From this interview with David Sirota
I felt like the movie was mostly about systems and the perceived loss of agency we feel when we can both see what’s wrong with the world and also feel totally powerless to change it, which is not quite the same thing as saying we’re all in collective denial. Nor is it the same thing as calling Americans stupid, which I think was how a lot of people interpreted it.
There’s optimism in the idea that in our tribalized politics somebody would say, “Wait a minute, I am being lied to, and this is not acceptable.” Right now it feels like we are locked in this forever battle between one set of politicians and their followers, and another set of politicians and their followers. And no one wants to look at inconvenient truths that may dispel or debunk what the leader is saying.
And now people are wondering, “Why doesn’t anybody trust the government? Why is there so much misinformation out there? Why do people not trust the media? Why are they going to folks who are pushing all sorts of wild misinformation who are outside of traditional…
… establishment media?” Listen, I’m not saying it’s good that people are pushing misinformation, but we can’t sit here and wonder why people have lost trust in these institutions. Rebuilding that trust is necessary if we’re going to deal with all these crises. We need to rebuild trust between the government, media institutions, and the public in order to ensure that science, especially climate science, lands and actually motivates the right policies. The problem is that sometimes science doesn’t give us black-or-white, yes-or-no answers.
I think it actually went in a productive direction in that 2008 election. People were sick of the Bush administration, which was really a horrific administration, and they actually voted for change. What happened next is one of the biggest tragedies in history that we don’t necessarily recognize as one of the biggest tragedies in history.
The Obama administration came in with this huge mandate and made a series of decisions to use that mandate to try to prop up the current system, to try to just preserve it for a little bit longer. Top-down bailouts, not bailouts that helped actual homeowners, and so on. If you don’t really try to deliver for working people, if you only try to prop back up the system, ultimately that ends up helping the opportunists, the right-wing authoritarian opportunists. And I think there is a direct line from the reaction to that financial crisis to the rise of Donald Trump.
