Reverend Mike

You may think me mad when I say that the closest historical parallel to Michael Moore is William Jennings Bryan. After all, Moore is a mere filmmaker–his latest pseudodocumentary is Sicko, a call for universal health insurance–while Bryan was thrice a candidate for the presidency and served as secretary of state. Moore is unquestionably a man of the left. Bryan–defender of Jim Crow laws, ardent Prohibitionist, fundamentalist Christian, opponent of Darwinian theory–is generally considered a man of the right.

But both stand as important cultural figures in the years just before and after the turn of a century–Bryan the 20th, Moore the 21st. Bryan was the most popular orator of his day at a time when speeches were one of the few forms of popular entertainment. Moore is the most financially successful nonfiction filmmaker alive; his Fahrenheit 9/11 earned a staggering $225 million, double the amount grossed by its nearest nonfiction competitor.

Bryan’s specialty was the “Chautauqua”–a stem-winding address in the manner of an evangelist’s sermon delivered in a tent to a rapt audience on a topic in the news. Moore’s movies are the Chautauquas of our time, addressing topics of current interest in a highly entertaining style that makes their author’s didactic intent go down like a spoonful of sugar. Moore movies are comic and sentimental and yet full of moral outrage, exactly in the Chautauqua tradition. They do not attempt arguments in any sense of the word. Rather, they are complete expressions of a worldview, and how you respond to them depends on whether you came into the theater accepting the worldview to begin with.

Moore, like Bryan, surveys the American scene before him in disgusted wonder. Bryan believed the simple, hard-working American was being ground into dust by “business interests”–heartless, faceless, machine-like interests that controlled America for their own selfish purposes. Those business interests, he thought, manipulated the system by proposing policies–free trade and a strong dollar backed by gold, especially–that were heartlessly destroying the lives of their more modest countrymen. Moore believes faceless corporations, relentlessly pursuing profit, are today’s destroyers.

“You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold,” Bryan famously said, finding the problem behind all of America’s ills in its tight monetary policy. In Sicko, Moore offers a cradle-to-grave peroration about today’s cross of gold: debt. A cycle of indebtedness turns Americans into obedient cattle. The system saddles you with debt through college, so that you will take a job and not make waves, because you are so worried about losing the job you need to pay off your debt, not to mention needing the health care benefits provided by that job. But your health care benefits don’t cover all your expenses anyway, so you go into more debt, and your kids go into debt to go to college, and the whole oppressive rigmarole begins again.

Bryan was a populist, perhaps the most storied populist in American history. He was seeking to protect the defenseless folk of America’s small towns from the depredations of America’s cities: “The miners who go 1,000 feet into the earth or climb 2,000 feet upon the cliffs and bring forth from their hiding places the precious metals to be poured in the channels of trade are as much businessmen as the few financial magnates who, in a back room, corner the money of the world.”

Moore is the most successful populist of the present moment, and that means something a bit different. His audience isn’t the workingman or the small-towner. Though he began his filmmaking career running after the chairman of General Motors to ask about plant closings, he has consigned his defender-of-the-poor posture to the ash-heap of history. Sicko is pointedly aimed not at the almost 50 million Americans who don’t have health insurance but, rather, at the 250 million Americans who do. Moore wants universal health care run by the government.

Usually, calls for this radical solution to America’s health care ills are laden with appeals to the conscience of those who have coverage about the nightmarish lives of those who don’t. Cleverly–and Moore is nothing if not clever–Moore is trying to convince people with health care coverage that they might even be worse off than people without. At least the uninsured don’t believe they are covered, only to discover their insurance company won’t pay for treatments it considers experimental. The sad tales on display here, and they are undeniably sad and infuriating, involve not only the failure of people to get proper treatment but also the profound disappointment they felt at being turned down by their insurer.

Fortunately, Moore proposes a cure for the disappointment with a sweet, uncomplicated message. We can have it all: great medical care with no bills, administered by loving institutions, and practiced by happy doctors. That’s the way it is in Canada, Britain, France, and even Cuba, according to Moore. And we won’t even have to pay for it, the way we do now.

Who pays? Moore doesn’t say, exactly, but the logic is clear: They do. The rich people. Tax them. Take from them. After all, why should they have it?

A movie review is not the appropriate place for a substantive discussion of Moore’s sugarcoated vision of government-run health care, or to offer a critique of his macroeconomics. Moore’s own case is not substantive, but almost entirely anecdotal–and for every anecdote he summons up, someone, somewhere, has a counter-anecdote that disproves his case. He does a masterful job of crafting his Chautauqua for the new millennium, but there’s something ultimately unsatisfying about it. Not unconvincing (though it is unconvincing), but unsatisfying.

The great emotional appeal of populism is not that it promises a better tomorrow, as Moore (evoking his past as a materialist socialist) does in Sicko. It’s almost exactly the opposite. Populism is powerful because it is a lament against change, an expression of grief at the rapidity with which old ways are being trampled by the rush toward the new. Bryan sought the material betterment of the poor through the redistribution of income, but he did not believe it would bring heaven on earth. Salvation would come only through God’s grace.

And there is the difference between the populism of the last fin-de-siècle and the populism of this fin-de-siècle. In the end, Michael Moore is less William Jennings Bryan than he is Reverend Ike, the Harlem preacher who sat on a throne in a converted movie palace and ran memorable ads in the New York subways in the 1970s proclaiming: “If you want ‘pie-in-the-sky when you die’ then Rev. Ike is not your man. If you want your pie now, with ice cream on top, then see and hear Rev. Ike.”

Reverend Ike is still there, but his ads are long gone. William Jennings Bryan has been dead for 82 years, but we are still reckoning with his legacy. It’s probably a safe bet that Michael Moore will follow Rev. Ike’s path to obscurity rather than Bryan’s path to an admittedly problematic immortality.

John Podhoretz, columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.