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Rolling Stone investigative reporter Greg Palast busted Jeb Bush for stealing the 2000 election by purging Black voters from Florida’s electoral rolls. Now Palast is back to take a deep dive into the Republicans’ dark operation, Crosscheck – designed to steal a million minority votes by November – and the billionaires who finance it.
In case you aren’t getting enough of the Worst Election Ever, sensationalist investigative “journalist” Greg Palast is here to make sure that you get your fair share of conspiratorial nonsense. Palast touches on some salient points, but goes badly overboard until “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” looks more like a conservative parody of liberal-friendly documentaries than an actual journalistic endeavor. In an era of unprecedented hyperpartisanship and bold-faced lies produced by partisan news sources both on television and online, this film only serves to add fuel to phenomena that are undermining the foundation of the American democratic process. That might sound a bit dramatic, and it is undoubtedly disingenuous to blame the breakdown of American civic institutions on one poorly-produced film, but it is nonetheless the symptom of a deeply worrying problem and should be addressed as such.
I don’t really know where to start sifting through this mess, so I suppose I’ll start with its bizarre opening. A stone-faced Woody Harrelson, standing in front of a very low-quality green screen, grimly informs us that the documentary we are about to see touches on some serious issues in American politics, and that we shouldn’t immediately write off conspiracy theories. Okay, Woody Harrelson. Thanks. This then segues into the introduction of the film’s narrator and Rolling Stone investigative reporter, Greg Palast. He dresses like a film noir detective, and proceeds to spend the duration of “Best Democracy” leading us on a wild goose chase from Kansas to the Arctic Circle to the Congo in pursuit of evidence of voter fraud perpetuated by the Republican megadonor Koch Brothers, in concert with a Kansas Secretary of State and Jeb Bush. Still with me? If you’re not, I don’t blame you. The threads that Palast tries to tie together between these different actors are incredibly thin and completely devalue the parts of this faux expose that have redeeming value.
So what did Palast get right? For one thing, he did correctly identify what could be charitably described as voter discouragement efforts by the Republican Party, if not outright voter suppression. This is not a partisan criticism. It is easily verifiable and there is ample evidence that it is occurring during this election cycle: a reduction in the number of early voting polling places in counties with high African-American populations, new voter ID laws that disproportionately target minority voters, and laws preventing convicted felons from voting are all tactics that Republican-controlled state governments have employed. While you might agree with the stated intent behind some of these laws – perhaps you believe that voter fraud is widespread (despite evidence to the contrary) or that being convicted of a felony should lead to the erasure of voting rights – there is little doubt that local and state Republican jurisdictions have applied these tactics to influence the outcome of elections. Where Palast loses the thread, however, is when he makes the completely unsubstantiated case that the Republican Party is committing widespread voter fraud on a national level and actually changing votes to steal elections. This is not only incorrect and completely unsupported by any actual evidence outside of a bizarre voter registration list that Palast obtains, it is also dangerous and only serves to further erode norms that have supported the democratic process in the United States for the past 200 years. Besides, if Jeb Bush really was involved in a nefarious conspiracy to manipulate votes, you would think he would have at least have been able to avoid being humiliated in the 2016 Republican primaries.
Any politically-charged documentary needs to be judged on a single criterion before any other: does it accurately inform viewers on its subject? Unfortunately, “Best Democracy” falls far short in that regard. While there are nuggets of truth buried in a morass of outlandish conspiracy theories, they are too few and far between to save this film from itself. I really cannot understate how strange this work is and how often I felt like I was peering into the mind of a schizophrenia patient. One minute, Palast will be talking to Willie Nelson at a Georgia diner (yes, this is in the film), the next, he’ll be harassing an elected official at a community event in Kansas, and will yet again completely change gears by confronting an Eskimo professor-turned-whaler in the Arctic Circle (also in the film).
A democracy can only work when its citizens are informed. Today, unfortunately, there is no shortage of “news” organizations churning out liberal or conservative agitprop that leads to uninformed voters casting their ballots based on things that are fundamentally untrue. There are still great journalists out there producing great work: Newsweek’s David Farenthold is in line for a Pulitzer for his detailed reporting on the 2016 presidential campaign. However, Greg Palast is not a great journalist, and “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” is not worth your time.
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