Read the whole review here.
Excerpts:
Well, that's not going to go over very well.BROADLY SPEAKING, there are three kinds of political films. There are those whose filmmaker fully shares your political outlook, mentality and ideology, and thus produces a film that, in each scene, validates and strengthens your views. There are those by filmmakers whose politics are so anathema to yours that you find no value in the film and are only repelled by it. Then there are those that do a combination of all those things, causing you to love parts, hate other parts, and feel unsure about the rest.
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Knowing that no political work can be commercially successful on a large-scale without affirming Resistance clichés, Moore dutifully complies, but only with the most cursory and fleeting gestures: literally 5 seconds in the film are devoted to assigning blame for Hillary’s loss to Putin and Comey. With that duty discharged, he sets his sights on his real targets: the U.S. political establishment that is ensconced within both parties, along with the financial elites who own and control both of them for their own ends.
There are, without doubt, people who will most love the exact parts of the film I most disliked. And those same people will likely hate many of the parts I found most compelling. But that’s precisely why Moore’s film is so worth your time no matter your ideology, so worth enduring even the parts that you will find disagreeable or even infuriating.
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[D]espite its flaws, some of them serious ones, the film deserves wide attention and discussion among everyone across the political spectrum.
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Moore quickly escapes the dreary and misleading “Democrat v. GOP” framework that dominates cable news by trumpeting “the largest political party in America”: those who refuse to vote. He uses this powerful graphic to tell that story:
Read the whole review here.Part of why they’re ignored is moralism: those who don’t vote deserve no attention as they have only themselves to blame. But the much most consequential factor is the danger for both parties from delving too deeply into this subject. After all, voter apathy arises when people conclude that their votes don’t change their lives, that election outcomes improve nothing, that the small amount of time spent waiting in line at a voting booth isn’t worth the effort because of how inconsequential it is. What greater indictment of the two political parties can one imagine than that?
One of the most illuminating pieces of reporting about the 2016 election is also, not coincidentally, one of the most ignored: interviews by the New York Times with African-American and white working-class voters in Milwaukee who refused to vote and – even knowing that Trump won Wisconsin, and thus the presidency, largely because of their decision – don’t regret it.
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Moore develops the same point, even more powerfully, about his home state of Michigan, which – like Wisconsin – Trump also won after Obama won it twice.
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After many months of abuse, of being lied to, of being poisoned, Flint residents, in May, 2016, finally had a cause for hope: President Obama announced that he would visit Flint to address the water crisis.
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Obama delivered a speech in which he not only appeared to minimize, but to mock, concerns of Flint residents over the lead levels in their water, capped off by a grotesquely cynical political stunt where he flamboyantly insisted on having a glass of filtered tap water that he then pretended to drink, but in fact only used to wet his lips, ingesting none of it.
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“When President Obama came here,” an African-American community leader in Flint tells Moore, “he was my President. When he left, he wasn’t.”
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Moore suggests to John Podesta, who seems to agree, that Hillary lost Michigan because, as in Wisconsin, voters, in part after seeing what Obama did in Flint, concluded it was no longer worth voting.
The autocrat, the strongman, only succeeds when the vast majority of the population decides they’ve seen enough, and give up. [--Michael Moore][...]
With all of this harrowing and depressing evidence compiled, it becomes easier and easier to understand why Americans are either receptive to anyone vowing to dismantle rather than uphold the system they have rightly come to despise. And it becomes even easier to understand why the guardians of that system view Trump as the most valuable weapon they could have ever imagined wielding: one that allows them to direct everyone’s attention away from the systemic damage they have wrought for decades.
Our two-party system was bound to fail as a democracy. I'm pretty sure the two parties see that as a plus.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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