Michael Moore

Terry Glavin reviews the film Manufacturing Dissent and books by Jesse Larner and by Joseph Health and Andrew Potter and uses them to give Michael Moore a good kicking:

What you take away from a Michael Moore film is no more and no less than what you came in with. If you're "conservative," you'll be offended and insulted. If you're a "liberal," you'll have your comfortable assumptions confirmed.

There are millions of nominally "left-wing" Americans who actually believe this rubbish, and if Moore was just subjecting a pack of suckers to a cinematic shakedown like some latter-day P.T. Barnum, that would be one thing. But the reduction of left-wing discourse to the level of puerile conspiracy theory has its consequences.

Here's the way Larner puts it: "For those viewers who despised both Bush and Moore it was absolutely maddening that just when Bush was vulnerable to a thousand legitimate attacks, Moore chose to waste the cultural moment and six million Disney dollars on overhyped connections and ahistorical polemics that the right could easily refute."

Right at the moment in American history when the power of the big media corporations was being seriously undermined by new forms of media -- everything from political-commentary blogs to easily-produced film documentaries -- the American left had no compelling narrative to offer.

It was crippled by its retreat into identity politics and the postmodernist acceptance of a world where there is no universal truth, where facts don't matter, everything is relative, and all reality is contingent and constructed. Just like a Michael Moore documentary.

In a world like that, there's little use for proper journalism. In a world like that, documentaries have little value except to entrench pre-ordained narratives and affirm political identities. Advocacy journalism becomes the work of telling your side what it wants to hear instead of what it might actually need to know.

It's all perfectly democratic, of course, and tailor-made for the marketplace. You get to pick the propaganda you want. You'll find demagogues like Anne Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly down one aisle, and the equally fatuous and shrill Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore and Rosie O'Donnell down the other aisle. Take your pick.

This has created what Larner calls "a hole in the heart of American politics." The Democratic Party is not, in the main, of the left. It is not for a steeply graduated income tax, or a single-payer health care system, or full equality for gay people. It doesn't stand firmly with labour unions and working people, and will not rise against the baleful influence of evangelical Christians.

That hole in the American heart has also left the reigning American conservatives dangerously enfeebled: "In the absence of any coherent popular and intellectual challenge," Larner writes, "it has descended into a lazy and bullying triumphalism."

"If Democrats want to regain power, they will have to be serious about truth," Larner concludes. "They will have to start aggressively calling out the grievous distortions of the right-wing propagandists who have gotten away with a duplicitous game for far too long, but also calling out the distortions of those in their own camp who justify means by ends. When Democrats win, it is in spite of Michael Moore, not because of him."

Read the whole thing.