THE VIEW OF THE WORLD FROM PINCH AVENUE. Left-Leaning Documentary World Seeks Right-Wing Perspective:

Three of the 10 top-grossing political documentaries ever are the work of the right-wing polemicist Dinesh D’Souza. The most powerful documentarian in the country is the White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon. Still, the rap on documentaries is that they preach to a left-leaning choir, one still trying to figure out how Donald J. Trump became president.

To that end, the American documentary establishment — financiers, festivals, filmmakers — has begun a determined effort to support films made by, for or about the other side of the political divide, one that they themselves say they’ve failed to bridge. The objective may be more about political conversation than conversion, but the wish to engage the “other” in a Trump world raises questions about why nonfiction cinema speaks largely to the like-minded and liberal.

The media left have been continually trying to figure out the rest of the country since 1969, when Time magazine declared “The American Middle Class” its collective “Man of the Year,” and wrote about their customers in a strangely detached anthropological fashion that Henry Luce (a moderate Republican), the magazine’s then recently-deceased founder, would have been floored by. And nothing has changed since – the “other” in quotation marks in the above quoted excerpt from the New York Times  is a particularly nicely done touch of oikophobia.

(Classical allusion in headline.)