Knock Down the House Review: A Netflix Documentary About Vacuous Democrats
As a piece of art, it’s a perfect tribute to the state of the radical left: empty, radical, dangerously ignorant … and proud of it.
The new wave of Democrat Congressional representatives brought with them egotism, self-righteousness, ignorance, and racialism—traits that have come to define the grassroots of the far-left. These freshman politicians see themselves as the saviors of Washington and the first wave of the burgeoning resistance against the resurgence of conservatism in America.
It doesn’t matter if their output is vacuous, unworkable nonsense like the Green New Deal. It doesn’t seem to matter that they’re constantly dropping anti-Semitic comments. It doesn’t seem to matter that they’re utterly obsessed with skin color. As long as they’re “doing something,” they’re on the right side of history.
This superciliousness in the left’s newest voices is on full display in Netflix’s newest documentary about this new class of progressive politicians. Knock Down the House is specifically about the leadup to the 2018 midterms, but it’s clear that this is the origin story that the left wants as the narrative about these new leftist politicians.
The movie puts a glassy, populist sheen on the rise of these new, young progressives marching into Washington. It follows the elections of four female Democrat candidates: Amy Vilela (NV), Cori Bush (MO), Paula Jean Swearengin (WV) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex (NY). Of the four, the only successful election bid was AOC who ends up being the headliner for the film’s promotion by default.
Ocasio-Cortez is the perfect Democrat for the current insane iteration of the left. She’s beautiful, a true believer in the cause of Democratic Socialism, a woman of color, and completely vacuous. She’s a blind devotee of the cause who parrots every narrative the left preaches with enthusiasm.
Most of what we see in the film is backroom conversations happening between these four politicians and their teams, as well as moments with the public they’re pitching their platform to. Most of this is dedicated to bloviating on the progressive boilerplate issues from mass incarceration to Medicare-for-all, abolishing ICE, raising the minimum wage to $15/hour, and taking on Trump.
Most of this comes in the form of emotional appeals. For example, Vilela tragically lost her daughter which ultimately informed her beliefs on the healthcare system.
The movie seems to assume that you’re on board with these ideas already and doesn’t really spend much time making the case for their positions.
The majority of the film focuses on AOC’s success, but the movie does frame the failure of the other three politicians as a tragedy of the power of the system. As they say in the movie, it takes hundreds of people running to get a few successful people in.
The villain of the piece isn’t Trump, surprisingly. The main focus of AOC’s rage is former Democrat Congressman Joe Crowley. Hers isn’t just a war on the right, it’s a collectivist uprising, and Crowley is merely a representation of greed and systematic corruption holding down the poor and oppressed within the left itself.
During the segments where she debates Crowley, she berates him as a hypocrite taking money from Wall Street who isn’t brave enough to call Trump a fascist and demand his impeachment. Beating him was only the first step in her journey to, in the words of Barack Obama, fundamentally transforming the United States.
The moral of Knock Down the House is that the left’s fight for the future is found entirely in a lunge to the left through an embrace of socialism, racial identity politics, and anti-establishmentism. At a time when the left continues to purity spiral, the movie encourages the left to embrace its fringe ever further. It’s an empty appeal to leftist populism drowning in emotional arguments. With it, the film’s producers hope to cement the narrative of AOC’s and the new left’s rise to power as just the beginning of a revolution.
As a piece of art, it’s a perfect tribute to the state of the radical left: empty, radical, dangerously ignorant . . . and proud of it.
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Comments
If only cauliflowers could vote.
Garbage disposals would probably use intimidation to suppress their vote.
“As a piece of art, it’s a perfect tribute to the state of the radical left: empty, radical, dangerously ignorant . . . and proud of it” Don’t forget arrogant.
Nobody is going to watch it
Like the crap on then Obama’s, it came and went without making a sound
I still don’t see how Mechelle had so many people come to see her on her book tour, and did they really buy her book?
She wore the most gaudy, ugly outfits, that the left just went nuts over, they were actually laughable!
Still dumb after all these years
If you recognize that AOC is engaging in dadaist performance art, you see that she is really quite brilliant. It is not supposed to make sense. She is making fun of people who take politics seriously. People are paying her a lot of money, and she is creating art.
Another reason not to have Netflix.
I don’t. I cancelled when they hired Obama.
You say she’s a woman of color. That color is white, not brown. And all red on the inside.
Arrogance, resentment and deceit are the triangle of Evil.
They are at the core of every school shooting. And, now I fear they are core values of the Democrat Party.
And anger, ignorance and self-righteousness. Perhaps Evil is an impregnable hexagon.
Beautiful? She reminds me of Norma Desmond’s final scene in “Sunset Boulevard”.
Don’t even need a documentary. Democrats are protracted adolescents, trying to remain irresponsible children.
Here’s an interesting piece:
“Saito calls hikikomori “a pathology of adolescence,” not adolescents. Teendom is spreading beyond its original cohort. The people who catch it may be in their 20s or 30s, but they’re stuck with a teen’s relation to the market, always at the entrance. Though he spends far more time cautioning parents to refrain from castigating their adult children as lazy, Sait? does at one point identify a cause: “The reason that the child goes into withdrawal is not because he or she does not want to work, but because he or she is unable to work, even though he or she wants to.” Since a job signals adulthood, being barred from one deranges the normal course of maturation, and manifests as psychic distress.
“The family was the home of age. You arrived at your job already mature, supposedly, and left before a messy senescence. But with the entire category of work in crisis and family formation in terminal decline, age too is revealed to have been left open to the whims and ravages of the market. Hikikomori is a glimpse of the new moments in the life cycle wholly integrated into a system that breaks itself down as it grows. It’s not a particularly heroic response to being called into being as surplus. But if it is pathological, it is so only in having decided not to die.”
The link:
https://thenewinquiry.com/an-infantile-disorder/
More:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/