Why the Left hates Michael Moore

Michael Moore as portrayed by Team America

Most people on the Right agree about Michael Moore: he’s a poseur and egomaniac whose “anti-capitalist” documentaries blend fact and invention. This is not surprising. However, with the release of his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, it’s worth noting that many of his critics come from the liberal Left. And with good reason, for Moore exposes their infantilism and narcissism.

One of his most trenchant detractors is Christopher Hitchens, who wrote of his movie Fahrenheit 9/11: “To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of ‘dissenting’ bravery.”

The anti-Bush campaigner Jesse Larner was even more disparaging in his 2006 book Forgive Us Our Spins: Michael Moore and the Future of the Left. In it, he despairs of Moore’s gesture politics and misleading use of montage, his reluctance to comprehend nuance and emphasis on “emotional appeal over factual content”. Reviewing the book in The Guardian, even George Monbiot concluded that it was “well written, witty, and wise … helping us understand where the Left has been going for the last few years, and where it might end up.” In The Independent, Sholto Byrnes asked: “Why does Moore twist the truth when his arguments are strong enough to be presented without manipulation? Is he merely a monstrous egotist whose head has been swollen further by international success?”

The film-maker’s weakness for misleading audiences was well illustrated by Mike Wilson’s 2004 documentary Michael Moore Hates America, which explains the dishonest aspects of Roger & Me (1989) and Bowling for Columbine (2002). Wilson is a conservative, but many on the Left are equally alarmed. Andrew Anthony asked in The Observer in 2004 why the director “has only ever established a partial relationship with the truth”, or why his public persona does not match his private one. This “champion of the working-class” insisted that Channel 4 house him in the Ritz when he was in England working on the television show The Awful Truth. This anti-capitalist sent his daughter to a private school. This self-appointed spokesman of the workers is also a notoriously demanding boss himself. “He’s a jerk and a hypocrite and didn’t treat us right and he was false in all of his dealings,” said one former worker. His former manager, Douglas Urbanski, has said that Moore “was the most difficult man I’ve ever met… he’s money-obsessed”.

The Left and Right can unite in accusing Michael Moore of double standards, but many on the Left are more dismayed because he represents a deeper delinquency in radical politics. He is an idol to a generation that chanted the childish, self-regarding slogan “Not in my name” and admire loudmouth cretins such as Hugo Chavez. It was fitting that a marionette of Michael Moore appeared in the 2004 film Team America: World Police, alongside representations of Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin and Sean Penn. The film’s makers, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are disaffected Democrats, unhappy at how Hollywood egotists adopt trendy political causes to make themselves appear virtuous; Moore is one of the worst offenders.

The secularist Left will probably turn on Michael Moore further, as in Capitalism: A Love Story, he speaks most unfashionably of his continued devotion to the Catholic church. Strangely, this may cause many on the religious Right to have a re-think, too.