Captain America has always been a character who reflects the world he exists in, or, more specifically, the country he’s named after. Because of that, the character is almost always changing. When Jack Kirby and Joe Simon created him in 1940 for Timely Comics (Marvel’s predecessor), he was used to drum up support for America’s involvement in World War II. In the ‘50s, he was used for significantly less-popular anti-Soviet propaganda (later retconned to be a different guy wearing the suit).

Shortly after the Avengers first got together in the ‘60s, they found Captain America frozen in ice and welcomed him onto the team (and into the Marvel Universe as a whole). With the character now disconnected from his original purpose as a propaganda tool, both in-universe and in the real world, various writers spent the next few decades having him explicitly reject his own use as a weapon of the American government.

After Watergate, for example, there was a Captain America storyline where he found out that fascists had infiltrated the U.S. government — including the presidency — and Steve Rogers abandoned the “Captain America” name entirely. And the most iconic modern Captain America arc, The Winter Soldier, is very much a post-9/11 story about terrorism and losing faith in the things meant to protect us (it’s fitting that Captain America died shortly after that, with the war in Iraq raging in the real world and the world’s opinion of America being pretty damn low).

So if Captain America is a character who changes with the world, then “What If?” issue 44 is about what happens when the world changes without him. The basic setup is that, unlike in the regular Marvel Universe, Cap isn’t found frozen in ice in the ‘60s. That means he’s not there to lead the Avengers, the team breaks up, and crime begins to go un-Avenged. Without Earth’s mightiest heroes around, new versions of Captain America and his sidekick Bucky are introduced by the government to promote American values (read: conservatism), and they eventually become direct tools of a fascist, right-wing political movement.

Time passes and it’s now the ‘80s, with far-right authoritarianism — promoted by this fake Cap — taking over the country. That’s when a submarine crew stumbles upon the frozen body of the real Captain America, and he’s horrified to see how fascism has taken hold in the United States. At a nationalist rally, the real Captain America attacks the fake Captain America and makes a great speech that you can just read here in its entirety. (Keep an eye out for a certain word, repeated a few times, that was first used in one of Reagan’s campaign slogans and has since been adopted by a new fascist movement.)

After that, the crowd immediately turns on the fake Captain America and accepts the other as the real guy, which is both a quick way to wrap up the story and a brutal condemnation of how easily swayed the American people are — It wasn’t exclusively hateful monsters who were swayed by the call of authoritarianism, it was everybody. Someone comes along and tells them they deserve to be great, and they believe it. Then someone else comes along and tells them that’s wrong, and they believe that too.

But that’s the exact point that Cap is making: These people, Americans, don’t have some inherent moral strength or superiority. There is nothing special about them. They just have the opportunity to stick up for the idea that all people were created equal.

With one comic — with one page, really — “What If?” 44 lands on one of the clearest and most powerful depictions of a superhero character’s ideals and beliefs of all time. Spider-Man’s “with great power there must also come great responsibility” is snappier, but this is better.

It’s almost a new year, so to test the power of the Search Term Suggester (click the button below to recommend topics!), I typed “new year” into the unnamed corporate comic book app I use and got Batman: Year Two — a book I’ve never read! Join me as I find out why Batman has a gun.