Instead of “realistic”, can we go with “rationalist”, in the tradition of Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics? It’s not quite what Oakeshott put his finger on, which had more to do with technocracy than the “great man”, but great-man-worship is a great sin of post-Enlightenment political rationalism.

I thought this interesting :

insofar as they’re working with a property they can’t damage, they can’t ultimately conclude that the right thing to do is stop being Batman.

But that is only because they are prisoners of the ingrained Hollywood presupposition that nothing actually happens outside the four edges of the screen. The whole process is entirely sanitized; the only result of the bugging is that Batman knows where the Joker is, not that everybody gets listened to in their bedrooms. The “blowback” is referred to but ultimately discarded.

But of course a moral actor wouldn’t concern themselves with “blowback”, they’d concern themselves with the moral status of the actions they were taking – of listening in on everyone in Gotham.

The Dark Knight is pretty fatalistic about Batman; Gotham can be made “livable” for honest folk by Batman, but Batman can’t stop the Joker before his depredations cause significant harm to the city and possibly hundreds of deaths.

In my mind, that seems to be more of a Nixonian view; only a strong autocrat can prevent total descent into chaos, not that a strong man can lead us reborn into a new era.