Wicked Shows Us the Moral Strategies for Resisting a Regime Gone Bad
It depicts how corrupt authoritarians invert our conception of good and evil
Every era has its witch. Every empire, its scapegoat. The person painted green so the rest of us can pretend we’re clean.
That’s the real story of Wicked, the celebrated Broadway musical adapted into two feature films in 2024 and 2025 that are part origin narrative and part reinterpretation of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Elphaba, the main character of Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, Wicked, which the 2003 stage musical was based on, is a full spectrum reimagining of the Wicked Witch of the West from the original Oz story.
In Wicked, Elphaba casts spells—but it’s one that she breaks, not casts, that is most decisive to who she becomes. When confronted with the truth in Emerald City, a horrible truth involving the oppression of others in which she unwittingly participates, Elphaba does not dismiss what she has discovered in favor of a more comforting narrative. She sees through the smoke machine, past the Wizard’s booming voice, and when she realizes that the system is running on lies, she refuses to clap along. For that, they brand her dangerous.
Sound familiar? Right now, that script is being read line by line. In a Cabinet meeting, President Donald Trump called Somali immigrants in Minnesota “garbage,” said he did not want them in the country, and suggested that Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Black Muslim congresswoman for the state’s Fifth District who is a naturalized citizen, should be thrown out with them. Minnesota’s Somali community is the largest in the United States, and his words land in neighborhoods already facing stepped up immigration enforcement and the threat of vigilante violence. When he casts an entire community as less than human, those aren’t inert racist screeds but powerful calls to action, activating the machinery of the state to come crashing down on a target population that he wants excluded from American society. After a meeting with Trump earlier this month, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recommended “a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”
We are living through our own Emerald City moment.
Propaganda repeats on loop; scapegoats fill the headlines; teachers are called indoctrinators; artists are called subversives; journalists are labeled enemies; officeholders from the opposition party are deemed America-haters. Entire communities are remixed into villains so authoritarians can stay in charge.
Same playbook, new costumes.
The genius of Wicked is that it shows how propaganda works: You tell the lie loud enough and long enough until even good people buy it. You do not need tanks when you have spin. The Wizard of Oz would have loved cable news and social media.
In Wicked: For Good, the just-released second installment of the two-part film adaptation of the Wicked stage play, we see the aftermath of that lie. Elphaba has fled into exile, and the Wizard’s government has rewritten her history and sold it back to the masses as truth. Her crime was speaking honestly and standing beside those the state erased, the Animals stripped of speech and identity. The power that silenced them is the same power that made her infamous. What begins as a story about magic becomes a story about control, about who gets to define reality and who will be vilified or even erased from it.
Elphaba’s rebellion reminds us that authoritarianism rarely arrives wearing jackboots. It comes with parades, promises, and smiles. It begins not with violence but with language, when cruelty is renamed as safety, when acquiescence is reinterpreted as strength, and when compliance is reimagined as patriotism. The Emerald City is less fantastical than we think.
That rhetoric carries a real cost. Researchers tracking Trump’s 2016 rallies found spikes in hate crimes and in traffic stops of Black drivers in the communities he visited, even when nothing else changed. His rhetoric does not stay on the screen; it spills into the street and lands hardest on whoever has been painted green. The goal? To stoke palpable fear across the communities and populations he deems unworthy of American inclusion.
What makes Elphaba dangerous is not her magic but her conscience. She refuses to trade truth for approval. Her green skin, the mark of difference that power exploits, becomes her armor. In a world where invisibility is survival, she insists on being seen. That act of self-possession is the moral heartbeat of the story, and it echoes every struggle for human dignity.
Glinda’s story carries a quieter kind of courage. She believes she can fix a broken world from within. She wants to do good but fears the cost of doing right. She represents those who stay behind in compromised systems and try to hold a light. She wants to believe reform is possible. She wants to believe that charm can soften injustice. Yet For Good makes clear that kindness without confrontation is insufficient to ensure justice. When institutions twist the meaning of good, how long can goodness survive inside them?
We see that same choice in our own politics. When Sen. Mark Kelly (Ariz.) responded to Trump’s threats to execute him for treason by calmly laying out his record of military service and saying he would not be silenced, he showed what it means to stand inside a damaged system and still tell the truth. Trump’s answer was not to reflect but to look for someone with less institutional armor, turning his fire toward a Black Muslim woman from Minnesota and the Somali community he felt free to designate as “garbage.” Last year, from a nationally televised debate stage, he spewed the lie that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio were eating their neighbors’ pets, mass amplifying a racist conspiracy theory from the bowels of reactionary discourse. That is how bullies move: they probe for the edge of courage, then press hardest on whoever they think can be isolated.
Glinda’s heartbreak is her realization that one cannot redeem a system that refuses to tell the truth about itself. Her dilemma mirrors our own. In the end, Glinda uses her place within the system to help Elphaba escape. She risks the safety that privilege gives her. That act matters because it is not grand or loud. It is strategic and human. She turns her reputation into a shield. Elphaba breaks the lie from the outside; Glinda bends the machinery from within.
Between them, they model the two forms of courage every democracy needs: those who refuse to obey and those who refuse to look away. Their friendship, strained, tender, and one not ultimately undone by their individual choices and their differential paths, is the soul of the sequel. Real solidarity is not built on full agreement—it is built on returning to one another after disagreement, because there is a deeper truth or a more significant cause that beckons the reconciliation. It is built on trust that can survive propaganda’s poison. When Elphaba and Glinda meet again on screen, they are really confronting the question that haunts every generation: Can mercy and accountability exist in the same room?
The title For Good is not a lullaby. It is a challenge. It asks what kind of good we are building, temporary gestures or systems that last? True change requires more than outrage. It demands endurance. It asks us to build institutions that make belonging routine and make intimidation costly. As Glinda shows us, the “work of real democracy” is not just to overthrow what is wrong but to protect what is right long enough for it to take root.
That is the quiet revolution Wicked: For Good offers when the lights rise again: conscience that does not fade; friendship that repairs; truth that refuses to be forgotten. Its magic is not the broomstick but the belief that decency, once awakened, can fly beyond fear.
Wicked: For Good, was released on Nov. 21 and is still in national theatrical circulation. Go see it. And when the lights dim and the orchestra swells, don’t just watch the spectacle. Listen for what the story is really saying. Elphaba was never wicked. She was awake. In an age addicted to illusion, staying awake together might be the most radical act we have left.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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Interesting what one can see in a movie. I have not and seen either one. I read a review of Wicked for Good in the Chicago Tribune. She gave it two stars. Perhaps she was not looking for a deeper meaning. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/11/20/review-wicked-for-good/