Reflections on The Last Election
Russell Jacoby[1]
Platypus Review 191 | November 2026
THE ABCs OF HISTORY: in November 1932, an election took place in Germany. The Nazis emerged as the largest party in the Reichstag.[2] Three months later the German president Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor. That was the last free election in the German Republic. Sometimes last is last.
But sometimes last is not last. How can that be determined? Stefan Zweig, the Austrian-Jewish writer who fled and killed himself in exile, admitted that he and other intellectuals underestimated Hitler; they thought him an uneducated clown who would never succeed with law-abiding Germans, who were committed to their constitution. Wrong.
These issues resurface in the movie The Last Election, a provocative documentary on Trump’s 2024 victory that plays on the ambiguity of “last” — most recent or final? I write on the eve of the November 2026 election. Will there be an American analog to the Reichstag fire in 1933 that ended German democracy?[3] As if to summon up Zweig, Charles Sykes, one of those interviewed in the film, recalls that the head of the Republican National Committee had assured him that Trump represented a flash in the pan whom moderate Republicans would dispatch. Wrong.
Allusions to German fascism are probably overdone in the academic literature on Trumpism, but the fragility of German democracy remains an unsettling lesson. In addition, one factoid might be worth recalling. The full name of the Nazis is rarely spelled out: National Socialist German Workers’ Party. This is not only a mouthful but suggests something about the ideological mishmash of right-wing populism that overlaps with Trumpism, an appeal to workers (and socialism!) with an aggressive nationalism.
The movie approaches the “last” election through the eyes of four principal characters with diverse politics who visit the Republican and Democratic national conventions as they nominate candidates for the 2024 presidency. It is directed and narrated by Douglas Lain, a self-professed Marxist.[4] The questions that drive the movie are: how did Trump happen, and where or what happened to the Left? Good questions. The movie engages them with interviews, clips of speeches and protests, and on-going commentary. The issues are urgent, the execution excellent.
At least in one respect the film could use a larger compass. The film remains restlessly American, without a hint of world events. But from Berlusconi in Italy — a very Trumpian character — and Brexit in the United Kingdom to Modi in India and Erdoğan in Turkey, the defeat of the Left and rise of Right-wing populism characterize recent world politics. Not a word about that in the film.
Such a framework might have righted the film from tilting into reflections on Jean-Paul Sartre, France in 1968, and Walter Benjamin. Obviously, no film can do everything. But the touch of Lain is almost too soft. He likes meditating on 21st century art, three types of despair, Sartrean “bad faith,” and Benjamin’s “flaneur” with its relationship to Ronald Reagan’s ersatz politics — maybe, but probably not. But why these discourses instead of probing the economy, the working class, unions, factory life, income inequality, and intellectuals? Aren’t the Marxists supposed to look at material conditions? There is nothing here about deindustrialization, underemployment, dead-end jobs, and the gig economy. In that domain (dare I say this?), the Obamas-sponsored documentary, American Factory, hits harder.
Even the criticism of the Left remains diffuse. We are told the Left lacks energy, Bernie Sanders functioned as the Left wing of the Democratic Party, and the protests at the Democratic National Convention seemed empty. “They were going through the motions.” Lain gives airtime to a performance artist, “Crackhead Barney,” a black woman who dresses up as a white woman to protest whites who want to save black people. But this seems like a clip from Fox News, a presentation of the most ridiculous or saddest figure as representing “the Left.” What is the point? Much could be said about the failures of the Left, but we need something tougher and more specific than what is given here.
David Shields, the “radical liberal,” is the most lucid and hard-hitting of the four. He believes the Trumpsters learned that truth does not exist from the academic Left. He may be correct. Radical professors taught that everything is a question of power and control of the “narrative.” The Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights are just texts composed by rich old white guys. The Marxist critique of ideology here degenerates into denouncing lies; everything bespeaks power. These half-truths lead to full-blown cynicism, a convenient apology for the status quo. When Trump was asked about his respect for Putin, a killer, he responded like a trained Leftist: we are not innocent. We kill also, he declared.
Good old Adorno nailed it exactly. The late bourgeois mind, he stated, cannot comprehend genesis and validity, meaning everything is reduced to its origins. Who said something is the only issue, not its verité. Of course, this is a half or full step into the identity politics that has plagued the Left, to which the film makes no allusion, much less gives an airing. Ethnic, racial, or sexual identities devour broader Left solidarity. To be sure, the Left vacillated between opposite positions: everything is constructed; and racial and national groups possess a primal essence. Hence the scandal when it is discovered that a “black” activist is white or a “Palestinian” activist is Jewish. That is both possible, when everything is constructed, and impossible, when an identity is inherited.
I write as a friend of the film, a comrade as it were, not an opponent, and I also write as someone who has both delved into the defeat of the Left (The Dialectic of Defeat, End of Utopia) and played around with “last” (The Last Intellectuals). The film forces us to think and raises urgent questions. Bravo! I salute it for that. We do not know if the last election will be the last. But the film is too close to the material — and almost too gentle. We need a movie tougher and more stringent, one not simply on the victory of the Trumpsters, but the disarray of the Left. Talk about despair is hardly extraneous, but perhaps we should return to Gramsci’s slogan, which he borrowed from a radical humanist: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.[5] |P
[1] Russell Jacoby taught at University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of ten books, including On Diversity and Bloodlust.
[2] The Reichstag was the German parliament during the Weimar Republic from 1919 to 1933.
[3] When an act of arson defaced the Reichstag building, the Nazi party blamed communists for the attack and used it as a pretext to arrest their political opponents.
[4] Douglas Lain is one of the founders of Sublation Media, which produced The Last Election.
[5] This phrase was originally used by the French dramatist Romain Rolland.
