'House of Cards' Season 3 - Netflix

What's The Point of Getting Netflix?

Rhetorical. It's to binge watch the amazing 'House of Cards'. Netflix has finally arrived in Australia and you can get a hold of it through Fetch TV, which is just swell because it's like having 2 suppliers on the one box. I guess that's what it is.

So yay Netflix and yay Fetch TV. Spoiler alert! I might spill something.

What's Good About It

Now in its third season, Frank Underwood is the President, and we get to see just what kind of policy maven he actually is. The cut and thrust being a caretaker President makes for good viewing. As with the previous seasons the acting is superb an the directing remains stylistically consistent from episode to episode. The tension mounts ever so slowly, and there's quite a lot of intrigue unfolding before our eyes which makes for much brain-teasing fun.

Francis now has a nemesis in the Russian President Viktor Petrov, a character that is a flimsily-loosely based on Vladimir Putin but is much taller. He also has a domestic rival in Heather Dunbar who is running against him in the 2016 election, and she too presents well. Frank is doing this without Doug who is in a long B-plot of his own through the season. So Frank is doing a lot of stuff, even as his own trusty marriage to Claire begins to fray.

The dramatic tension is always high and the intrigues keep you wondering so they've stuck to the method of the earlier seasons, and it works very well.

What's Bad About It

There are limits to what Frank can do given his method in his rise to power. This gives rise to a lot of wheeling and dealing scenes that are subtle and expository, but it's too much like 'The West Wing' without a plan. Frank wings it a lot, and every time he does, you sort of wince. You hope Barack Obama doesn't just wing it like this. You know George W Bush must have winged it much like this - and his record speaks for itself.

The policies Frank pursues are also bad. They're not picaresque bad, they're just flat out disagreeably awful. I'll go into it a bit later but basically it's not much fun rooting for a bad guy to win if his plan is something that you think is not exactly great. After all it would be hard to root for a film about say, the Nazis in power because you'd inevitably have to discuss the Final Solution and that's just the worst of a government full of bad policies.

It's one thing to root for the bad guy to get to the top through dastardly tricks he winningly shares with the audience. It's another when he then goes off and becomes a President that's worse than Nixon. It was hard rooting for or sympathising with Nixon in Oliver Stone's 'Nixon' film. It's hard to feel much for Frank when he bangs on with crappy policy.

What's Interesting About It

The show seems to be straining at the seams. It wants to tell us so much more and go into politics itself much more but it can't without looking like other shows and films. Frank Underwood then does something drastic and crazy but in most part it comes across as hokey. What we seem to be finding out about Frank in Season 3 is that for all his ambition and gusto and conniving and scheming, the Presidency itself is his endpoint of the Peter Principle. He is good enough to rise to the office but having achieved it, he is not up to it.

In this we can sort of see echoes of 'Richard III' by Shakespeare where they got the device of the bad guy main character addressing the audience. Richard III himself came to power under cloudy circumstances and didn't really reign for long, and was brought down by a rebellion; from which you can draw a certain conclusion that he couldn't have been terribly good at the King-ing business. Frank Underwood does whole lot less of it in this season because... well, he looks awfully busy; too busy even to talk to us.

The end of Season 3 leaves you with a cliff hanger of sorts but having sat through this season, I thought the road ahead isn't terribly long for this show. The UK Version had 3 seasons and finished with Francis Urquhart getting assassinated and turned into some kind of martyr for politics. In the case of Urquhart, the character starts as a conniving conservative and ends up as a kind of full blown fascist so you don't mourn for him so much as feel relieved the whole damn show is over. Frank Underwood starts off as a Southern Democrat so you wonder just how far to the right he can go, and what exactly that means.

The Third Pole

As dumb and stifling as the two party system is and the kind of politics it engenders, from time to time it throws up people who want to start a third pole. Some of these are well-meaning like the Australian Democrats of old or Malcolm Fraser who was trying to put something together in his dying days. But other instances they seem to be Trojan Horses for the Far Right and lunar Right. Like Ross Perot or the Golden Dawn in Greece. The point is, most instances of the third Pole seem to be far right insurrections, posing as centrists sitting between the two parties.

Frank's positioning of his policies are deeply, deeply suspect. He wants to get rid of welfare, raid the coffers for emergency relief and just employ people or pay employers to employ people. it's fanciful as the economics is crackpot. Frank wants 100% employment and there is no discussion of what that would mean. He is also against minimum wages because that would limit the number of people getting jobs. It's like the corporatist heaven where people can be fired at will, and be totally fungible. Naturally people resist the inanity of this vision, but somehow Frank Underwood is totally convinced this is the best policy direction.

The subsequent gyrations involved in craving for this crappy third-pole-fascist policy takes up a lot of screen time and he keeps telling us this is the legacy wants to leave behind. Dismantling the welfare state and replacing it with guaranteed 100% employment: The ultimate small-government fetishists' dream. When you consider such policies essentially drive labour out of its own negotiating table and sends them to the below-poverty-line wages of Walmart, you wonder how this could even be considered by the show runners.

In The Absence Of Marxism

Over the years - thanks to Facebook and such - I've come to realise just how distant Marxist theory is from American political thinking. What's even more interesting is how the US Democrats try to pose as the party of the broader Left without any actual theoretical framework except an old kind of small 'l' liberalism. As such, the US Democrats have rarely taken a policy framework that could alleviate the issues of the working poor which has existed since Reagan came to power.

Watching 'House of Cards' unfold in the US has been far more enlightening as to just how little framing goes into the thinking over policy. It's free, but it's un-moored so it is oblivious of its drift to the right. If nothing else, Marxist theory would give some of these policy makers a kind of sextant to know just how far off the middle they are drifting. But the ingrained fear of a Godless communism has made any consideration of Karl Marx, all but nought. In its place is an absurd kind of identity politics that allegedly starts with the individual, with a bloated sense self-importance typical of identity politics. If this is black rappers from Compton or the LGBTQ population in San Francisco, that's one thing. But white southerners bearing the Confederate flag trying to assert identity politics only serves to show how stupid identity politics is when pursued to the reductio ad absurdum.

Frank Underwood's position is that if everybody had jobs, they would have the freedom to exercise their identity politics to the full. In other words, he himself might not be a racist, but he supports the ideological framework that gives rise to racism in the absence of Marxist analysis. And he's supposed to be from the US Democrats. Honestly, that is so stupid, but he seems totally unaware of where that would all go. The problem right there is that when I watch the show, I'm smarter than the allegedly smart main character; and that makes it pretty boring.  The rest of it becomes a sort of choreographed sequence of political tactics, but his centrepiece policy really is fucked.

He really is like Shakespeare's 'Richard III' - truly deserving of a terrible end.

Cheering For Psychopaths

Frank Underwood is of course a psychopath so the picaresque essentially works on cheering on the psycho, in the same way we did that for 'Dexter', except he's not killing one or two people, he's killing swathes of people from the seat of power as President. Viktor, the re-imagined Putin is equally a psycho who only understands power through the prism of Machiavelli's 'The Prince' but with a further discount on scruples. Frank's wife Claire remains a psychopath as well. Heather Dunbar says all the right things but she has hints of psychopathy as well. After three seasons I'm a little fatigued with the constant cognitive dissonance of cheering or spending time observing these head cases. What used to be edgy is now grating. What used to be intriguing is now blatantly obnoxious.

Maybe this is the point the show is trying to make; that it takes a genuine psycho to rise to the top and get things done, and this is what is really rewarded in democracy. Plato thought so, so it's not a new idea, but you'd think there was something a bit more to go on than psychopathy. At this stage I'm longing and waiting for the moment Frank is assassinated, but I guess Season 4 is going to be about how he wins re-election and goes onto a second term.

It is however interesting in how it exposes the frailties of American political thought. They're a lot more interested in politics than policy.

"You're Entitled To Nothing."

If you thought TonyAbbott and WTE Joe Hockey saying this kind of stuff was going to lead to a more egalitarian society, you were wrong. Tony and WTE Joe proceeded to devise the least fair budget in the short history of Australia. Which gives rise to the notion that people who bang on about entitlements are those who are most motivated to hold on to their own entitlements while stamping out the entitlements of others. This is the basic nature of politics in a zero-sum game, and this rhetoric is true of both sides of politics. When Leftists talk about ending entitlements, they're talking about Private school funding and special tax rates for the rich and franking credits on dividends and so on, without giving up on any of the Left's favourite programs.

Rightists are of course, worse. Nobody seems to think about what Machiavelli wrote in his 'Discourses' but it's worth noting that the baseline clause of good government is stability, the second clause is building the benefits to maximum number of people in its constituency. Taking away benefits and replacing it with nothing isn't good government.

Of course it goes without any surprise that Frank Underwood kicks off his national address with "In this life you are entitled to nothing." It's true in a libertarian sense but a society run on libertarian sense is no society at all. Small Government is a myth concocted by people who think governments are run like corporations. Worse still, the psychopathic end of this crowd think that if you could cut government services altogether and privatise everything, government would be reduced to nothing. The purest of Libertarians would like government stop and simply disappear; the US Republicans seem to want to cut it so there's nothing but the military and the police and a perpetual war on drugs and terror. The Australian Coalition Government wants to cut the government in such a way that all tax dollars collected go to service their class only.
Frank Underwood wants to dismantle welfare and make everybody work for less than poverty wages.

While one isn't entitled to anything in particular, you'd think one's government would be doing better than sending us back to the 18th century. In the real world, this means we really should be sacking this Coalition government in Australia on grounds of lack of competence.