Movies: the American Elite’s Bible

I am especially interested in movies that advance liberalism by capturing a truth about America. Liberal thinking is post-religious. The American elite, bless their souls, get their big ideas from movies. Liberals and movies go together.

Movie stories make truth out of current events. Movies put words and actions into “ordinary people,” using “regular folks” to carry the political message, though like everything Hollywood, we’re of course looking at an ersatz reality. But it works. Must be true. After all, it’s in the movie everybody’s talking about.

There are many lists of “most influential” movies. Here’s one: an ABC list of the top 20 political movies. My list of the ten most politically influential movies includes two from the ABC list—“The Candidate” and “The American President.” Below, my selections:

1. “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962). The civil rights revolution in America, from the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, was about finishing the Civil War fought 100 years earlier. White liberals transformed the South, and Harper Lee, a Southern liberal who wrote the book and screenplay about good, brave, Southern lawyer Atticus Finch, ably acted by Gregory Peck in his favorite film, personified the role liberals and especially liberal lawyers played in this epic struggle during liberalism’s finest decade.

2. “M*A*S*H” (1970). Vietnam was, besides civil rights, the other great 1960s liberal cause. The best "Vietnam" book was Catch 22, about the absurdity of World War II, and the best movie made about Vietnam during the Vietnam war era was “M*A*S*H,” Robert Altman’s brilliant satire set in the Korean War. What craziness. Vietnam had to end.

3. “The Candidate” (1972). By the early 1970s, the American left was deeply disillusioned with phony, Kennedy-like liberal politicians such as Democratic senator John V. Tunney of California, who with his name (his father was a famous heavyweight boxing champion) and a well-financed slick campaign managed by paid consultants, beat back more authentically progressive challengers. Tunney seemed to stand for nothing, and in fact lost after a single term. Robert Redford, who played the winning “Candidate,” closed the movie by famously asking, “Now what do we do?”

4. “Nashville” (1975). Robert Altman’s movie set in the nation’s country music capital, contained a piercingly satirical look at a presidential candidate who spoke simple truths about honesty and integrity, as part of a calculated campaign designed to win over simple people in the aftermath of Watergate. “Nashville” revolved around a town that was Altman’s stand-in for Middle America. Altman had eerily foreshadowed Jimmy Carter's campaign for president, one that carried Carter to the White House a year later, to the liberal establishment's eventual dismay. “Nashville’s” impact was more limited than it should have been, though the movie was the subject of eight New York Times articles and generated much discussion for months afterward.

5. “All the President’s Men” (1976). The film was a popular success, won 4 Oscars, and was nominated for best picture. It nailed down investigative reporting’s reputation as a profession that could not only change our politics, but also lead us out of the darkness. The Washington Post (and along with it, the entire mainstream media) never stood taller than when “All the President’s Men” made heroes out of the Post’s owner, editor, managing editor, and top young reporters. They changed the country for the better.

6. “Platoon” (1986). Many good, but flawed movies came our of our bleak Vietnam experience. Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” was the most real, and gave the generation that had earlier lived through Vietnam from a distance its most vivid image of why America should avoid all such future wars. "Platoon" won the Oscar for best picture, and Stone won for best direction.

7. “Roger and Me” (1989). Before Michael Moore became a caricature of himself, he made a hard-hitting documentary about how U.S. corporations (he focused on General Motors) were downsizing by sending manufacturing jobs to low wage countries overseas. Graphically, he captured the cost of job displacement at home, and opened the political line of attack Ross Perot took up in the 1992 campaign about the “giant sucking sound” of American jobs headed for Mexico. Perot’s success in turn helped elect Democrat Bill Clinton as president, and led to Democrats distancing themselves from their historic pro-free trade position.

8. “The American President” (1995). Aaron Sorkin’s story of an idealistic, good American widower president who falls in love with a top environmental lawyer captured well the elite’s return from post-Watergate cynicism about our leaders, and why not? Handsome Rhodes scholar Bill Clinton was in the White House with his brilliant lawyer wife, the first "First Couple" in the over three decades since Kennedy’s assassination with whom liberals could truly identify. Michael Douglas starred as our liberal dreamboat, and the movie inspired Sorkin’s long-running TV hit “The West Wing,” which carried forward the theme of idealistic liberals running the country well.

9. “As Good as It Gets” (1997). By Clinton’s time, universal health care stood out as the great unfinished item on the liberal agenda. Neither Truman, nor Kennedy, nor Johnson, nor Carter, nor Clinton were able to enact health insurance coverage for all Americans. “As Good as It Gets,” a pro-gay comedy vehicle for Jack Nicholson, has an important subplot about how Nicholson acquaintance Helen Hunt can’t get adequate health care for her sick son, because her HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) is so greedy and profit-driven. The subplot helped build popular support for better health care.

10. "Sicko" (2007). By the time Michael Moore's propaganda piece for national health insurance hit movie theaters, America had become sharply divided into two roughly equal camps of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. Moore's audience was his fellow liberals, and "Sicko" provided sets of talking points for the cause even as conservatives catalogued the movie's many distortions. In the end, "Sicko" helped move universal health care forward, and on to its 2010 passage under President Obama.

Taken together, the movies I've catalogued helped advance the civil rights agenda, end our involvement in Vietnam, expose the emptiness of consultant-driven campaigns electing cliche-popping unknowns, build support for liberal lawyers and investigative reporters, undermine backing of the military, big business, and health insurance organizations, and rally us behind handsome liberal presidents supported by sharp women. These movies have done so in part because they are quality products that tell a good story.