“I think Bernie would probably encourage people [to vote Clinton], because he doesn’t have a lot of ego in this,” she said. “But I think a lot of people are, ‘Sorry, I just can’t bring myself to do that.’” As for herself, “I don’t know. I’m going to see what happens.”
“Really?” an incredulous Hayes asked.
“Some people feel Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately,” she replied.
Hayes accused her of adopting “the Leninist model of ‘heighten the contradictions,’” and she happily agreed. Isn’t that dangerous, he wondered?
“If you think it’s pragmatic to shore up the status quo right now, then you’re not in touch with the status quo,” she said.
As Michelle Goldberg said:
What Sarandon is voicing is the old Leninist idea of “heightening the contradictions,” which holds that social conditions need to get worse in order to inspire the revolution that will make them better. In this way of thinking, the real enemy of progress is incremental reform that would render the status quo tolerable. That was the position of the German Communists in the early 1930s, who refused to ally with the Social Democrats, proclaiming: “After Hitler, our turn!” A similar—if less deadly—assumption underlay Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign, for which Sarandon served as co-chair of the national steering committee. George W. Bush, Nader argued then, could serve as a “provocateur,” awakening the power of the left. “If it were a choice between a provocateur and an ‘anesthetizer,’ I'd rather have a provocateur,” said Nader. “It would mobilize us.”
And of course that is the extremist Radical Chic position as I have noted.
Tony Kushner has a response to the Sarandon controversy.
Tony Kushner has a response to the Sarandon controversy.