“I’m running because everyday Americans deserve to be represented by everyday Americans… and it’s time for ordinary people to do extraordinary things. Let’s raise some hell and take our lives back.”
The voices on screen belong to four feisty American women who contested against powerful politicians in the Congressional primaries in 2018, forcing even the most supercilious out of their amused complacency. Knock Down The House, the Netflix documentary that follows their journey, was released this month, bringing the world spotlight on an extraordinary experiment that succeeded against all odds.
Director Rachel Lears’ film trails the insurgent candidates—waitress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, nurse Cori Bush, accounting clerk Paula Jean Swearengin and healthcare activist Amy Vilela—their poignant personal stories that brought them into the fray and their hectic campaigns against seemingly unbeatable opponents. It’s a film of hope, struggle and a sliver of sadness that culminates in the stunning win of 28-year-old Ocasio-Cortez against long-entrenched Democrat Joe Crowley.
Against all odds
The David-Goliath face-offs underscore the core principle of Knock Down The House: the fight against the corrupting influence of big money and super-wealthy legislators in America’s corporate-backed politics. The battle lines here are clearly drawn: people of wealth versus those of modest means, whites versus people of colour, corporate funding versus small individual donations, pressing peoples’ issues versus the apathy of legislators in Washington DC, and advertising splashes versus door-to-door campaigns. As Ocasio-Cortez says in one scene: “They’ve got money, we’ve got people.”
At one hour and 26 minutes, the documentary doesn’t have the temporal luxury of dwelling on the antecedents of the two grassroots groups that brought scores of ordinary candidates into the political fray. But though Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats—which emerged from Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2016—remain in the background, the political upsets they wrought say it all. Particularly through the victory of Ocasio-Cortez, the woman who gets the lion’s share of footage and lights up the screen with her sparkle and spunk.
Closer home
Knock Down The House is startlingly similar to an Indian documentary that preceded it by more than a year: Vinay Shukla and Khushboo Ranka’s An Insignificant Man on the rise of Arvind Kejriwal and his volunteer-based Aam Aadmi Party. Like the Netflix documentary, An Insignificant Man takes us through political outsider Kejriwal’s grassroots activism, his public meetings, his war room strategies and even his warts (the much-dissed ‘intolerance’ is on display in one scene). There are portions where he educates slum dwellers on participative democracy versus procedural democracy and tells do-gooders that charity is no substitute for social justice. The documentary also catches his human side—he is seen repeatedly dissolving into laughter as his colleague Kumar Vishwas says a piece to camera (prompting Vishwas to remark wryly, “And people wonder if this man even cracks a smile.”) and holding back his tears after the accident and death of one of his firebrand slum volunteers.
What also comes across is Kejriwal’s gravest error—namely, his rash public espousal of an extreme and unfeasible idealism (like pledging never to ally with ‘corrupt’ parties) that in real life left him vulnerable to gloating criticism. There are scenes in the film where disgruntled AAP volunteers, initially promised a sweeping internal democracy, question the breaching of this principle and later on ask whether AAP has compromised with its ideals. Yogendra Yadav, resident pragmatist and cautionary voice, patiently explains how one must stick to one’s achievable ideals but let go sometimes for the greater good. “True idealism can only be practised in a monastery,” he says. “In politics, the challenge lies in navigating between idealism and brute reality with the eventual goal of realising the ideal that you have set for yourself. And this challenge will always exist.”
The patronising attitude of the political outsiders’ opponents, meanwhile, is gradually built up in both films. Crowley refuses to even appear for an initial public debate with his waitress rival while Delhi chief minister Sheila Dixit is consistently sneery about Kejriwal. She finally dismisses him with one dramatic line worthy of a Bollywood film: “Arvind Kejriwal ki baat aap mat kijiye. Woh ek kahani thi, khatm ho gayi (Don’t talk of Arvind Kejriwal. He was just a story, and the story is over).” That has to be the biggest facepalm moment in the film.
Challenging the establishment
Eventually, both Knock Down The House and An Insignificant Man make that one point which has great significance in the cynical and corrupted political systems of both nations: the need for new blood in politics to cleanse the old order. Yadav, at one point, talks about the code of silence among all established political parties and stresses how such codes need to be shattered in a democracy by outsiders. Ocasio-Cortez, while comforting saddened volunteers and colleagues after the initial losses in the primaries, emphasises that such a battle has to be carried out consistently on a war footing. “It’s just the reality,” she says, “that for one of us to get through, a hundred of us have to try.”
Indeed.