“Fahrenheit 11/9,” the title of Michael Moore’s new film that opens today

FYI:

Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 11/9" Aims Not at Trump But at Those Who
Created the Conditions That Led to His Rise
Glenn Greenwald
September 21 2018, 1:08 p.m.

2017 AP YEAR END PHOTOS - Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th
president of the United States by Chief Justice John Roberts, as
Melania Trump and his family
looks on during the 58th Presidential Inauguration at the U.S. Capitol
in Washington, on Jan. 20, 2017. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Photo: Patrick Semansky/AP
"Fahrenheit 11/9," the title of Michael Moore's new film that opens
today in theaters, is an obvious play on the title of his wildly
profitable Bush-era
"Fahrenheit 9/11," but also a reference to the date of Donald J.
Trump's 2016 election victory. Despite that, Trump himself is a
secondary figure in Moore's
film, which is far more focused on the far more relevant and
interesting questions of what – and, critically, who – created the
climate in which someone
like Trump could occupy the Oval Office.

For that reason alone, Moore's film is highly worthwhile regardless of
where one falls on the political spectrum. The single most significant
defect in
U.S. political discourse is the monomaniacal focus on Trump himself,
as though he is the cause – rather than the by-product and symptom –
of decades-old
systemic American pathologies.

Personalizing and isolating Trump as the principal, even singular,
source of political evil is obfuscating and thus deceitful. By effect,
if not design,
it distracts the population's attention away from the actual
architects of their plight.

This now-dominant framework misleads people into the nationalistic
myth – at once both frightening and comforting – that prior to 2016's
"Fahrenheit 11/9,"
the U.S., though quite imperfect and saddled with "flaws," was
nonetheless a fundamentally kind, benevolent, equitable and healthy
democracy, one which,
by aspiration if not always in action, welcomed immigrants, embraced
diversity, strove for greater economic equality, sought to defend
human rights against
assaults by the world's tyrants, was governed by the sturdy rule of
law rather than the arbitrary whims of rulers, elected fundamentally
decent even if
ideologically misguided men to the White House, and gradually expanded
rather than sadistically abolished opportunity for the world's
neediest.

But suddenly, teaches this fairy tale as ominous music plays in the
background, a villain unlike any we had previously known invaded our
idyllic land,
vandalized our sacred public spaces, degraded our admired halls of
power, threatened our collective values. It was only upon Trump's
assumption of power
that the nation's noble aspirations were repudiated in favor of a far
darker and more sinister vision, one wholly alien to "Who We Are": a
profoundly "un-American"
tapestry of plutocracy, kleptocracy, autocracy, xenophobia, racism,
elite lawlessness, indifference and even aggressive cruelty toward the
most vulnerable
and marginalized.

This myth is not just false but self-evidently so. Yet it persists,
and thrives, because it serves so many powerful interests at once.
Most importantly,
it exonerates, empowers, and elevates the pre-Trump ruling class, now
recast as heroic leaders of the #Resistance and nostalgic symbols of
America's pre-11/9
Goodness.

ellen-instagram-1537551468Screenshot: The Intercept

The lie-fueled destruction of Vietnam and Iraq, the worldwide torture
regime, the 2008 financial collapse and subsequent bailout and
protection of those
responsible for it, the foreign kidnapping and domestic rounding up of
Muslims, the record-setting Obama-era deportations and whistleblower
prosecutions,
the obliteration of Yemen and Libya, the embrace of Mubarak, Sisi, and
Saudi despots, the years of bipartisan subservience to Wall Street at
everyone else's
expense, the full-scale immunity vested on all the elites responsible
for all those crimes – it's all blissfully washed away as we unite to
commemorate
the core decency of America as George Bush gently hands a piece of
candy to Michelle Obama at the funeral of the American War Hero and
Trump-opponent-in-words
John S. McCain, or as hundreds of thousands of us re-tweet the latest
bromide of Americana from the leaders of America's most insidious
security state,
spy and police agencies.

Beyond nationalistic myth-building, there are substantial commercial,
political and reputational benefits to this Trump-centered mythology.
An obsessive
fixation on Trump has single-handedly saved an entire partisan cable
news network from extinction, converting its once ratings-starved,
close-to-being-fired
prime-time hosts into major celebrities with contracts so obscenely
lucrative as to produce envy among most professional athletes or
Hollywood stars.

Resistance grifters exploit fears of Trump to build massive social
media followings that are easily converted into profit from
well-meaning, manipulated
dupes. One rickety, unhinged, rant-filled, speculation-driven Trump
book after the next dominates the best-seller lists, enriching
charlatans and publishing
companies alike: the more conspiratorial, the better. Anti-Trump mania
is big business, and – as the record-shattering first-week sales of
Bob Woodward's
new Trump book demonstrates – there is no end in sight to this profiteering.

All of this is historical revisionism in its crudest and most
malevolent form. It's intended to heap most if not all blame for
systemic, enduring, entrenched
suffering across the country onto a single personality who wielded no
political power until 18 months ago. In doing so, it averts everyone's
eyes away
from the real culprits: the governors, both titled and untitled, of
the establishment ruling class, who for decades have exercised largely
unchecked power
– immune even from election outcomes – and, in many senses, still do.

The message is as clear as the beneficial outcomes: Just look only at
Trump. Keep your eyes fixated on him. Direct all your suffering,
deprivations, fears,
resentments, anger and energy to him and him alone. By doing so,
you'll forget about us – except that we'll join you in your
Trump-centered crusade, even
lead you in it, and you will learn again to love us: the real authors
of your misery.

The overriding value of "Fahrenheit 11/9″ is that it avoids – in fact,
aggressively rejects – this ahistorical manipulation. Moore dutifully
devotes a
few minutes at the start of his film to Trump's rise, and then asks
the question that dominates the rest of it, the one the political and
media establishment
has steadfastly avoided examining except in the most superficial and
self-protective ways: "how the fuck did this happen"?

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.

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:

It's remarkable how little attention is paid to non-voters given that,
as Moore rightly notes, they form America's largest political faction.
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 more 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 white and African-American 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. "Milwaukee is
tired. Both of them were terrible. They never do anything for us
anyway," the article
quotes an African-American barber, justifying his decision not to vote
in 2016 after voting twice for Obama.

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.
In one of the most powerful and devastating passages from the film –
indeed, of any political documentary seen in quite some time –
"Fahrenheit 11/9″ takes
us in real-time through the indescribably shameful water crisis of
Flint, the criminal cover-up of it by GOP Governor Rick Snyder, and
the physical and
emotional suffering endured by its poor, voiceless, and overwhelmingly
black residents.

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. As Air Force
One majestically lands, Flint residents rejoice, believing that
genuine concern, political
salvation, and drinkable water had finally arrived.

Exactly the opposite happened. 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.

President Barack Obama drinks water as he speaks at Flint Northwestern
High School in Flint, Mich., Wednesday, May 4, 2016, about the ongoing
water crisis.
(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
 President Barack Obama appears to drink water as he speaks at Flint
Northwestern High School in Flint, Mich., Wednesday, May 4, 2016,
about the ongoing
water crisis.
 Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP

A friendly meeting with Gov. Snyder after that – during which Obama
repeated the same water stunt – provided the GOP state administration
in Michigan with
ample Obama quotes to exploit to prove the problem was fixed, and for
Flint residents, it was the final insult. "When President Obama came
here," an African-American
community leader in Flint tells Moore, "he was my President. When he
left, he wasn't."

Like the unregretful non-voters of Milwaukee, the collapsed hope Obama
left in his wake as he departed Flint becomes a key metaphor in
Moore's hands for
understanding Trump's rise. 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. As Moore narrates:

The autocrat, the strongman, only succeeds when the vast majority of
the population decides they've seen enough, and give up. .  . . . The
worst thing
that President Obama did was pave the way for Donald Trump. Because
Donald Trump did not just fall from the sky. The road to him was
decades in the making.

The long, painful, extraordinarily compelling journey through Flint is
accompanied by an equally illuminating immersion in West Virginia, one
that brings
into further vivid clarity the misery, deprivation, and repression
that drove so many people – for good reason – away from the political
establishment
and into the arms of anyone promising to destroy it: from the 2008
version of Obama to Bernie Sanders to Jill Stein to Donald Trump to
abstaining entirely
from voting.

We meet the teachers who led the inspiring state-wide strike, some of
whom are paid so little that they are on food stamps. We hear how
their own union
leaders tried (and failed) first to prevent the strike, then
prematurely tried (and failed) to end it with trivial concessions.

We meet Richard Ojeda, an Iraq and Afghanistan War veteran, Democratic
State Senator, and current Congressional candidate, who tells Moore:
"Our town is
dying. One out of every four homes is in a dilapidated state . . . . I
can take you five minutes from here and show you where our kids have
it worse than
the kids I saw in Iraq and Afghanistan." Needless to say, all of that
began and took root long before Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower
escalator
in 2015.

To Moore's credit, virtually no powerful U.S. factions escape
indictment in "Fahrenheit 11/9." The villains of Flint and West
Virginia are two Republican
governors. But their accomplices, every step of the way, are
Democrats. This, Moore ultimately argues, is precisely why people had
lost faith in the ability
of elections generally, and the Democratic Party specifically, to
improve their lives.

And in stark and impressive contrast to the endless intra-Democrat war
over the primacy of race versus class, Moore adeptly demonstrates that
the overwhelmingly
African-American population of Flint and the largely white
impoverished West Virginians have far more in common than they have
differences: from the methods
of their repression to those responsible for it. "Fahrenheit 11/9″
does not shy away from, but unflinchingly confronts, the questions of
race and class
in America and ultimately concludes – and proves – that they are
inextricably intertwined, that a discussion of (and solution to) one
is impossible without
a discussion of (and solution to) the other.

No examination of voter apathy and the perceived irrelevance of
elections would be complete without an ample study of the 2016
Democratic Party primary
process that led to Hillary Clinton's ultimately doomed nomination.
And this is another area where Moore excels. Focusing on one
little-known but amazing
fact – that Bernie Sanders won all 55 counties over Clinton in the
West Virginia primary, beating her by 16 points in a state where she
crushed Obama in
2008, yet, at the Democratic Convention, somehow ended up with fewer
delegates than she received – Moore interviews a Sanders supporter in
West Virginia
about the message this bizarre discrepancy sent.

Moore asks: "This just tells people to stay home?" The voter replies:
"I think so." Moore offers his own conclusion through narration: "When
the people
are continually told that their vote doesn't count, that it doesn't
matter, and they end up believing that, the loss of faith in our
democracy becomes
our deathknell."

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, or just abstain altogether. 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.

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.

Without doubt, "Fahrenheit 11/9″ falls into the latter category. It's
literally impossible to imagine someone who would love, or hate, all
of the scenes
and messages of this film.

Indeed, for all the praise I just heaped on it, there were several
parts I found banal, meandering, misguided and, in one case, downright
loathsome: a
lurid, pointless, reckless, and deeply offensive digression into the
long-standing, adolescent #Resistance theme that Trump wants to have
sex with, if
he has not in fact already had sex with, his own daughter, Ivanka.
What makes the inclusion of this trash all the more tragic is that it
comes very near
the beginning of the film, and thus will almost certainly repel – for
good reasons – large numbers of people, including more reluctant and
open-minded
Trump supporters, who would be otherwise quite receptive to the
important parts of the film that constitute its crux.

Then there is the last 20 minutes, devoted to a direct comparison
between Trump and Hitler. I am not someone who opposes the use of
Nazism as a window
for understanding contemporary political developments. To the
contrary, I've written previously about how anti-intellectual and
dangerous is the now-standard
internet decree (inaccurately referred to as Godwin's Law) that Nazi
comparisons are and should be off-limits.

As the Nuremberg prosecutors (one of whom appears in the film)
themselves pointed out during the post-war trial of Nazis: those
tribunals were not primarily
about punishing war criminals but about establishing principles to
prevent future occurrences. There are real and substantive lessons to
be drawn from
the rise of Hitler when it comes to understanding the ascension of
contemporary global movements of authoritarianism, and this last part
of "Fahrenheit
11/9″ features some of those in a reasonably responsible and informative manner.

Ultimately, though, this last part of the film is marred by cheap and
manipulative stunts, the worst of which is combining video of a Hitler
speech overlaid
with audio of a Trump speech, with no real effort made to justify this
equation. Comparing any political figure to someone who oversaw the
genocide of
millions of human beings requires great care, sensitivity, and
intellectual sophistication, and there is sadly little of that in
Moore's invocation (which
at times feels like exploitation) of Nazism.

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.

Because – in contrast to the endless armies of cable news hosts,
Twitter pundits, #Resistance grifters, and party operatives, all of
whom are vested due
to self-interest in perpetuating the same deceitful, simple-minded and
obfuscating narrative – Moore, for most of this film, is at least
trying. And what
he's trying is of unparalleled importance: not to take the cheap route
of exclusively denouncing Trump but to take the more complicated,
challenging, and
productive route of understanding who and what created the climate in
which Trump could thrive.

Embedded in the instruction of those who want to you focus exclusively
on Trump is an insidious and toxic message: namely, removing Trump
will cure, or
at least mitigate, the acute threats he poses. That is a fraud, and
Moore knows it. Unless and until the roots of these pathologies are
identified and
addressed, we are certain to have more Trumps: in fact, more effective
and more dangerous Trumps, along with more potent Dutertes, and more
Brexits, and
more Bolsonaros and more LePens.

Moore could have easily made a film that just channeled and fueled
standard anti-Trump fears and animus and – like the others who are
doing that – made
lots of money, been widely hailed, and won lots of accolades. He chose
instead to dig deeper, to be more honest, to take the harder route,
and deserves
real credit for that.

He did that, it seems clear, because he knows that the only way to
move forward is not just to reject right-wing demagoguery but also the
sham that masquerades
as its #Resistance. As Moore himself put it: "sometimes it takes a
Donald Trump to get us to realize that we have to get rid of the whole
rotten system
that gave us Trump."

That's exactly the truth that the guardians of that "whole rotten
system" want most to conceal. Moore's film is devoted, at its core, to
unearthing it.
That's why, despite its flaws, some of them serious ones, the film
deserves wide attention and discussion among everyone across the
political spectrum.