MAGA Is to Woke As Errol Flynn Is to Henry Fonda

“Captain Blood” captures the essence of MAGA—or, anyway, of MAGA’s slightly piratical idea of itself. “The Grapes of Wrath” is a masterpiece of what might be called sentimental realism, heavily laden with Christian and socialist formulations. Ask yourself which of the movies speaks to your heart. The exercise—a visit to American fantasies from the time before

Donald Trump

and

Joe Biden

were born—might be interesting preparation for deciding how to vote in the November elections.

As “Captain Blood” begins, an honest Irish physician, Peter Blood (Flynn), is arrested for the crime of treating a man wounded while participating in the Monmouth rebellion against King James II, who in this story is vaguely villainous. Dr. Blood, reduced to a convict and a slave, is transported to the Caribbean colony of Port Royal, Jamaica. He escapes and turns pirate—a gaily, rakishly successful one. The movie passes lightly over his crimes, which must have been many and gruesome. By the end of the story, Captain Blood has been made the governor of the colony and has won the former governor’s beautiful niece (de Havilland). He throws back his head and laughs (ha ha!) at the “authorities”—i.e., the regime of King James II, who, conveniently, has just been deposed in favor of William and Mary in the Glorious Revolution.

Mr. Trump is too old and heavy to jump around in the rigging of a pirate ship, but he likes to fly the Jolly Roger. He has pursued his career, as real-estate developer and politician, on principles of buccaneering. Established authority—corrupt and corruptible (he says) and, in any case, always temporary—has meant as little to Mr. Trump as to Captain Blood. Each man operated, when possible, as a law unto himself. Their followers, as a matter of course, tended to be well armed, sometimes scruffy—think

Steve Bannon.

Jan. 6 ought to be understood as a raid by a pirate who lost his nerve at the end of the afternoon.

Free-booting Captain Blood represents the idea of freedom, of action, of entrepreneurial initiative, working if necessary outside the law. These are the norm-shattering American energies, defiant of bureaucracy and the crown. “The Grapes of Wrath,” by contrast, is an epic of passive endurance. It proclaims—in an elaborately Christian way—the nobility of poverty and suffering. The movie is an American Sermon on the Mount. The People, Yes!

The Joad family’s point of view is not so different from that of the 21st century’s immigrants, legal and illegal. The Joads have been “tractored out by the cats.” Tom has served four years in McAlester prison for manslaughter. He killed a man with a shovel during a fight. Self-defense, it is said. He breaks his parole by leaving Oklahoma to go west with the family. The novel’s author,

John Steinbeck,

and the movie’s director,

John Ford,

are entirely sympathetic to the underdog, the homeless and uprooted and penniless. The big growers’ gun thugs, the railroad detectives and the local sheriffs are, as it were, Trumpian in their callousness. They treat the migrant Okies as invaders, riffraff. The villains are local and state authorities, vicious to outsiders. The Joads’ putative protector, God in the person of Franklin D. Roosevelt, dwells somewhere far to the east, in Washington, among the white marble, in the Shinto mists of his promises. The New Deal is a distant, numinous hope.

In real life, many of Steinbeck’s Okies of the 1930s became Trump voters a few generations later. Meantime (such are the ironies of these evolutions), the ferociously anti-Trump left—erstwhile champions of the downtrodden Joads—gets most of its money and ideas and passion from its preponderance of highly privileged new elites whose experience of suffering and poverty is, as it were, literary. Martha’s Vineyard people, you might say.

But all ideals and tropes decay. Pirates get fat. The dashing Errol Flynn became an alcoholic and died at 50. Peter Blood’s Port Royal became, in reality, a sort of Sodom and Gomorrah for 17th-century pirates. Time marches on.

The Rorschach value of “Captain Blood” and “The Grapes of Wrath,” as applied to the 2022 elections, depends upon your thinking of them not as literal models but as self-sufficient myths, outside time: as attitudes—as fantasies of the self in its relation to power or powerlessness.

Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of “The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism,” forthcoming in January.