Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 11/9” Aims Not at Trump But

at Those Who Created the Conditions That Led to His Rise

Glenn Greenwald

“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.
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: (Imagen Trump 63 m voters,
Hillary 66 m and 100 m no-voters)
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.
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.