clue about the reality of their world's dangers, and barely a hair away from some mistake that would have doomed them all, before the protagonists show up with their experience. As in the MCU, the leader is smart and capable, and well-disposed to the heroes, but her wisdom manifests as an admission of her group's peril, their inability to protect themselves, and their need for the rugged band of outcasts to save them. In spite of their culture clashes leading to the deaths of her husband, son and the town's doctor. That's how a wise and benevolent leader is portrayed - someone who knows that the leadership of a society is incapable of fulfilling their functions, and retains unshakable faith in those who buck its authority.

The show also has a spin-off, set earlier in time, which largely centers around the oppressive and incompetent response of the governments to the initial outbreak and showing why their world goes to pot.

Outside of the MCU, the most popular and successful superhero franchise is Batman, whose integral backstory has him stepping up to take upon himself the responsibility for public safety and crime prevention from agencies that are simply not up to the task for which they have been created. The head of the law enforcement apparatus, Commissioner Gordon, is universally well-portrayed, even currently the subject of a spin-off TV show (which is generally most successful when he bucks his corrupt department to team up with an underworld leader to take out a more serious threat). As with the MCU, it's not the boss who's the problem, it's the established institution itself.

Other superhero movies without a political subplot have generally flopped, such as Green Lantern & Ghost Rider, and the last three Spiderman films. The recent attempt to reboot the Fantastic Four had the titular group being detained and exploited by the government.

The first 21st century cinematic depiction of Superman flopped with no politics, and the more successful remake has him gratuitously destroy a piece of surveillance equipment for trying to follow him. He's Superman. He is generally good and benevolent and leads a moral, upstanding life, with no furtive inclinations. At the point where he tells off the government, he hasn't even really established his secret identity, and had no motive in that scene to protect said identity. Again, it's not an anti-government/anti-authority flick. Numerous soldiers are shown giving their lives in an effort to help combat Superman's foes. Superman's birth parents and foster parents are both positively portrayed, and his character arc is largely about trying to reconcile both his heritages. The film chooses to highlight his heroism with Christ imagery. We're not exactly talking about rebellion or iconoclasm being a big thing. But the film opens with Superman's home planet being destroyed with the government unable to take any measures to save their people, and the sole hope being a loner & rogue official. Their half-measures arguably create the threat to Earth & Metropolis for the film's major conflict.

The non-MCU Marvel IP that is most successful is the X-men franchise, whose protagonists are constantly the targets of an inept government, which utterly fails at stopping the dangerous mutants, while impeding the benevolent ones.

Again, none of these films are actually "message" films. They don't exist to make a point, or expose some social ill, they are aimed at appealing to as many people as possible. They are mostly corporate productions, marketed to secure and appease an audience for the purpose of selling stuff. And it seems like the best way to do that, is to paint the government as incompetent or malicious, even when the individuals involved are not necessarily wrong or even antagonistic. They don't hate the president (a couple of years ago, there were two different movies about trying to protect a likable & heroic chief executive, and one has a sequel in the works) or America, they just consistently portray the institutions and organizations as corrupt or subversive or tyrannical.

With both the entertainment industry, and aspiring politicians finding success playing on the same theme, the real question, I believe, should not be "what's wrong with the people who support these guys" but rather "what's wrong with the system, that so many people are embracing those who disparage it"?