Following in the wake of polemicist documentarian Robert Greenwald, Brian Malone's Patriocracy is a nice and safe story about how bad American government is in 2012 and what we have to do to get it back to normal. Malone suggests that the reason everything on Capital Hill stinks so much is because of the deep partisan rift that has opened up in recent years and how no business gets done anymore because both sides are just bickering back and forth.
Malone's biggest example of nothing getting done is the Simpson-Bowles fiscal readjustment committee (he spends a lot of time interviewing Sen. Alan Simpson, who likes to say words like "bullshit" a lot). Apparently because there were members of both political parties and that both parties are monolithic, the findings of that group had to be perfect, or something. That they didn't get passed in Congress and that the White House basically ignored them is a terrible thing.
This is where the film loses me. I agree that things don't get done enough in Washington and that the bickering is sickening, but I don't think both sides are equally to blame for the problem. I would say things got terrible when the GOP controlled congress in the mid-aughts and then got worse when the so-called Tea Party Republicans gave the GOP a majority in the House in 2010. That nothing gets done in the Senate has more to do with Republicans there not wanting to bend at all than with any sort of greater issue with partisan bickering or filibuster issues. (Yes, I realize I'm asking the GOP to bend more, but that's because the Senate Dems. already bend a ton for their centrist members.)
There are a bunch of smart suggestions made in the film, like having primary elections not be divided by party, but all-in-one affairs where many parties could run against one another, and taking money out of elections, but all of these things seem like long-shots that will never come together.
I mind that centrism is seen as some sort of perfect state of being, because centrism now is really center-rightism. The American political system is gerrymandered so much to the right that even "compromise" is just a way of giving Republicans almost everything they want. This feels like how people feel both sides of an issue should be explored to make something fair, but really, there's right and wrong and showing both sides gives "wrong" too much credit.
Stars: 2 of 4
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