Washington, DC – Republican Congressman Mike Bost’s big political moment this election year came in July when he and President Donald Trump toured the Granite City Steel Works near St Louis in the American heartland.

The president, appearing at a rally with Bost and other Illinois congressional Republicans, touted his steel tariffs and promised to bring industrial jobs back to the Midwest.

People in Illinois’ 12th district voted 55-40 percent for Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Yet Bost, a Republican who has embraced Trump, is in a tight race for reelection this year.

“This is a competitive race that leans maybe slightly Republican is the way I would rate it,” said John Jackson, a political science professor at the Paul Simon Institute of Public Policy at the University of Southern Illinois in Carbondale, Ill.

One telling sign, the Granite City steelworkers union threw their support to Bost’s Democrat challenger, Brendan Kelly, a former state prosecutor and political moderate.

On November 6, some 80 million Americans – perhaps more depending on turnout – will cast ballots for all 435 seats in the US House of Representatives where Republicans now hold a 23-seat majority.

Historically called “midterm” elections, the vote is essentially a referendum on the party of the president whose performance in office is watched closely.

“Trump’s job approval is one of the critical factors and thus there is some reason to believe a Democratic wave is coming,” Jackson told Al Jazeera.

Recent polls show American voters increasingly hold negative views of the president. Sixty percent of registered voters in an August 29 Washington Post-ABC News poll disapproved of the job the president is doing, up from 54 percent in April.

Democrat revival?

Now, as Republicans begin their reelection campaigns in earnest, most analysts are predicting Democrats will gain control of the House, an outcome that would match historic norms.

“My forecast is that the Democrats will pick up a net of about 30 House seats. I don’t see a huge wave. But I think they will take the House,” said Greg Valliere, chief global strategist and Washington analyst at Horizon Investments LLC, a financial advisory firm.

Republican losses, however, easily could be higher depending on the depth of a potential backlash against Trump.

Republicans face credible challenges from Democrats in 62 congressional districts while Democrats face competition in only four, according to The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan publisher of US political analysis.

In California, affluent suburban voters in Orange County have historically provided Republicans a reliable base of support. Not so this year.

“We used to be the county that Ronald Reagan said all good Republicans go to die,” Dan Chmielewski, publisher of TheLiberalOC, an Orange County political blog, told Al Jazeera.

“Hillary won Orange Country in 2016, the first time a Democrat has taken this county since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There are significant cities that have voter registrations that are majority Democrat now,” he said.

‘House battlefield’ 

Three Orange County Republicans face Democratic challengers in races analysts rate as toss ups.

In the agricultural San Joaquin and San Fernando valleys, where Hispanics make up one-third or more of voters and Trump’s anti-immigrant policies hurt migrant workers, two more Republicans face competitive races.

In particular, Representative Dana Rohrbacher, now in his 15th term as a congressman, faces criticism at home for his connections to Russians amid the US Department of Justice’s special investigation into Trump’s campaign and potential collusion with Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Rohrbacher blames a “deep state” conspiracy for the investigation of Trump and says he doubts the veracity of criminal charges brought against Russians by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Rohrbacher’s opponent Harley Rouda has aggressively tied him to Trump and argued the Republican has failed to hold the president accountable, a campaign theme that plays well in California.

Nationwide, a combination of demographic change and disaffection with Trump’s brand of politics – particularly among suburban white, college-educated women – has created a challenge for incumbent House Republicans who four years ago might have counted on easy reelections.

“The House battlefield is largely in districts that either Clinton won, or where Trump didn’t really run that far ahead. There are a lot of suburban districts where they like Republicans but maybe not a Republican like Trump,” Kyle Kondik, who analyzes House races for the University of Virginia Center on Politics, told Al Jazeera. “And so I don’t think the president is an asset.”

‘Gift to the wealthy’

Democrats have led Republicans in national congressional preference polls all year. The average spread has widened recently to 8.4 percent, according to RealClearPolitics.com.

House races in Texas are emblematic both of the depth of Republican troubles this year and how American politics are shifting at the grassroots level in response to Trump.

Representative John Culberson has held the wealthy Texas 7th district in suburban Houston for 18 years. It’s a district once held by former President George HW Bush when he began his political career. Today it is more diverse with a population that is 44 percent White, 32 percent Hispanic, 13 percent Black, and 10 percent Asian.

Culberson now faces a tough challenge by Democrat Lizzie Fletcher, a relatively inexperienced, progressive liberal who is focusing her campaign on organising local turnout and resentment about the federal response to Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 storm that caused $125bn in damage.

A senior member of the House committee that doles out federal money, Culberson played a key role in delivering billions in federal aid to Texas after Harvey but hasn’t been personally visible in the district. Like many other Republicans, his hopes of campaigning on the popularity of a huge tax cut enacted in 2017 under Trump have fallen flat.

“An awful lot of Republicans thought the tax cuts would be a major plus for them in the election,” Valliere said. “We’ve seen a lot of Republicans abandoning campaign advertising, bragging about the tax cuts. People, especially the Trump base, feel that the tax cuts were a gift to the very wealthy and the corporations.”

Unpopular policies

Other pieces of the Republican agenda in Congress have proved unpopular, particularly the 2017 repeal of Obamacare, the 2010 Affordable Care Act that set up mandated health insurance markets designed to cut costs and make healthcare more accessible for Americans.

In Illinois, Bost was forced to discontinue holding town hall meetings to avoid irate constituents.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which is the political arm of the House Republican party, adopted the theme “Protecting Our Historic Republican Majority” in its campaign and fundraising communications. One by one, it is attempting to paint Democrats as “radical leftists” opposed to “conservative values”.

But without a popular national platform, the anti-Trump political climate has left Republicans scrambling to play on local issues or, in some cases, use dirty tricks to smear Democrat opponents.

In Virginia’s 7th district, defined by suburbs of the state capital Richmond, Tea Party darling Dave Brat is in a tough fight against Democrat challenger Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA operative whose security clearance application was improperly leaked by a political group tied to Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Ryan’s working-class Wisconsin district outside of Milwaukee was carried by Trump 53-42 percent over Clinton in 2016. He announced in April he would not seek reelection, one of 39 House Republicans choosing to retire rather than face voters this year.

“There’s where the Achilles heel in the Trump movement is,” Jackson said.

Iraq’s newly elected parliament held its first session on Monday as two rival blocs, both claiming to hold the most seats, vied for the right to form a new government.

The parliament meeting followed more than three months after the May 12 polls, the first since Iraq declared victory over the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group late last year.

On Sunday, Iraqi political groups, including those led by Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, formed a 16-group alliance to create a parliamentary bloc.

With 54 seats, Sadr’s Sairoon coalition had won the elections, while Abadi’s al-Nasr coalition came in third with 42 seats. However, no electoral coalition secured a clear majority in the polls.

The new bloc includes religious and ethnic groups, such as Shia and Sunni Arabs and Turkmen, as well as Yazidi and Christian minorities.

A total of 166 MPs are required to form a coalition in the 329-seat parliament, which in turn would form the country’s new government and name the new prime minister.

The Sadr-Abadi alliance claimed it had a majority of the seats, which was contested by former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who formed an alliance with militia commander Hadi al-Ameri.

Neither alliance included the two main Kurdish parties, placing them to reprise the kingmaker role they have historically played, as their combined 43 seats would give whichever alliance they join a sizable numerical advantage.

I don’t think the Americans will accept any role for the Iranians in Iraq.

Ahmed Rushdi, former Iraqi parliamentary speaker

Protracted process

Ahmed Rushdi, a former parliamentary speaker and a member of the House of Iraqi Expertise Foundation told Al Jazeera that due to these differing claims of majority seats, there is still no clear vision yet as to which bloc will end up forming the government.

“The most important thing is that until now [parliament] still hasn’t managed to [put forward] candidates for the prime minister, president and the parliamentary speaker,” he said.

After the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, the leadership positions are held by Iraq’s three largest ethnic-sectarian components – a Shia, Kurd and Sunni respectively.

Rushdi said that a protracted process in forming a government is likely, pointing out that in the previous 2010 election, it took 11 months for a government to be made.

This time around however, there are two foreign players on the ground: Iraqi allies and archrivals, the Iranians and the Americans.

“I don’t think the Americans will accept any role for the Iranians in Iraq and have been threatening to use economic blockage if the next Iraqi government will be close to Tehran,” he said.

Ameri and Maliki are Iran’s two most prominent allies in Iraq. Abadi is seen as the preferred candidate of the US, while Sadr portrays himself as a nationalist who rejects both American and Iranian influence.

Rebuilding the country

In addition to balancing relations between Iran and the US, the new government will be tasked with rebuilding the country after a three-year war with ISIL.

Furthermore, uncertainty over the composition of the new government has raised tensions at a time when public impatience is growing over poor basic services, high unemployment and the slow pace of reconstruction.

Nader Hashemi, a professor at the University of Denver, told Al Jazeera that there is hope that Sadr and Maliki’s alliance, as the “most inclusive and representative since the 2003 US invasions” will begin to address these issues.

“Most of the key players have a nationalist political agenda that is geared towards developing Iraq for all of Iraqi citizens not catering to the ethnic or sectarian interest of a particular group,” he said. “So in that sense there’s a lot to be optimistic about.”

Mamoon Alabbasi, a political analyst focusing on the Middle East and North Africa, was more cautious about just how representative Sadr’s alliance would be.

“It is common for Shia-led political alliances to include members of other communities,” he told Al Jazeera.

“How much influence do these members have or what kind of treatment their communities will receive is the real test. Otherwise the diverse makeup is cosmetic.”

‘Stakes are huge’

Hashemi acknowledged however that whether Sadr alliance will be able to address the immense political and socioeconomic challenges that Iraqi society is afflicted with, such as unemployment, corruption, and the delivering of public services, remains to be seen.

“The stakes are huge,” he explained. “Iraq is a failed state. It’s been deeply affected by a sectarian war and by the rise of ISIL – which has been comprehensively crushed but not defeated,” Hashemi added.

Abbasi said that the rebuilding of Sunni-majority provinces, especially Anbar and Nineveh, has taken a backseat.

“Talk of reconstructing these areas was abundant following Iraq’s victory against the ISIL, and it peaked during the donor conference in Kuwait early this year,” he said.

“But now the focus for the current and incoming governments is on dealing with the protests in the Shia-majority south.”

People gather during a protest near the main provincial government building because of the water pollution and poor services in Basra [File:Essam al-Sudani/Reuters]

For several months now, tens of thousands of Iraqis, in several provinces such as Basra, Najaf and Karbala, have been demonstrating against the lack of clean drinking water and electricity cuts, but their demands have yet to be met.

“The incoming government will likely start by making short term fixes for the unemployment and poor services crises,” Abbasi said.

“However, if the government wants to go deeper than merely addressing the symptoms of some of Iraq’s problems, then there will be no escaping the fight to root out corruption.”

More than 1,600 people have died or gone missing while attempting to reach Europe so far this year, UNCHR’s new Desperate Journeys report shows. 

The report released on Monday reveals that while the number of crossings has fallen, the deaths have risen, making the voyage more deadly in percentage terms for those who venture across.

According to the report, people smugglers are taking greaters risks in the journey due to increased surveillance.

A total of 2,276 people died last year while trying to cross, this represented one death for every 42 arrivals.

This year, it is 1,095 deaths, or one out of every 18 arrivals. In June alone, the proportion hit one death for every seven arrivals. About 500 people have gone missing. 

“This report once again confirms the Mediterranean as one of the world’s deadliest sea crossings,” said UNHCR’s Director of the Bureau for Europe, Pascale Moreau.

“With the number of people arriving on European shores falling, this is no longer a test of whether Europe can manage the numbers, but whether Europe can muster the humanity to save lives,” she added.

People travelling to Europe continue to do so for different reasons.

Some continue to flee armed conflict and human rights violations, while others seek international protection on account of religious, ethnic or political persecution or to escape different forms of sexual or gender-based violence, the report revealed.

On the Central Mediterranean route so far this year, there have been 10 separate incidents in which 50 or more people died – most after departing from Libya.

“The reason the traffic has become more deadly is that the traffickers are taking more risk, because there is more surveillance exercised by the Libyan coast guards,” said Vincent Cochetel, UNHCR’s special envoy for the central Mediterranean.

Seven of those incidents have been since June alone, UNHCR said.

“This is not new, we have highlighted this for a while now,” Maria Jesus Vega a spokesperson from UNCHR in Spain told Al Jazeera.

“We need a regional response, this not an exclusive problem from those countries that are in the outer border, such as Italy, Greece or Spain.”

And while people risk their lives in the journey, this is not the only time they are at risk. 

“People aiming to reach to Europe risk their lives multiple times,” Vega said. 

“They risk their lives when they try to flee conflict in their countries, when they need to cross the borders with no authorisation, and when they fall in the hands of traffickers and mafias that promise to take them,” she explained.

Monetising tragedy

Libyan authorities intercepted or rescued 18,400 people between August last year and July this year – a 38-percent increase from the same period of 2016 and 2017.

Arrivals by sea from Libya to Europe plummeted 82 percent in those comparable periods, to 30,800 in the more recent one.

UNHCR says a growing worry these days is deaths on land by people trying to get to Libya in the first place, or getting stuck in squalid, overcrowded detention centres.

Many are returned there after failing to cross by sea to Europe.

The problems after disembarkation (is that) those people are sent back to detention centres, and many disappear,” Cochetel said.

“Many are sold to militias, and to traffickers, and people employing them without paying them.”

He said the drop in departures means that traffickers attempt to “monetise their investment, which means they have to exploit more people.”

“That results in more cases of slavery, forced labour, prostitution of those people – because they (smugglers) want to make money off those people.” 

And while this route is deadly, this is not the only one that raises a red alert.

“The route of Morocco or Algeria to Spain has also shown an increase in the death rate,” Vega said.

“So far this year we have a total of 300 people dead.”

“In the same period last year, we had a total of 200 deaths, this is very worrisome, and a lot of this has to do with the mafias that are operating the route, they are taking greater risks every day,” she added.

Spain is the third busiest point of arrival for all refugees and migrants entering Europe by sea, behind Italy and Greece, accounting for 23 percent of all such arrivals to the EU.

Renewed clashes between rival armed groups in Tripoli have plunged Libya in yet deeper chaos, casting serious doubt as to whether the war-wracked country is ready to hold planned elections later this year.

On August 27, fierce fighting erupted in the capital’s southern districts after the Seventh Brigade, an armed group based in Tarhouna, 65km southeast of Tripoli, launched a surprise offensive against rival militias.

At least 39 people have been killed so far, including 18 civilians in gun battles and indiscriminate shelling hitting densely populated areas. Hundreds more were wounded.

A truce was reached on August 28 but clashes resumed shortly after, forcing authorities to close Tripoli’s only functioning airport.

The Seventh Brigade has since assumed control of the airport.

The UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli declared a state of emergency on Sunday, saying in a statement it was necessary to “protect and secure civilians, public and private possessions and vital institutions”.

Divisions along regional, tribal and linguistic lines have complicated the North African country’s transition to democracy since the ouster of longstanding leader Muammar Gaddafi nearly seven years ago.

Arms groups now clashing in and around the capital played an integral part in the NATO-backed mission to topple Gaddafi.

Successive governments’ failure to integrate these militias into the formal security structure has led to some groups strengthening their position in the capital – and elsewhere – where they control oil terminals, airports, military barracks and other crucial infrastructure.   

The existence of two rival legislatures – the internationally recognised GNA and the eastern based House of Representatives (HOR) – each with its own central bank and national oil company, highlights another challenge in the country’s plight to enact the necessary reforms and, ultimately hold elections.  

In May, Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj of the GNA and General Khalifa Haftar of the self-styled Libyan National Army – who control much of eastern Libya – met in Paris and agreed on a timeline to hold nation-wide polls by the end of the year. 

With a September 16 deadline to establish a constitutional and legal basis for elections looming, Al Jazeera takes a look at the different groups vying for power and the prospects for an election this year.

Who’s fighting who?

The Seventh Brigade, otherwise known as the Kanyat – named after three brothers who hail from Tarhouna – are the only armed group to control an entire town. 

The group’s stated aim in the latest surge of violence is to “cleanse Tripoli of corrupt militias […] who use their influence to get bank credits worth millions of dollars while ordinary people sleep outside banks to get a few dinars”.

Joined by fighters from the Misrata and Zintan regions, the group is targeting four armed brigades inside Tripoli which it accuses of usurping power and pursuing its interests at the expense of the Libyan state.

According to Emadeddin Muntasser, a Libyan political analyst and human rights campaigner, the behavior of armed groups inside the capital – their grip on virtually all economic activity – has prompted the current crisis.

“Lack of bank liquidity, corruption, and interruptions of all basic services has made living conditions quite desperate,” Muntasser said.

“These conditions formed the backdrop for the current military action,” he added.

The United Nations’ Panel of Experts has already warned of the threat that armed groups pose to vital state institutions such as the Central Bank, the National Oil Company or even the Libyan Investment Authority.

A report by the Small Arms Survey report (SAS) in June said the Seventh Brigade – which operates under the banner of the GNA – had expanded significantly since mid-2017. 

Analysts say armed groups pledging allegiance to the GNA government however doesn’t mean they will heed civilian authorities’ orders.

“Everybody is under the GNA government because the ministry of interior and ministry of defence pay out salaries but nobody takes orders from them,” said Tarek Megerisi, a political researcher specialising in Libya.

“What happened about six or seven months ago is an alliance that formed between Zintan, Misrata, Tarhouna and Tajura, and they have been planning to attack Tripoli for a long time,” he added. 

Megerisi said other fighters, at times from lesser-known groups, are also participating in the current violence. They too had been pushed out from the capital in the past. 

Why are they fighting?

In a paper brief published in April, Wolfram Lacher, a senior associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, warned of a worrying trend among Libyan armed groups; the rise of a “militia cartel” or “oligopoly”. 

According to Lacher, four groups in particular exerted a disproportionate influence on the government.

These are the Tripoli Revolutionary Brigade, the Nawasi Brigade, the Special Deterrence Force and the Abu Slim unit of the Central Security apparatus.

“The pillaging of state funds – a hallmark of Libya’s political economy – now benefits a narrower group than at any previous point since the 2011,” said Lacher.

“Actors excluded from this arrangement are building alliances to alter the balance of power in Tripoli by force.”

When the Presidential Council of al-Serraj arrived in Tripoli in 2016 by boat, the four groups were among the many that were already active in the city.

According to analysts, the four entities won the favour of the weak UN-backed government because they actively defended it.

At the same time, they benefited from the legitimacy that comes with being associated with a government.

Experts say recent events show the government’s inability time and again to demobilise irregular forces and integrate them into its defence and security apparatus. 

This failure, in conjunction with the consolidation of military brigades to a handful of powerful factions, has angered rival militias who feel like they have been dealt with unjustly. 

They feel like they have been marginalised and are at risk of losing access to state funds.

In the short run, the consolidation helped make Tripoli safer by decreasing the risk of armed skirmishes but actors who were sidelined were working behind the scenes on making a comeback. 

What is the international community saying?

The United States, France, Italy and the United Kingdom said in a joint statement on Saturday that they condemned the escalation of violence and warned “those who tamper with security in Tripoli or elsewhere in Libya that they will be held accountable for any such actions.”

“These attempts to weaken the legitimate Libyan authorities and hinder the ongoing political process are not acceptable,” the statement published by the French foreign ministry said.

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres also condemned the violence but for many Libyans, the GNA – who the UN supports – has no real authority on the ground.

“The GNA is a paper government with no influence of events,” lamented Muntasser.

“Plagued with incompetence, corruption and infighting, the GNA will come apart as soon as the armed gangs that offer it protection are driven out.”

This, in turn, complicates efforts by the international community and France especially to hold a vote before the end of the year.

Italy, the former colonial power in Libya, has voiced its readiness to host the warring parties in Rome for reconciliation talks that it says would set the stage for elections but not before mid-2019.

Is Libya ready for elections? 

In May, when al-Serraj and Haftar met in Paris, powerful armed groups in western Libya that officially fell under the GNA’s authority rejected the move. 

They said it went against their interests. 

Analysts told Al Jazeera at the time that political leaders agreeing to organise nation-wide polls would not necessarily be a popular measure among their supporters, especially in Tripoli where al-Serraj has to appease armed groups backing the government.

Some of these armed groups are now fighting to take over the capital. 

Experts say they may well be able to break through Tripoli’s defences and establish a foothold in the government where they will try to re-negotiate their relationship with the GNA.

Megerisi said the Seventh Brigade employ a populist narrative of wanting to curb corruption and improve life for the average citizen but there is no gurantee that this is what they will do once in power. 

“Everybody is vying for a piece of the pie,” he added. 

A more immediate concern is the absence of a constitution to govern the electoral process and set out the mandate of executive, legislative and judicial branches of government.

Muntasser, the Libyan political analyst, suggests authorities take a different approach altogether by holding elections in regions that are under civilian control and deemed to be free and secure enough for a vote.

He said that as elections progress and are held in qualifying regions, a new parliament would be gradually formed.

“The new parliament will possess sovereignty and will have full legislative powers, including the authority to form a government, regardless of the number of members who will be voted in.

“This process will continue and more elections shall be held in an incremental fashion with districts electing their representatives to join the newly formed and functioning parliament,” Muntasser added.

I am a great fan of Spike Lee’s cinema and have followed his extraordinary career closely. A few of his films, fiction and documentary, such as Do the Right Thing (1989) and 4 Little Girls (1997), I consider among the masterpieces of world cinema. Malcolm X (1992), his greatest film, is a staple of the courses I teach at Columbia. 

When his new film, BlacKkKlansman (2018) came out, a filmmaker friend and I made arrangements to go and see it right away at my regular hangout, Magic Johnson Theater in Harlem. We sat there dutifully from beginning to the end of the film waiting, hoping against hope, for the other shoe to drop. Alas! It never did. 

It is deeply disconcerting to watch the decisive failures of an iconic filmmaker you have always loved and admired. How could a gifted filmmaker who in his youthful thirties made a powerful epic like Malcolm X, in his mature 60s make a reactionary flop like BlacKkKlansman? What happened?

The question is not disappointment in one filmmaker, in one of his films. The implications of the failure, given the serious subject matter of the film, are far more important. 

What happened?

After I saw the film I went to read some of the reviews to see if I had missed anything. In the first sentence of his review of BlacKkKlansman, the prominent New York Times film critic AO Scott declares the film Spike Lee’s “best nondocumentary feature in more than a decade and one of his greatest.” 

Although we frequent the same movie theatres, he and I must have seen two different films, I thought. AO Scott’s laudatory review marked precisely where the trouble lies in this astonishingly reactionary film. 

So how could the epic filmmaker who gave the world Malcolm X be so blindsided in his latest film and how can critics fail to call him out? What happened?

Let me cut to the chase: Barack Obama happened – the most reactionary liberal affliction to the revolutionary momentum that was set in motion by generations of black critical thinkers and social movements capped by their crowning achievement, Malcolm X. That is what happened. Let me explain. (Spoiler alert: If you have not seen the film yet don’t read the rest of this essay until you do).  

BlacKkKlansman is a biopic based on the 2014 memoir Black Klansman by Ron Stallworth. Set in 1970s Colorado Springs, the film narrates the story of an African American detective who infiltrates the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. This setting provides the background against which we see the ridiculous antics and delusional racism of the KKK.  

As a period piece, the film could have been a perfectly powerful examination of the nasty roots of racism in the US. The trouble with the film starts when it leaps to larger ambitions, of being relevant today – in Trump’s America, when the deep-rooted racism, xenophobia, and bigotry definitive to this country have come out for a joyride.

With punctual references to the Black Lives Matter movement, many other suggestive phrasings, and the decisive ending of the film with footage or the the Neo-Nazi white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, as well as with many interviews after the film was released, Spike Lee has made it clear this is a film about now, and not just about then.  

And it is this big ambition that makes BlacKkKlansman a politically outdated, retrograde, cliche-ridden nostalgia – indeed, not a period piece but a museum piece at a time when the world is in dire need not of more truisms of racism in the US but a deeper examination of the renewed roots of its resurgence, and the arts and ideas of how and where to fight it.

It is here, today, that Spike Lee in his latest film proves to be a deeply flawed, deeply reactionary filmmaker out of touch with the ugly truths of his own society.

If a film made in 2018, in Trump’s America, does not see that anti-black racism, anti-Jewish antisemitism, anti-Muslim Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant xenophobia are all variations on the same white supremacy theme, it has failed to see racism. It has fetishised the racist manufacturing of the colour “black”, bought into the white-centred codification of power, remained trapped in the dominant racist discourse, and failed to see or show beyond into any horizon of liberation form them all.

Myopic provincialism

By adopting myopic provincialism and abandoning the larger national and global context of racism and militarism, BlacKkKlansman shoots itself in the foot. Neither in the 1960s and – a fortiori – neither now, was the liberation of black people so insular and unaware of the larger global context.

While towering moral voices of the time like Martin Luther King Jr and Mohammad Ali were widely aware of the link between domestic racism and global militarism of the United States, it was Malcolm X who blasted the black liberation movement into global context by actively connecting it to African, Asian, and Latin American revolutionary mobilisations.

In his film, Spike Lee seems entirely oblivious to any such relation of what the fight against racism at home and militarism abroad means. All he had to do was to look at the aggressive militarisation of police forces, particularly in black neighbourhoods like Fergusson, and pay some attention to the fact that Israeli security forces are training them.

The reason why BlacKkKlansman doesn’t make this connection is because it targets the Obama liberals as its choice audience and stays there from beginning to end. In the process, the film gives short shrift to the most revolutionary mobilisation of African American politics in the 20th century, reducing it to cartoonish characters who speak like robots, act like mindless minions, and exude a fanatical obsession with their race.

In catering to a middle-class Obama voters’ audience, Spike Lee remains fatally limited to a white liberal constituency that join in laughing at David Duke and other ridiculous KKK caricatures and never see themselves implicated in the terror of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and the rest of their wicked company.

These creatures did not come out of nowhere. Their roots are right under Spike Lee’s nose. But he does not see it.  

In perhaps the most abusive sequence of the film, we see the venerable figure of Harry Belafonte (as “Mr Turner”) surrounded by young revolutionary activists moved to the liberating cry of “Black Power” intercut with a KKK initiation ceremony’s crescendo to “White Power!” – devoid of any understanding of the differences between the two cries, one by a victorious racist ideology, the other by a defiant mobilisation against it. 

Behind history, not ahead of it 

Today, a racist Trump campaign aide screams at an African American man, “You’re out of your cotton-picking mind!” loudly and openly on national television and gets away with it. Today, a white Florida GOP gubernatorial nominee publicly warns a vote for his black opponent would “monkey this up” and also gets away with it.

Yet, in his film, Spike Lee decided to come nowhere near and decidedly stays far away from the roots of this evil to give his liberal white audiences a football field of comfort zone not to see themselves in such ugly phrases. BlacKkKlansman is made for a “post-racial” delusion in a pre-Civil War resurgence of racism in the United States.

Laser-focusing on the ridiculous KKK and partaking lavishly in the liberal class-conscious disdain of the white working-class places Spike Lee right next to Obama’s liberal imperialism and far from the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement, now definitive to this generation of progressive politics.

In his 2018 reading of racism, Spike Lee opts to come nowhere near a Muslim or a Mexican or an Arab or Afghan refugee as the primary targets of Trump-era xenophobia. There is not a clue of the interpolated spread of racism across the US society. Only a cliche-ridden rendition of a black police officer frozen in his cocoon, cut off from the moral fabric of his time and history.  

This was not the America of the 1970s, and this is not the America of the Trump terror. “While this platform is focused on domestic policies,” reads the platform of The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), right now in 2018, “we know that patriarchy, exploitative capitalism, militarism, and white supremacy know no borders. We stand in solidarity with our international family against the ravages of global capitalism and anti-Black racism, human-made climate change, war, and exploitation.” This is now. This is at the time that Spike Lee was making his film – and yet he is farthest removed from its towering moral power.

“The Movement for Black Lives stands with the Palestinian people and especially those in Gaza, that have been engaging in resistance at the Gaza border.” This, too, is the position of the single most powerful moral stand of Black Lives Matter today when Spike Lee made his film under the illusion that he has something to teach these brave and visionary activists.

There are a couple of references to Angela Davis in the film but no awareness of what she stood for then or what she or other luminary revolutionary leaders like Alice Walker stand for now. What sustained the civil rights movement of the 1960s were the massive demonstrations against the Vietnam war, was the now legendary MLK speech at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, on militarism and racism, was Muhammad Ali’s heroic refusal to be drafted into the US army to go kill people who had done him no harm.

What enriches the M4BL today is in equal terms its antiwar positions in Iraq and Afghanistan and particularly against the Israeli crimes in Palestine. None of this means anything to Lee in his latest film. His myopia is blinding.  

Failing to read the present moment 

By the time we get to Spike Lee’s final montage of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in August 2017, when platoons of racist Americans faced courageous counterdemonstrators, he has wasted so much precious time on cliche antiquarianism and demonisation of black activism that it feels and looks like a cheap-shot slapstick.

Because of its sustained dramatic failures, the film ends with this forced denouement that fakes a Brechtian “Distancing effect” but ends up being a cop-out of any meaningful resolution to a moral crisis he had failed to map out.  

There are student activists present at that rally who have strongly objected to Lee’s use of that clip and accuse him of opportunism and of abusing their anti-racist movement to cap a deeply flawed rendition of black revolutionary activism and of whitewashing the role of the police then and now.

They have even pointed to Spike Lee receiving money from the New York Police Department to whitewash their image in black communities. But, again, serious as these charges might be, the question is not just historical inaccuracies. The issue is the moral imagination of the film itself, which is so deeply flawed.

The racist white supremacy that stages itself in bold vulgarity in Charlottesville rally or in the White House has its roots in the liberal imperialism that happily handed its reigns to the first black president for eight years before losing it to its more vulgar version that Trump embodies.

The potent liberal roots of that white supremacy get a free pass in Spike Lee’s new film, happily hide in the dark movie houses and laugh at idiot klansmen and write laudatory reviews of his film. This is what the liberal blind spot of a visionary filmmaker did not allow him to see.

I will continue to love, respect, and admire Spike Lee for the best of his work, above all for his monumental achievement Malcolm X. At issue here is not one filmmaker failing to live up to his own best work in his latest film.

The issue, rather, is the changing neoliberal climate of opposition to Trump that is abusing a legitimate criticism of a racist charlatan to muddy the water and dismantle an entire critical history of black revolutionary thinking and action against racism, with the token of Obama liberalism distorting an entire spectrum of far more serious promises.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.