#not everything is cleanly interpretable through the lens of pop culture

[tanadrin]

why do most americans watch and praise media like Star Wars or The Karate Kid, which endorses the idea of the "underdog that wins against all odds", but refuses to help the *real* underdogs in our political system? if any of the people who saw Star Wars took it's message to heart, they would start funding socialists and independent candidates right away. but they don't. because "no bodies going to vote for them, so whats the point in helping them?" i feel like that says a lot about the usa.

Because the underdog is always relative to who you identify with. You can identify with Luke Skywalker (and to a lesser extent the Rebellion) or Daniel LaRusso without seeing anything of yourself within larger and more distant political concepts like "the working class" or "black Americans" or "the global south" or any other "underdog" in politics. And, indeed, those characters are tailor-made to identify with: they're generic, nonthreatening, they have tragic backstories, and their opponents are comically evil. And not to put too fine a point on it, but they're fiction, and people go into those movies knowing that. We do not use the same interpretive lens for real-world politics as we do for classic good-vs-evil kids' stories, so this is a little like asking "how can people root for Bugs Bunny and still eat meat." And in the sense that all the things in a movie that help you to root for the protagonist are purely affective devices of narrative (score, costuming, casting, sad music when they're sad, defiant music when they're up against the baddie), and that all the things which bind most people to their political tribe are affective in nature ("we God-fearing individualist, capitalist, freedom-loving conservatives who represent True American Values"), these kinds of stories increase, not decrease, the propensity of people swept up in them to identify with political conservatism.

So I think the premise of your ask is pretty silly. Star Wars and Karate Kid are not "socialist" narratives. They're very generic, and very simplistic. More troubling, you seem to think your political values are so self-evidently correct that anybody who disagrees with them must be a mustache-twirling villain a la Palpatine, someone not only obviously wicked to his craven supporters, but knowingly wicked to himself. That is just the same lazy affect-based political tribalism that so many conservatives engage in, except with the valence of good and bad flipped. Politics should be based on more than aesthetics.