
I enjoy House of Cards, both the American one starring Kevin Spacey and the British one upon which it is based, starring the remarkable Ian Richardson. There are many people (including me) who have pointed out the American one gets a lot wrong about politics. I mean it leaves out the bureaucracy and the true believers and everyone in it is beautiful (which is laughable). More importantly, the show relies on the brutality of elites towards fellow elites, which isn’t how DC manipulation happens.
But one thing the show gets right is how the ascendant strain of political ideology is that of the Democratic Leadership Council. The show’s main character is political leader Frank Underwood, a nasty South Carolina anti-union corporate Democrat. Underwood instinctively wants to raise the retirement age and destroy unions, and he’s a huge fan of natural gas because the industry gives money to politicians. In the first season, Underwood destroys an education proposal by leaking in the press that it’s too left-wing, and then proceeds to move a proposal through that gets rid of teacher tenure. The basic policy bias of the show maps well to the policy bias of current Washington.
The West Wing was also about a group of neo-liberals, but they were culturally more in tune with liberal identity politics, cosmopolitan and wanting to do the right thing, but actually deciding to be adults and practical and therefore in reality cowardly and savage. Underwood is just overtly savage and nihilistic, and therefore, not realistic. The best salesmen believe in their product, and every political system is populated by good salesmen.
Actually come to think of it, hating on teacher tenure is pretty consistent. Also, it’s weird that there’s no war on terror in House of Cards. Seems tailor-made for the show - it certainly was a big part of the British House of Cards.
Anyway. Unlike in the 1990s, when people wanted The West Wing fantasy of wonderful heroic insiders beset by stupid childish activists, today people seem to want to believe political leaders are deeply evil, sort of cynical anti-heroes. Interestingly activists play the same role in House of Cards as they do in the West Wing, fringe stupid characters used as plot devices to show how powerful the insiders are. In fact House of Cards is actually a weird perversion of the same West Wing narrative that just accepts the cult of personality conceit of how we organize our culture.
One day, I hope, people will realize that political leaders are just people, even if they have titles.