I notice that the average user rating for this documentary is less than four out of ten and I can understand why. The low rating more or less illustrates the point of the film, which is that we have never been so polarized since the early 1900s. There's a lot of hatred out there. And the fact that the average rating is so low -- rather than high -- suggests where most of that hatred is coming from.
The movie is a call for reason. It asks us to keep our emotions in check, to act in a civil manner towards those we don't happen to agree with, and to check our facts before engaging our emotions.
The excessively low rating is a measure of how well THAT message went over with viewers! And, to tell the truth, the film leans towards moderate Democrats and far fewer moderate Republicans, so it seems to have a leftist tilt. The real tilt, in my opinion, is towards reasonableness, and in fact it's getting harder to find much of that among the extreme conservative wing of the Republican party. Even at the height of what was called "the Bush Derangement Syndrome", nobody yelled out "YOU LIE" as the president spoke to a joint session of the Congress. That is just one of many incidents that don't sound very civil to me.
Another is the attempted assassination of Gabrelle Gifford, a young Democratic politician speaking at an Arizona mall and shot in the head, with one dead and others wounded. Very little civility there. And the response of the pundits on the right were hardly better. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh showed little sympathy for Gifford but lambasted what they always call "the far left" for the hatred they "spewed out" in the wake of the shooting. I will pass over the placards carried by Tea Party members after the death of Senator Edward Kennedy from brain cancer: "Bury Communism With Kennedy." The left has its share of angry rabble-rousers too. Nancy Pelosi is given as an example of a politician who is unwilling to compromise. And there are repeated critical clips of Keith Olbermann pumping out outrage and propaganda. The man was let go by MSNBC and au revoir. He had an ego the size of Greenland. Some of the other leftists are rude, like Chris Matthews, and some are professorial and keep their wits about them, like Rachel Maddow. But, let's face facts. The left simply has no equivalent of Rush Limbaugh or the Murdock empire with its unyielding rigidity and incandescent fury. Theirs is the audience that would happily give this documentary appeal for politeness and accuracy a low rating. I'm not talking politics, just media. After the passage of the Dodd-Frank bill, here is Glenn Beck shouting: "People -- your republic is OVER!" Then he preached the End of Days and the Rapture. Olbermann was obnoxious but not insane.
The people who sound the most reasonable are no longer in office. They include journalists like Bob Schieffer, and moderate Republicans like Mickey Edwards, who lost his primary in Oklahoma, and Bob Inglis, representative from South Carolina who opposed the Iraq surge and supported the auto bailout ("Bailout Bob"). He also lost the primary. Alan Simpson has something to say too. He informs us that we need to ignore much of the BS on the internet. I wanted to applaud. Other long-term moderates lost their offices or, like Olympia Snowe, simply resigned. There seems to be little room for them.
The film is a little week on causality. Generally, it pins the move to the right down to two recent social and legal developments. One is the internet, where anyone can say anything and what is said can be taken up as fact overnight. I don't think that accounts for much of the move to the right. (One might ask, for instance, why it didn't stimulate a move to the left, even as a counter move.) The other cause is the "Citizens United" decisions which, in effect, gave corporations the same freedom of speech, in some cases anonymously, as individuals. That decision turned much of political influence over to powerful organizations and billionaires. The national election before the Supreme Court's decision cost about $1 billion. The election after the decision cost $4 billion. One speaker calls it "crazy" and I'm forced to agree.
I'm so terribly old that I can remember as a child the first television ads that accompanied a presidential election. It must have been 1952, because a little animated duck marches across the screen carrying a placard proclaiming "I Like Ike" and the viewer heard a little repetitive ditty: "I like Ike. I like Ike. Everybody likes Ike." Everyone seemed to enjoy it because it was harmless and cute, but that was a long time ago.
