The fantasy-noir movie “Witch Hunt” (1994) has some very sharp insights into American politics that are quoted below.
Here’s the context. Dennis Hopper plays a private eye, Phillip Lovecraft. Eric Bogosian is a U.S. senator. The premise is that magic is being encouraged in Hollywood movies, and Bogosian holds hearings to root out magic practitioners and find witches to burn. (Read: communism, McCarthy and a witch hunt.)
Hopper finds that the senator is himself conspiring with a magic practitioner to cover up a murder. This leads to the following exchange, 78 minutes in:
Hopper: This guy’s gonna blackmail you and then you’re acting like long lost brothers.
Bogosian: Politics makes strange bedfellows, I guess.
Hopper: But he’s a practitioner.
Bogosian: So?
Hopper: It was all a show. The hearing. The press coverage. Attacking magic. You could care less about protecting the people.
Bogosian: Spend some time in Congress, Phil. You get up to here with the people. Listening to their petty complaints, their demands, their constant inane whining about one thing after the next thing after the next thing after the next thing! Just because they vote for you, they think you owe them something!
Hopper: Why go after magic?
Bogosian: Whom am I supposed to go after? Big Business? You need something different, a little outside. Let me tell ya a little something about the people, Phil. You lock any ten of ’em in a room. They may not elect a leader, but I guarantee they’ll pick someone to hate.
This last line is especially sharp. It pays Congress to go after enemies. Many candidate enemies are out of bounds. They are too well fortified, too essential, know too much and make campaign contributions. This is why Congress goes after foreign enemies, like Kaiser Wilhelm, Tojo, terrorists, Iranians, and now Putin. Anything “outside”, like communists, drug pushers, Indians, pointy-head intellectuals, kooks, hippies, and protesters can become a candidate for enemy.
Why does this method succeed in gaining support? It’s because Americans love to hate someone. Congress appeals not so much to American fears as to its hatreds. Congress stirs up the fears to elicit the hatreds.
11:18 am on December 6, 2014
