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Reason and Moore

What our late lamented Lee used to call the Best Magazine on the Planet has an early look at Capitalism, which Sean Higgins watched with members of the AFL-CIO.  The thing that struck Higgins—and has struck me in Moore’s recent commentary—is that he seems to be drifting into a territory we will call Red Tea Party, as opposed to the current tea-parties being held by the Right:

First, Moore is a radical ideologue before he is a partisan Democrat. His film hammers congressional Democrats pretty hard for leading the effort to pass the Wall Street bailouts last year. Moore fudges a little on this, portraying the opposition that sank the initial House vote on the bailout as comprised exclusively of progressive Democrats. In fact, it was mostly Republican opposition that killed it. (That opposition crumbled after the markets subsequently tanked.)

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The film’s second unexpected direction is to go beyond just shaking a finger at Wall Street and Washington. Moore doesn’t simply call for new regulations. Instead, he explicitly states that “Capitalism is evil and you cannot regulate evil.” Something must replace it.

He doesn’t exactly say what should come next, but he does lay some pretty heavy hints. Towards the end of film he interviews Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the Senate’s only (avowed) socialist. As far as Moore is concerned, Sanders’ ideas “sound like America.”

While many liberals have mocked conservatives for claiming that the left’s agenda is socialist, Moore’s response is, “Yeah, so?”

This is no surprise to those of us who have spent time following the writing and movies of Michael Moore.  He has never been in favor of changing the system or finding sensible ideas.  He has always been a radical who believes that our culture is fundamentally sick and can only be cured by a massive overhaul.  The tepid response of the AFL-CIO tells me that this message is not going to play as well as he thinks it will.  Americans—some of them, anyway—will put up with liberalism but not outright socialism.

I did find this amusing:

One final note: Just before the film started, Moore asked the audience to turn off any recording devices because the studio did not want bootleg versions of the film getting around. Apparently this socialism stuff has its limits.

Of course it does.

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