I'm, shall we say, politically aligned with Graeber so it's nice to see something of his shared. He's a smart man who knows a lot of about the subjects he's researched.

I think what he gets at here is a reason why Alan Moore's Watchmen was so revolutionary and well received. It's take on how super heroes would act, be used, and be received in a realistic world differed from the usual comic book universe. I'm pretty sure Moore was shocked at how popular Rorschach became as he's explicitly a right wing reactionary who acts on his own moral code.

Batman is a notorious example and the Nolan films are known for being pretty conservative. I often tell people that I love Batman, the fictional character, but I would hate him if he was real. He'd be a guy who'd rather physically abuse petty criminals than investigate the conditions that create crime, which pretty much makes him a tool/accomplice of the police and the establishment.

This seems to echo that sentiment:

As a result, they remain parasitical off the villains in the same way that police remain parasitical off criminals: without them, they’d have no reason to exist. They remain defenders of a legal and political system which itself seems to have come out of nowhere, and which, however faulty or degraded, must be defended, because the only alternative is so much worse.

It's therefore not surprising Graeber would single out Batman, especially since he points out the Nolan villains are often "anarchists." Hell, Batman actually has an anarchist super villain in his canon.

This is an interesting article so thanks for sharing. This paragraph also stood out to me about the US's modern conservatism after being a liberal leader in the Enlightenment:

The response, by mainstream, respectable opinion, is to try to push the problem as far away as possible. The usual line is: the age of revolutions is over, except perhaps in benighted spots like Gabon or Syria, and we can now change the constitution, or legal standards, by legal means. This of course means that the basic structures will never change. We can witness the results in the US, which continues to maintain an architecture of state, with its electoral college and two party-system, that—while quite progressive in 1789—now makes us appear, in the eyes rest of the world, the political equivalent of the Amish, still driving around with horses and buggies. It also means we base the legitimacy of the whole system on the consent of the people despite the fact that the only people who were ever really consulted on the matter lived over 200 years ago. In America, at least, “the people” are all long since dead.

I wonder what his opinion of The Green Arrow would be. I don't really read comics, but I always heard he was characterized as a leftist. I think he was characterized as such in The Dark Knight Returns at least.