What seems like an eon ago, I wrote a book called "The Deep State." I conceived it as a Baedeker’s Guide to how the political machinery of Washington functioned through lobbying, political contributions and influence peddling: a nuts-and-bolts look at how institutions like the military-industrial complex, Wall Street and Silicon Valley generally got their way.
It analyzed how we lurched into the Iraq nightmare, the way Wall Street and the Bush administration co-engineered the 2008 financial meltdown, and how the Tea Party “revolt” was Astroturfed by a few billionaires. All these actions, I repeatedly emphasized, happened in plain sight of the voters whose interests were harmed by them.
It was emphatically not a tale of deeply laid conspiracies, covert assassinations, the Federal Reserve planting microchips in us or alien autopsies at Area 51. The closest thing to the Illuminati or Freemasons in the book was the Ivy League, which has a remarkable record as a credentialing shop for gargoyles like Ted Cruz, Mark Zuckerberg or Josh Hawley.
Like Henry Frankenstein, I had created a monster. Although the term “deep state” had been around before, suddenly every whack-job with an extra chromosome glommed onto the phrase as a blanket descriptor for his own paranoid fantasies. Now it has become wingnut coin of the realm: the reason for stolen elections, Jewish space lasers and pedophile rings grounding freighters in the Suez Canal. I can only speculate that the degradation of ideas into bizarre caricatures of themselves is the result of fantastic cultural misunderstandings, like the belief among French film critics that Jerry Lewis was a cinematic genius.
At the time I was writing the book, a TV drama ostensibly about politics became an entertainment phenomenon. "House of Cards," which ran for six seasons on Netflix, beginning in 2013, was about a politician who made his way to the top through ruthlessness, back-stabbing and even murder. I described it in the book as a kind of Hollywood fantasy about the amorality of Washington, albeit in a crucially decontextualized way. It was as if the screenwriters had taken the plot formula for crime dramas like "CSI" or "The Wire" and shoehorned it into an upscale setting, with Senate cloture motions replacing drug busts in a West Baltimore ’hood.
I wrote at the time that whatever one might think of seedy, amoral political hacks, I was not aware during my time as a congressional staffer of elected officials stalking the halls of the Capitol or the adjacent Metro station looking for inconvenient witnesses to bump off. The evil that real politicians did was the far more prosaic legislative activity performed in full view of the American people.
Well, that was then. In present circumstances, there is no way that "House of Cards" could be as popular, quite apart from the fact that lead actor Kevin Spacey’s real-life misadventures might repel a significant potential audience share. And my own contemporary analysis of the show’s flaws, while reasonably accurate then, does not stand the test of time.
All popular entertainment is at some level a form of escapism made superficially plausible by an intriguing plot, good acting and realistic dialogue. People don’t kick back and divert themselves by binge-watching the all-too real. Diversion was what "House of Cards" offered — escapism that gave viewers a little thrill, hinting that their worst fears about how society is organized just might be true. It was a diversion in the way that horror movies are: a simulated world in which you willingly suspend disbelief even while you know it’s not real.
The writers even had a little fun with this convention by having the protagonist-villain, Frank Underwood (played by Spacey), occasionally break the fourth wall and address the viewer directly about his schemes. It was a nod and wink signaling that you, the viewer, were clued in and presumably above the on-screen shenanigans.
The real failing of "House of Cards" that now renders it an antique was not that its depiction of politics was overly cynical, but that it was too naïve by half. At the time of its production, birtherism had already blossomed like a toxic plant, the parents of children murdered in the Sandy Hook school shooting were being mocked and harassed as crisis actors, and Republicans “knew” that Obamacare included death panels that could decree involuntary euthanasia. Yet "House of Cards" focused on the machinations of politicians in the manner of the 1962 film "Advise and Consent" rather than the real story that was brewing in the collective id of Republican voters.
By the time of Barack Obama’s second term, the quiet parts were beginning to be spoken out loud, and then acted upon. There was no longer any need for a psychopath to be furtive about his dastardly designs. Concealing a murder? How quaintly bourgeois. Soon we would see a president on live television openly incite a mob intent on murdering the vice president and speaker of the House. He, and millions of followers, would go on to deny what had happened before their own eyes, and the entire legal system was flummoxed. Politicians and court officials now must routinely hire security to protect them against bodily harm, or give up office altogether.
The world has turned upside down. Since 1963, the Kennedys, a political dynasty of the type miniseries producers churn out family sagas about, have usually been subjects rather than authors of conspiracy theories, from the "grassy knoll" of 1963 to a family member supposedly faking his own death. Now the scion of the bloodline, the purportedly ’roided-up Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is running for president on the strength of his claim that COVID-19 is "targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese." And he’s a Kennedy financed by right-wing money. What scriptwriter could have dreamed up that plotline?
It is not just that current events are too implausible to make believable fiction. Popular entertainment not only diverts viewers; it habitually flatters them. Challenging the audience too directly is a good way to lose ratings. Thus, the covert character of Frank Underwood’s nefarious deeds tacitly supported the idea that the voting public was unaware of his behavior and would be outraged if they found out. I too once believed that the chronic defects of our political system were a product of public ignorance, apathy or complacency.
But the initial invasion of Iraq was wildly popular, and even after it settled into a squalid quagmire, George W. Bush managed to win re-election. Extending health care to the uninsured may have been a long-overdue policy improvement for a supposedly developed country, but no sooner was the Affordable Care Act passed than the American people voted in one of the biggest congressional landslides in history to let Tea Party candidates run the House of Representatives.
One of the better films about politics is Elia Kazan's 1957 "A Face in the Crowd," from a screenplay by the blacklisted writer Budd Schulberg. It brilliantly casts Andy Griffith against type as a petty grifter who rises first as an advertising pitchman, then as a political adviser to oligarchs, and finally as a proto-Rush Limbaugh with a huge audience. His nasty, authoritarian personality becomes more and more evident to his associates as his ambition fixes on the White House. His denouement arrives when he accidentally tells his audience over a hot mic that they’re a bunch of witless, contemptible rubes; they turn on him and his popularity evaporates.
That is the audience-flattering message of American cinema at least since Frank Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington": Good will eventually triumph over evil because of the innate virtue and common sense of the people. It is not just an entertainment trope; holding the American people blameless for the atrocities of politics is the stock in trade of the news media as well. It has its psychological roots in works like Carl Sandburg’s "The People, Yes," and ultimately derives from the delusion of American exceptionalism.
Donald Trump’s public utterances about his fan base being “uneducated” or “losers” have led to no obvious diminution of their support, which tarnishes some of the credibility of "A Face in the Crowd," at least from the standpoint of the present. The fact that after two years of intense publicity, a majority of Republicans has somehow contrived to remain unaware of Trump’s massive legal troubles is not, as I once might have thought, a sign of ignorance. It is an act of mass self-hypnosis that makes one blink in astonishment. These are times that have become impossible to satirize.
Truth is undeniably stranger than fiction, but we crave the comfort of escapist tales, plotted on a level that is comprehensible to us. During World War II there appeared a cartoon, I believe in The New Yorker: A mousy, James Thurber-esque little man is in front of a newsstand. The newspapers on display feature screaming headlines from the contemporary battlefronts: TERRIFIC TANK BATTLES RAGE IN FRANCE; THOUSAND BOMBER RAID ON BERLIN; YANKS STORM PACIFIC STRONGHOLDS. The little man approaches the news vendor and says, “Action Stories, please.”
