Election 2016: The Coming Fight to Reclaim Democrats' Populism

I interrupt my Summer Leave to make a required reading assignment.

I have just read the best article I've seen on recent political history.  If you want to understand what happened to allow the Democrats to trade away their signature role as defenders of the powerless, the workers (unions), the breadwinners, the victims of racism, sexism, and Big Capital, for a mess of bankers, corporate criminals, trade pact traitors, and media darlings, you'll do no better than to read Matt Stoller's masterful piece in the Atlantic magazine,  "How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul."

In it you will learn about the pivotal role played by Texas Congressman Wright Patman (1893-1976) as Jeffersonian guardian of the interests of the common people against Trusts, Big Banks, Big Corporations, monopolies, and so forth--displaced by the "Watergate Babies" of the Seventies, who redefined liberalism in terms of the counter-culture's anti-war (Vietnam) campaign, and battles against sexism, and racism, while giving a free pass to Wall Street, Big Banks, monopolies, and other barely disguised "trickle-down" theories of noblesse oblige.

Stoller is a prominent blogger for Progressive causes, and has worked for Alan Grayson and Bernie Sanders as economic advisor.

An unforseen  consequence of this historical shift is precisely the popularity of the fascist Mr. Donald J. Trump in most areas of the country traditionally allied with the Democratic defenders of the victims of the owning class--the agrarian South, the industrial mid-West, and the rural areas of otherwise blue states.

Hillary is a thousand times better choice in the current election than the ignorant and volatile predator, Trump, but the article recommended above should help you understand why I--born in the Dust Bowl depression-era 1930s--much preferred Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton.

There is hopeful talk about Sanders's success in helping Hillary understand the centrality and importance of such concerns. We'll see whether her conciliatory talk leads to a new stress on Progressive causes in her first term, though the makeup of the Senate and House will determine how successful she, or any Democratic President could be.  At least we shall have dodged the nightmare of Trump's Supreme Court nominations!!

Society of the Spectacle: Notes Towards a Syllabus for a Class on Superheroes, Movies, Video Games, and Donald Trump

"But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence,...illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness."

--Ludwig Feuerbach, "Preface" to the Second Edition of The Essence of Christianity, and used as Epigraph for The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord

On Super Tuesday, as votes are cast in presidential primaries in a dozen states and a territory--an event that may all but guarantee that the Republican party will nominate Donald Trump for the November election--I am thinking about how I might organize a college class of the sort that I taught for many years as Philosophy 105 / "Film and Politics," with the goal of exploring the ideological mechanisms that brought us to the brink of this result.

Film List:

Fritz Lang, Metropolis
Charles Chaplin, The Great Dictator
Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will
Sidney Lumet, All the King's Men
Elia Kazan, A Face in the Crowd
Thomas Schlamme, Kingfish (TV)
Sidney Lumet, Network
Orson Welles, Citizen Kane
Ken Burns, Huey Long (TV documentary)
William Wellman, The Oxbow Incident
Frank Capra, Meet John Doe
Hal Ashby, Being There
Sidney Lumet, Twelve Angry Men
Michael Ritchie, The Candidate

Assigned Readings:

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics
Erving Goffman, Asylums
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
David Eggers, The Circle

Requirements:

Completion of all readings and viewings.  Voting responsibly.

Since I know nothing of the last 20 years of blockbuster film-making, super-hero comics, and movies, video games and other examples of the fantasy/sci-fi/super-power/super-villain genres, with their super-human protagonists and simplistic plots of good guys/bad guys myth-mongering, this course will have to be team taught with a person at least 50 years younger than I am, who has lived her/his entire life thinking that movies are special-effects-all-action-all-violence-all-explosions all the time--someone who can explain to me the attraction that such productions have for the producers, makers and viewers of current cinema and for video game addicts of every persuasion.

We may be witness to the first generations who find no clear distinction between Reality and Fantasy--who live out entire lives in imagined UNreality.  Reality has died, now replaced by a spectrum of Virtual/Reality of varying degrees of practical impact.  Of course, I'm overstating my case, but not by much. I imagine a class using my syllabus of  "old media" exploration of "new media" issues, and supplemented by the other half of the syllabus to be provided by someone who knows the terrain.

Perhaps my teaching partner can provide some arguments against my view that the constant barrage of this form of mass culture is very much involved in the success of the all-explosions, good guy/bad guy, spectacle-violence of the current Republican Party, and its current front-running candidate, The Donald?

Perhaps....

Koons and Trump, etc.

...speaking of Jeff Koons and Donald Trump...I'm just back from a few days in New York, where I confirmed the ongoing relevance of a photocollage that I made a few years ago, Metropolis Redux:  (click to enlarge)

This very large work, recently exhibited in a group show at the University of New England, can be seen with zoom software at photocollagist.com.