In his new documentary, Where to Invade Next, Michael Moore jaunts around Europe showcasing what he deems enlightened social and economic policies, including Italy’s lengthy paid vacations, Norway’s treatment of prison inmates, and France’s school-lunch program. New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden observed that Moore’s “examples…are cherry-picked to make American audiences feel envious and guilty.”
On Monday, Salon ran an interview with Moore in which he talked about the movie as well as the U.S. presidential campaign (Democrats, he says, have the election in the bag). Highlights (bolding added):
-- “No one [in the United Kingdom] would run on a platform of destroying the [National Health Service]…There’s a consensus across the political spectrum that these things are important for our well-being. Conservatives in [European] countries like these programs not because they have such good hearts, but because it’s best for them. They’ll live in a safer society. It maintains social order…They see benefits to themselves, benefits to capitalism and profitability.”
-- “[The U.S. has] a lot of problems and we also have some great things. [Europe has] some great things and they have a lot of problems. This film wants to show the great things [in Europe]. It’s not about the problems. I also think it’s a little gauche for Americans to point out to anybody in the world what their problems are at this point…I think we need a little time in the timeout room, you know what I’m saying? A little chill-down from running around the world: ‘You need democracy! Now you need democracy!’”
-- “Privatizing things has led to one fail after another. It’s in the American belief system that the DMV would be so much better in private hands than this nightmare I’m going through right now.”
-- “81 percent of the electorate in 2016 will be either female, people of color or young adults between 18 and 35. They don’t look like those men on stage for the Republican debates…We are not the America those guys grew up in, or the America they think they’re talking to. Those three groups they have alienated: women, people of color and young people. By turning off 81 percent of the electorate, what is their plan to get into the White House? They can’t make it happen anymore. I mean, it really is a dead party…Whoever has a D in front of their name is gonna be the next president, because of the math.”
There was also an alternative-history exchange (questions from interviewer Andrew O’Hehir are bolded):
Did the end of the Cold War have negative consequences, in a bizarre way? I’m not defending Soviet Communism at all, but that specter compelled the United States to adopt more progressive policies, to prove that our system could take care of poor people too.
I know what you’re saying. That’s very true…Title IX, that was Nixon. Methadone clinics for heroin addicts, instead of putting them in prison. Federal funding for Planned Parenthood…
So maybe the end of the Cold War was a mistake, and forcing Nixon to resign was a mistake!...That’s a counterintuitive take on history for sure.
I hadn’t actually thought about it that way. But you have a point.
O’Hehir is hardly the first leftist to contend that one reason the U.S. has cut back on social programs over the past few decades is that Communism fell by the wayside as an ideological rival. For example, in an April 2014 Salon piece, Edward McClelland opined that Communism was “fantastic for the American worker. It's no coincidence that the golden age of American equality, that period from the 1940s to the 1970s when the gap between CEOs and employees hit its all-time low, was almost exactly coterminous with the Cold War. As any capitalist will tell you, competition is good for the marketplace...The same is true for capitalism itself: as a means of raising the living standards of an entire society, it never functioned better than when it was forced to compete with a rival economic system.”
In his introduction to the interview, O’Hehir endorsed Moore's idea that Europe ought to serve as a model of generosity for this country (bolding added):
Europe…represents a level of collective commitment to equality and a decent living standard that America has never had. We came the closest, perhaps, under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon…But the relatively mild Keynesian interventionism of that period has been under sustained ideological attack ever since, to the point where most Americans simply accept the dogma that the private sector always does things more efficiently…More to the point, politicians accept that dogma or refuse to resist it; see the turgid tale of Obamacare, which represents a big improvement over the previous situation in roughly the same way as the moment when the horror-movie maniac stops beating you with a claw hammer.
