Libertarian Fantasies: Dirty Harry and Captain Sully

I saw the movie Sully when it was released and I recently caught a few minutes of it on TV. It was a frustrating film to watch, but it does have something interesting to say, if it wasn't what the director Clint Eastwood wanted to say. Instead, I think it’s a pretty good example of how libertarianism only makes sense within a fantasy world, but because that world doesn’t exist, libertarians needs to invent it.

I generally don’t like the language of heroism. Growing up in Canada, it wasn’t a word that we ever really used, and it still comes off as a strange word to my Canadian ears. I’m happy to talk about people that I admire, and even that I might try to emulate, but the word hero just strikes as an unhealthy idolization—as a way of putting certain people beyond reproach. But, if I were to use that word, Captain Chesley Sullenberger seems like someone to whom it might apply. At the very least, I have nothing but good things to say about him, and what he did was truly remarkable.

I don’t know too much about Sully’s politics, but I’m pretty sure that he’s one of those lifelong Republicans for whom the Republican Party is the party of personal virtue. I won’t argue about the fallacy of that particular point, but I recognize that this is the way that many people view the GOP, if that reputation is perhaps fraying these days (including with Sully, it seems). But while he might not be right about the GOP, as a statement about Sully’s values, I can appreciate it. He does strike me as a man of deep personal integrity. And he’s therefore a natural choice for a Clint Eastwood hagiography.

The problem, however, is that Sully is a hero in real life, and not, like Clint Eastwood, only one on the silver screen. And Sully’s real life heroism doesn’t lend itself to Eastwood’s narrative of heroism, it actually refutes it.

Eastwood faced a cinematic problem with the story of Sully—the main event is too short. From takeoff to touchdown, the “Miracle on the Hudson” only take a few minutes. And even if you add in the river rescue, you don’t have the duration of a film. So, Eastwood had to figure out how to fill an entire film’s worth of time with a story that fits within a fraction of it. Naturally, some of this is filled with dramatic backstory of Sully’s family, but there’s a limit to this. For the film to work, the narrative that occurs before and after the main event has to be in some way connected to it. That is, the main event has to be the culmination of a narrative arc. Otherwise, these other details come off as empty filler that aren’t advancing the film’s story. Which means that the challenge Eastwood faced was really the challenge of figuring out which larger story the main event fits within.

And what was Eastwood’s solution to this problem? He invented a story.

Rather than a film about the landing in the Hudson, the film’s real narrative arc follows the story of the post-landing investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). As Eastwood tells it, the out of touch bureaucrats from the NTSB are looking to blame Sully for the crash, claiming that he had plenty of time to land at other airports, and that landing in the Hudson was a bad choice. And so, we are treated to the classic libertarian fantasy of the individual versus the government. Rather than praising the cowboy hero who saved us all from certain death, the government instead ties him up in bureaucratic red tape, threatening to punish him for his individualism rather than celebrating it. But ultimately, the hero overcomes—not only the initial act of heroism that saved his passengers and crew—but also the even greater battle against the evils of government bureaucracy. And as Eastwood tells it, they really are the greater evil over which Sully eventually triumphs.

However, the problem is that this story isn’t true. If anything, the opposite is the case. And Sully knew it.

As it goes, Sully was disappointed by the film that Eastwood made, and went so far as to request that the names of the NTSB officials were changed, so that the real life officials weren’t tarnished by the film. In fact, if Sully would be on anyone’s side in the fictitious drama, it’s pretty clear that he’d be on the side of the NTSB.

For example, this is what Sully had to say in a recent blog post: “the current [Trump] administration insists on rolling back large numbers of regulations, and they’re pushing hard to lower training requirements for pilots just starting out. Nearly every rule, every procedure put into place in the aviation industry over the last several decades was the result of an investigation into an accident that usually resulted in blood shed and lives lost. By acting on what we have learned, we have codified best practices and required them for everyone who flies.” As Sully knows, the purpose of the NTSB is to investigate airline accidents so that we can learn about their cause. And what they do with this knowledge is that they codify it into regulations. In fact, the NTSB investigation into the “Miracle on the Hudson” led to 35 new safety recommendations that will hopefully prevent a similar event from recurring.

Far from fighting against the work of the NTSB, Sully clearly appreciates that their work is why airline travel has become so safe. And so, Sully’s fight is a fight for more regulations, for greater safety standards, and for improved working conditions for those in the airline industry.

In fact, in his 2015 testimony before Congress, Sully identified the real cause of airline danger—profit. Regulations can be expensive to follow. And by cutting corners, airlines are able to avoid those expenses. As Sully explained of a 2009 airline crash in Buffalo, NY: “It was a terrible tragedy that resulted from the performance of the crew and safety deficiencies. But even more concerning, the federal investigation into this crash revealed that these safety deficiencies reflected a systemic problem among some regional carriers that lacked the robust safety systems of major airlines. This investigation confirmed what many of us know: that we have a two-class system in the airline industry. Major airlines reflect the gold-standard in best practices, training, and safety management programs while some regional airlines, in a race to the bottom that they seem to be winning, take shortcuts to save money wherever they can, often potentially negatively impacting safety.” Granted, by Sully’s judgment the major airlines aren’t yet racing to this particular bottom (for now, they seem content merely packing us like cattle), but also according to him, it is the drive for profit—freed of regulation—that led to this crash.

The standard criticism of libertarianism is that it frees us of our subordination to the state only to subject us to the tyranny of private actors. That is, the government is the only actor with enough power to reign in the private power of corporations, so that freed of government regulation, we become slaves to corporate tyranny. And Sully the man is a good refutation of this, because he clearly recognizes the role that the government plays in regulating the profit-seeking behavior of the private sector. And this includes the type of regulation that ensures that pilots are well-trained and well-experienced, so that if an emergency happens that was not prevented by strong regulation, we have people like Sully in place to help us through them.

But aside from this standard critique of libertarianism, Eastwood’s film helps reveal something else—that it depends on an invented Manichean worldview. For Eastwood, the lone individual is always the hero while the government or the collective is the enemy. In such a world, agencies like the NTSB aren’t there to improve the world by engaging in the type of action that can only be done collectively. After all, if only some pilots followed regulation while others didn’t, and if the same was true for airlines, air traffic controllers, the TSA, and so forth, we would live in a much more dangerous world, because airlines safety is not the result of lone individuals making the right choice, but of all individuals being “forced” to. We therefore need large collective organizations like the NTSB to ensure that all actors follow things like airline safety standards, especially when the profit motive urges non-compliance. However, for Eastwood, these regulations are only there to inhibit the true source of good in the world—the heroic actions of men like Sully.

And yet, as Sully himself recognizes, airline travel is safe not because of him but because of government agencies like the NTSB. Moreover, he even realizes that he himself, and other pilots like him, are the very product of this same regulatory environment. That is, Sully became Sully because of regulations that ensured that pilots could handle situations like these. And I don’t mean to take away from what he did, and it’s quite possible that another well trained pilot would not have been able to do what he did, which truly was miraculous. But I do mean to say that the likelihood that we have a Sully in the cockpit is only increased the more regulations we have, it is not decreased, as Eastwood seems to believe.

And so, what I found most interesting was that Eastwood had seemed to have found yet another example of the type of hero that he likes to glorify. Someone of personal integrity, of solitude, and perhaps above all else, someone whose heroism is the reason that we can all live our comfortable lives. But in this case, not only had he found a figure that is more unambiguously heroic than some of his other “hero’s,” but Sully’s heroism was a stark refutation of Eastwood’s own worldview. We don’t need him, he needs us.

Eastwood therefore faced a choice—either rethink his worldview or else create a fantasy world in which it was true. But Eastwood has lived his life in the fantasy world of the silver screen, playing characters with a range that spans from the lone cowboy who takes matter into his own hands to the lone cop who does the same.

But if you don’t live in a fantasy world and are nonetheless entertaining Eastwood’s libertarian vision, the next time you step on an airplane you might want to ask yourself: “Do you feel lucky, punk?”