Alex Gibney’s The Dark Money Game Explains How The Right Managed to Achieve Their Wildest Dreams
And The Film and Its Maker Explain Exactly Why The Left Never Will
I’ve been accused on this site and others as being a MAGA extremist, a racist, a conservative, a bigot, and so many other names that I think I need to truly explain my ideology. I don’t expect it will change any of the name-callers feelings about me one bit but I’m not trying to reach them anymore.
I am a registered Democrat who has voted in every single election since I became eligible to do so in 1998. I have voted Democrat in the Presidential election every time since 2004 and have basically done the same at a federal and local level every time since, though there have been some occasions when I have voted at state level for Republican candidates.
I consider myself a moderate on most things but I am in accord with the majority of the progressive values. I also believe — and this part has gotten me in the most trouble — that you can’t pick and choose which part of the Constitution you agree with. Free speech and freedom of expression have to apply to everybody equally, not just the people you agree with. I also believe no one body or individual should be able to determine what is hate speech and what is free speech. And I believe the right to dissent is by far one of the most important rights in our society and can’t be limited to ideology.
More to the point I am a pragmatist who knows that the only way to solve the wrongs in our society is through political means. Activism is a wonderful thing but unless the people in power are willing to hear you, it is worthless. In order to get your vision realized you need to commit to it, go through a lot of work at every level of the political system and focus that it might not be achieved in your lifetime. And what the left has never been willing to accept is that when it comes to playing the long game, the right has been far more willing to do so then they have. Indeed there’s a strong argument that the majority of the triumphs of the conservative movement and the Republican party in the 21st century has because the two extremes have been playing completely different games this whole time — and the left still doesn’t seem to have realized it.
The most recent confirmation of this came when I viewed the recent HBO documentary The Dark Money Game. Made by Alex Gibney, one of the more successful documentarians for film and television the second part basically makes it very clear how both the anti-abortion movement and the super-rich worked together to gut campaign finance reforms, shape the Supreme Court and achieve their visions beyond their wildest dreams when it came to the conservative agenda.
For anyone who has spent time on Daily Kos, watched Last Week Tonight or indeed read many of the columns on this site, there is literally nothing to learn that you don’t already know. There’s a deeply cynical part of me that thinks that this is the cinematic equivalent of the doomporn I’ve seen so many times all these years and I can see a lot of the readers watching it over and over with the lights dim and reaching frenzies as Gibney tells them about the Powell memo, the Federalist Society and everything leading up tot Citizen United and beyond. I also think Gibney knows this because he’s been making these kinds of films about corporate greed and politics for much of his career.
Gibney is, in many ways, is very much the kind of documentarian Michael Moore has been when it comes to the left. His most famous film was Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, but he also made The Trials of Henry Kissinger, Who Killed The Electric Car, Taxi to the Dark Side, No End in Sight — and that was all during W’s term. After that came Casino Jack & The United Staes of Money, Zero Days, American jihad Enemies, The Ruling Class. To be fair he’s also made documentaries about Robin Williams, Serena and Venus, Janis Joblin and James Brown as well as just this past year one interviewing David Chase. But make no mistake: what gets Gibney up in the morning is making films that show you just how corrupt your institutions are and how false the wealthy and powerful are.
Gibney has, like Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, become wealthy showing how evil capitalism and has gained a certain celebrity by telling people that the famous and powerful are untrustworthy. Unlike Moore and Stone, however, he makes an effort to go behind the corridors of power and actually talk with the people he truly considers villains. He does so in The Dark Money Game very effectively. The two biggest villains’ of the piece in this story are James Bopp, an Indiana attorney who is a member of the pro-life movement who has spent his career as the major attorney arguing against campaign finance reform and Robert Schenck, an evangelical minister who spent most of his career working to argue for anti-abortion candidates across the board.
Both Bopp and Schenck are incredibly forthcoming about their beliefs and show utter commitment to them. Bopp is very frank how he believes that campaign finance was a violation of the first Amendment. Schenck is very honest as to how he set up a plan to meet with billionaires whose values he detested but whose money the movement needed to realize its goals. Bopp talks about how he worked to form the Federalist Society and produce the lawyers they needed; Schenck tells us how he set up one of his foundations right on the footsteps of the Supreme Court and worked to make ‘introductions’ between the justices and the corporate interests — as well as how he realized that to get what they needed “they would have change the court”. They are very frank and completely unapologetic about what they have done to every branch of our government and seem fine with it.
Gibney no doubt tends to show with them and their colleagues just how unrepentantly evil these men are — and make no mistake, I find every part of their belief system and their actions loathsome and repugnant to me in every way. But I came away having heard them directly with a different impression than the one Gibney and so many of the other people he interviews do of them. In a twisted, horrific way I admire their work ethic.
Yes the vision that they had goes against all the things that are against America and civilized people and there’s something deeply disturbing that neither man sees anything wrong with what they’ve done. But the fact remains they were committed to bringing about their vision in a way that, to be very blunt, the left has not shown towards its agenda over this exact same period of time. Bopp, Schenck and their followers in corporate America, the religious right and certain key political areas had a vision for this country. It was a sick, backwards and completely twisted vision for society but they had a vision. (I’ll get back to that.) And all of them were willing to spend an immense about of time, energy, work — and most important, money — to realize this vision.
Gibney illustrates cinematically that the decisions that these men have made and their plan to execute it has been going on for almost half a century. None of this will come as a shock to his likely audience; most of them have been stridently lecturing us mere mortals on the subject for years. But the thing is Gibney is like the rest of us. He doesn’t ask questions he doesn’t want answered. And the biggest question is: if all of this was going on in plain view during the last half century why didn’t the left do anything to counter it during this period?
It’s here I should mention that Gibney gives himself away. The only Democratic politician he interviews at great length is Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat who spent his career advocating campaign finance legislation. Most of the time he shows Democrats in footage, showing that they are taking money from the corporate interests just as much as the Republicans are. This is particularly telling in a series of footage that show ads for bot W and Al Gore as taking corporate finance. Even twenty five years later Gibney is still not willing to say there’s a difference between the two parties. He actually doubles down on that with footage involving not only Trump but Harris being willing to take campaign contributions from corporate donors. That is an even bigger tell as to how Gibney views the world by the end of the documentary — he thinks, at some level, America is getting what it deserves.
Now imagine if you were an uninitiated viewer — let’s say a Democrat — and you saw this film. Your reaction would no doubt be a kind of horror and outrage and that is a justifiable one. But afterwards watching it you’d also be in despair. Because as with so many other leftists Gibney makes several things very clear:
1. The rich and powerful have taken over and corrupted America.
2. No politician on either side of the aisle has a vested interest in cleaning things up.
3. The conservatives have won.
4. There is nothing you can do to stop it or change it.
The next question is if there’s nothing we can do and the bad guys have already won, why did Gibney make this film? And the answer comes back to what I said about the left and right not playing the same game.
The right, as Gibney himself illustrates, understands at a fundamental level that to realize their twisted vision they need a combination of alliance, a willingness to play the long game and political muscle. They spent half a century doing this and it worked.
The left, by contrast, has spent this entire period playing a different game, one where such ideas of electoral politics, corporate interests or any kind of pragmatism are absent. They will march in the street, write many books, try to educate people and make films like this on their vision. This is a flawed plan at best, in large part because their education and these films come long after the fact. Gibney seems to think he can win a victory by showing the confessions of the ‘villains’ to his audience. This ignores the fact that not only have they gotten away with murder but the statute of limitations has long since run out.
This is the pattern of so many of Gibney’s films: he keeps showing us how the rich and powerful, whether they be Kenneth Lay or Elizabeth Holmes, get away with horrible crimes simply because they have wealth and power. You honestly wonder if there is anyone left in the world who doesn’t know this already or needs to be reminded of that fact. But let’s not pretend that’s the point of the films of Alex Gibney.
Indeed it’s the pattern of so many so-called documentarians over the new millennium whether they be Gibney, Michael Moore or Ava Duvernay. We see it in the books of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky and it’s the foundation of The 1619 Project. All of these works are basically part and parcel of the left’s deconstruction foundation which are basically all versions of the same premise. Every single institution in America is corrupt and broken, either because of racism, corporate greed, or the indifference of our society. The difference is between the subjects of The Dark Money Game and its filmmaker. The former had a plan for their vision and spent their lives in enacting to achieve success. The latter has spent their lives exposing these plans — long after they had been successful — and basically says: “The bad guys got away with it and they always will.” Showing how evil triumphed over good is noble but unless you have a plan to get power back, it’s self-defeating. That Gibney has indicted the two-party system as being complicit in this evil argues that we have no recourse and therefore we’re just waiting for the inevitable destruction of society — which Gibney will no doubt film and show to his audiences afterwards.
The Dark Money Game is, in microcosm, why I have a habit of treating the left in my articles far more harshly then the right. It’s not that I like or agree with what the right does — I find much of it horrible and terrifying as the left does. But whereas I find it despicable, what I want next is to know what we, as the average citizen, can and should do to fight back. And I also understand — in a way filmmakers like Gibney and their viewers refuse to acknowledge — is that while these actions are moral wrongs they can only be righted through real-world, political means. That means building coalitions, grass roots drives in political campaigns, and essentially doing the long, complicated work that the right was clearly willing to do to achieve its vision.
All of this, I have slowly realized, is basically anathema to the far left who prefers to write articles from afar, make films like these, march in circles and basically stay as far away from electoral politics as possible because they find it too impure. They have spent the period that Gibney shows in his film basically doing everything BUT getting involved in politics and yet somehow have the nerve to be shocked when the rest of the country choosing not to do what they know to be right.
Gibney makes films like these not to solve a problem or even shine a light on the inequities of the world. Rather he wants to demonstrate to his audience — always smaller than the following among the right on cable news and other sources — that they are, to paraphrase one of his films, the smartest ones in the room. That is the feeling of the left in general towards almost anyone who isn’t part of their circle and they go out of their way to make sure that everyone else — not just the voters who gave the GOP power but everyone who doesn’t follow their mindset or agree with them completely — is beneath their intellectual field and therefore not worth bother to try and win over to their side. They are, frankly, prouder about who they push away rather than who they win over. As Gibney illustrates in this film, that is not a winning strategy long term — but because the people who did it are people they despise, it will justify to them their action of non-involvement.
That’s the reason I think, for all the so-called intellectualism and scholarly illustrations of Dark Money Game, it is just another example of how truly stupid people like Gibney and the left are overall. They see the methods of how the rich and powerful have been getting their agenda pushed forward for decades and it never seems to occur to them that they could use those same methods to pass theirs. Bopp, Schenck and their followers knew how the game worked and did everything in their power to rig it to win. Gibney and his viewers think the game is beneath even bothering to play it — and have the audacity to still be surprised each time they have lost.