Something new on Netflix
By Andrew Klavan
House of Cards, the Netflix series about a lethally
unscrupulous Washington politician, is a wonderful show, but it does
sometimes stretch the limits of credulity. I have no trouble believing
that a Democratic congressman would push a reporter in front of a train,
but the idea that anyone in the press would try to expose him for it is
flat-out ridiculous. After all, Barack Obama has been pushing reporters
under the bus for six years and nobody’s said a word. Ah, well. If the
show gives leftist politicos nightmares about being held accountable for
their actions by American journalists, they can simply keep repeating,
“It’s only a movie, it’s only a movie.”
House of Cards does pose a more realistic threat to leftists,
however: their 40-year monopoly on artistic political statements—and
their tacit blacklist of anyone who tries to make opposing
statements—may finally be coming to an end. House of Cards is not, as left-wing activist Randy Shaw wrote in a blithering and inattentive piece
on Huffington Post, a “Republican fantasy world,” but it is not pure
leftist cant, either. And that in itself makes it something of a New
Thing on the show-business landscape.
Let’s set aside the bigger issues for a moment and consider one small
scene in the third episode of the second season. Reporter Janine
Skorsky—brought to vivid life by the perfectly cast Constance Zimmer—has
left the Washington rat race to teach journalism at an unnamed college
in Ithaca, New York. We find her lecturing the class on how a
media-manipulated narrative can outweigh the facts. Her example? In
1992, led by the New York Times, the left-wing media reported
that President George H.W. Bush was surprised to see a barcode scanner
in the checkout line at a grocery store. The president was depicted as
an aristocrat out of touch with the common man. In truth, as Skorsky
explains to her students, the president was merely remarking on new,
cutting-edge scanner technology.
Well, wow! Really, just wow. It would be difficult to express fully
how rare a show-business moment this is. It’s almost an unwritten law of
Hollywood that any glancing reference to real-life politics in a film
or television show must be slanted left. On HBO’s True Detective,
a venal evangelist ghoulishly anticipates the school-voucher program
that will allow him to reopen his child-molesting religious schools.
School vouchers! Bwa ha ha! On Glee, when the gym coach wants to
call her students stupid, she compares them to Sarah Palin—though Palin
owns hairbands smarter than Joe Biden. Even on House of Cards
itself, the Tea Party is used as shorthand for political intransigence
rather than, say, constitutional integrity. The redoubtable culture
warrior John Nolte, of the Breitbart blog Big Hollywood, has called
these left-wing digs “sucker punches,” and he actually formed a “Sucker
Punch Squad” to help expose them. “Must be nice being a leftie and NEVER
having to worry about some childish television creator taking a
gratuitous shot . . . at what you believe in,” Nolte wrote.
For a high-class, high-profile television show like House of Cards to
make an off-hand reference to a real-life incident in which a massively
biased left-wing press slandered a Republican to reinforce its false
narrative . . . I’m telling you, folks: it’s virtually unheard-of. Is it
possible, then, that we’re watching a conservative show? Well, no. And
also yes.
House of Cards has its origins in a British novel written by
Michael Dobbs, a former chief of staff at Conservative Party
headquarters in the United Kingdom. But the novel’s evildoing
parliamentary whip is himself a Tory, seeking power in the aftermath of
the Thatcher years. I don’t know the politics of Andrew Davies, who
scripted the much-acclaimed BBC television series, but the people
involved in the Netflix remake whose politics I can identify—including
the great lead actor Kevin Spacey—are all reliably liberal. (But then,
Hollywood conservatives know it’s wise to keep their mouths shut.)
Nonetheless, in the American version, Spacey’s murderous
power-seeking congressional whip is a Democrat. This in itself borders
on the miraculous. But the actual political maneuvers that move the
story forward are ideologically muddy and unrealistic. Democrats seek
serious entitlement reform, but Republicans are reluctant to go along.
Really? Democrats circumvent teachers’ unions to reform education. Dream
on! A Republican politician stands on principle . . . okay, it’s
Hollywood, but there’s only so much a fellow can believe.
All that said, however, there is one way in which House of Cards
relentlessly and continuously undermines the left-wing narrative,
whether it intends to or not. In its heightened way, it shows the
government as exactly what it is: a power center, inspiring all the
soulless perfidy and amoral ambition that any power center is prone to
inspire.
This is devastating to left-wing philosophy, because the central flaw
of leftism is not its ceaseless cynicism about business, individualism,
religion, or the common man—it’s that its cynicism evaporates into
unicorn-and-rainbow stupidity when it comes to government. Insurance
companies are too greedy to handle health care, but not the government.
Individuals are too reckless to own guns, but not the government.
Religion is too corrupt to preach morals, but not the government. The
people are too foolish to know their own good, but not our old friend
Uncle Government. It’s no wonder some conservatives think leftists are
all evil tyrants. It’s easier than believing they could really be such
knuckleheads.
America’s Founders did not put check-and-balance brakes on government
because they idealized the people. They knew the people all too well.
But they also knew that it is in government that power tends to
coalesce; that it is in power that men and women become most corrupt and
abusive; and that it is corruption and abuse that eat relentlessly into
the walls and rafters of the cathedral of liberty, until the entire
structure collapses like . . . a house of cards.
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