The Classical Liberal Themes In Captain America

C.S. Lewis warned that “of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” Lewis’s insights are captured in The Winter Soldier (2014), which offers a critique of the American surveillance state. Rogers, now working for the counter-terrorism agency S.H.I.E.L.D., discovers Project Insight: a program employing predictive algorithms and weapons designed to eliminate potential terrorists before they act, thus eliminating the messy unpredictability of human choice. While Nick Fury insists that the project is a preventative measure to ensure global security, Rogers identifies it as a power grab that would “hold a gun to everyone on Earth and call it protection.”