"House of Cards" once seemed too cynical -- those were innocent times

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"House of Cards" once seemed too cynical — those were innocent times
Frank Underwood seemed like an implausible caricature. In the era of You Know Who, he now looks impossibly naive

By MIKE LOFGREN
Contributing Writer
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 19, 2024 6:00AM (EST)


(Salon) What seems like an eon ago, I wrote a book called "The Deep State." I conceived it as a Baedeker’s Guide to how the political machinery of Washington functioned through lobbying, political contributions and influence peddling: a nuts-and-bolts look at how institutions like the military-industrial complex, Wall Street and Silicon Valley generally got their way.

It analyzed how we lurched into the Iraq nightmare, the way Wall Street and the Bush administration co-engineered the 2008 financial meltdown, and how the Tea Party “revolt” was Astroturfed by a few billionaires. All these actions, I repeatedly emphasized, happened in plain sight of the voters whose interests were harmed by them.

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At the time I was writing the book, a TV drama ostensibly about politics became an entertainment phenomenon. "House of Cards," which ran for six seasons on Netflix, beginning in 2013, was about a politician who made his way to the top through ruthlessness, back-stabbing and even murder. I described it in the book as a kind of Hollywood fantasy about the amorality of Washington, albeit in a crucially decontextualized way. It was as if the screenwriters had taken the plot formula for crime dramas like "CSI" or "The Wire" and shoehorned it into an upscale setting, with Senate cloture motions replacing drug busts in a West Baltimore ’hood.

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The real failing of "House of Cards" that now renders it an antique was not that its depiction of politics was overly cynical, but that it was too naïve by half. At the time of its production, birtherism had already blossomed like a toxic plant, the parents of children murdered in the Sandy Hook school shooting were being mocked and harassed as crisis actors, and Republicans “knew” that Obamacare included death panels that could decree involuntary euthanasia. Yet "House of Cards" focused on the machinations of politicians in the manner of the 1962 film "Advise and Consent" rather than the real story that was brewing in the collective id of Republican voters. ...................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/02/19/house-of-cards-once-seemed-too-cynical--those-were-innocent-times/