Michael Moore, an American Populist?
Article Sidebar
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Anafora provides open access to all its content to support greater global exchange of knowledge. Articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction of the full texts of the journal’s articles and allows readers to use them for any other lawful purpose, without the author’s and the publisher’s permission, provided that the original work is properly cited.
Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal (this applies to both the print and electronic issues). By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are free to use, with proper attribution.
Main Article Content
Abstract
This article contextualizes the films of Michael Moore in the tradition of American populism. Extending in particular from historian Thomas Frank’s argument in People without Power that populism can usefully be understood as a particular American tradition of leftism, the article traces how three of Moore’s films—Roger & Me (1989), Sicko (2007), and Capitalism: A Love Story (2009)—articulate political concerns that overlap with the political beliefs of American populism. The article also explores some of the populist elements in Moore’s style and argues that there is good reason to see Michael Moore as a twenty-first-century American populist but that any attempt to do so must remain clear about the definitions of populism used to make this contextualist argument.