Art predicts politics

Over the holiday weekend, I saw two films that really put their finger on the pulse of the present moment in our culture: “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and “The Big Short” and clarifies the times in which it is produced. Both of these movies had that quality.

The new J.J. Abrams “Star Wars” movie was prescient in reading the mood of the moment. No wonder it made a billion dollars in the first week. The portrayal of life under the boot heel of “The First Order” (successor to ‘The Empire’) was strangely familiar. The lesser planets under the sway of this soulless fascistic empire show all the signs of having once been great civilizations that have declined under their iron rule. The landscape is now blighted and barren, and the inhabitants are reduced to powerless serfs (‘independent contractors’) scavenging the remnants of a great past, living in paycheck-to-paycheck precarity under the thumb of petty local tyrants and warlords.

That sense of living in a great civilization in decline, with little job security and lack of political agency, is the daily experience of most working class people in the post Great Recession economy. This sense of loss of stability and a predictable future is driving the appeal of demagogues who promise to “Make America great again.” Unfortunately, those followers are being herded into another dead end.

“The Big Short” (based on the Michael Lewis book) is an amazing portrayal of the groupthink and lack of moral and fiduciary standards in the financial services sector that caused the Crash of 2008. This insider’s view of Wall Street culture is a timely corrective to the counter-narrative that is being mass-produced by the right-wing think tank white paper manufacturers that attempt to blame the crash on dead-beat debtors and government regulators. The whole sick business of the inherent conflict of interest in having the ratings agencies competing for corporate clients by diluting standards is brought to life in this vivid cinematic portrayal.

I was charmed by the wit of the filmmakers in periodically breaking the ‘4th wall’ and addressing the audience directly. They know their demographic well. Mind-numbing financial lingo like CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligation), were cogently explained by a beautiful blonde in a bubble bath, brandishing a glass of champagne. In another scene, singer and actress Selena Gomez explains how a ‘synthetic CDO’ works and it hits the brainpan in a way that a parade of very serious professorial experts could never accomplish.

Bernie Sanders has been mining this trench of working class and middle class economic anxiety astutely in his presidential campaign. He is attempting to revive the economic populist legacy of FDR. You might not know that if you watch corporate news, which has clearly decided to not give his campaign any oxygen, despite his record-breaking audiences in every region of the country. He’s the one that scares them. When ABC Nightly News gives Trump 84 minutes of airtime to Bernie Sanders 20 seconds, you know that the fix is in.

Rabbi Michael Lerner has written movingly on this topic in his books “Surplus Powerlessness: The Psychodynamics of Everyday Life” and “The Left Hand of God.” Lerner encourages progressives to have empathy with the plight and concerns of white working class folks, especially the older males, who are deeply resentful about their loss of status, wealth, and job security in the post Great Recession economy. This is where a more humble attitude by professional class liberals and cultural progressives towards the white working class and the suburban middle class would really help draw this politically disengaged population, who were part of the original New Deal coalition.

We have them in our camp up until the point where we start going on about esoteric left-wing social issues. When cultural progressives get very serious and censorious about ‘cis-gendered’ this and that, making them confess to their white privilege as the price of admission to our club and demanding they observe a finely tuned and constantly changing set of linguistic rules and conventions, they don’t know what the hell we’re talking about and they leave our tent for some place they feel welcome.

That’s the secret of Trump’s appeal. He welcomes them under his big-top circus tent. He addresses their social status anxieties (“We’ll all be winners!”) and provides simple solutions that rightwing media has prepped them to understand intuitively. The progressive message has far more to offer for them as workers and citizens, but they are turned off by what they perceive as ‘elitist’ liberal messaging that invalidates their social worth.   This is where we need to lay off the DLC identity politics. We need a big inclusive multi-racial tent that is centered on shared class issues and social justice concerns. Given the steady losses of political power at the Congressional and state level, some humility and strategic re-evaluation is in order by the Left.