Is the best way to change the world to work within the system or outside it?
That perennial question surged to the fore in the past five years, with Black Lives Matter's challenge to the culture of law enforcement, and the self-dubbed Resistance's revolted response to Trump's election. Pop culture has gotten in on the conundrum, too, most recently with a series of stories about Black men navigating their places within institutions that have violently kept them down - or, at best, accommodated them grudgingly.
But in a hopeful sign, reality seems to be offering a demonstration that the genius of American politics doesn't reside solely inside the halls of power or only outside them. Fiction loves an either-or approach, but it's the tension between outsiders and insiders that creates a mandate for change.
A recent spate of best picture nominees made the case for the outsider approach - but also showed the limits of what's possible without the power, or at least the support, of government or other big institutions.
In Shaka King's "Judas and the Black Messiah," the Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and his colleagues step up to meet urgent social needs with their so-called Survival Programs, most famously the Free Breakfast for Children initiative.
That same logic drove the mutual aid networks that filled gaps in the federal pandemic relief system as covid-19 swept across the nation. Community fridges, the People's Bodega and the Rolling Library in New York weren't substitutes for federal efforts - but then, state and federal aid didn't meet the same needs as mutual aid.
Acting outside the system can reveal its inadequacies, as the Panthers' social programs so often did. And challenging the system directly can reveal the incoherence behind its impartial facade.
"The Trial of the Chicago 7" -- Aaron Sorkin's movie about the attempt to charge leaders in the movement against the war in Vietnam with conspiracy after the riots at the 1968 Democratic national convention -- provides an example of how people with great authority can undermine themselves via overreaction. In the film, white radicals such as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin get away with courtroom provocations. But the judge in the case orders Black Panther Bobby Seale gagged and shackled for repeatedly interrupting the proceedings to demand that he be allowed his own legal counsel.
That same dynamic was on display in the contrast between law enforcement's violent attempts to contain last summer's Black Lives Matter protests and the lax preparation and tepid initial response when a mostly white mob attacked the Capitol.
In pop culture franchises, institutions and insiders reign supreme. If superheroes quit the costumed avenger game, or if James Bond retires from MI6, their stories end -- as do the profits. But these economics don't always translate into a compelling political case for operating within the system, as Marvel's "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" and the new adaptation of Tom Clancy's "Without Remorse" demonstrate.
Both stories are about their protagonists' decisions to continue working with institutions that have treated them badly. In the former, Sam Wilson grapples with the question of whether the government or the public would accept a Black man like him as Captain America. In "Without Remorse," agents of a sinister government plot to murder ace former Navy SEAL John Kelly's wife, unborn daughter and squad -- part of a plan to spark a new world war, unite America and boost the economy -- which forces him to reckon with whether the better country he claims to fight for is even possible.
Despite all they're subjected to, both men return to the fold. But for what? A Smithsonian exhibit acknowledging the contributions of Black super-soldiers hidden from history? The right to create a Special Operations unit? Audiences are supposed to trust that Wilson and Kelly alone can reform America, even though the series and the movie set their ambitions low.
Real life may involve fewer explosions than these two stories do, but it's made a much stronger case for what can be accomplished by working within existing institutions.
Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo's testimony in the trial of former officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd demonstrated one approach. If you're part of an institution, you can help define its rules and norms, and exclude people who violate them. The lawmakers in Virginia, Maryland and D.C. who passed significant policing reform bills proved that while Congress might have become dangerously sclerotic, the legislative process still has power.
Yet Black Lives Matter -- an outsider movement -- helped make Arradondo's testimony and those lawmakers' actions possible, by providing a mandate for change that hadn't previously been so clear or forceful.
The world does change, but rarely do institutions or activist movements alone bring that change about. It's the push and pull between them that feels like the real superpower.