Has politics turned Netflix viewers off?

There was another possibility: Netflix was an entertainment business that manufactured information on the side — just like the New York Times, really. By the late 2010s there was no demilitarized border separating news from entertainment. What else could explain Netflix’s huge selection of socio-political documentaries? There was Get Me Roger Stone (2017) and RBG (2018), Knock Down the House (2019) and The Great Hack (2019) and many more to come, with Barack Obama and Meghan Markle on board.

Though the subject matter of each film differed, the values that suffused them — clipped from the op-ed pages of any center-left newspaper in the western world — were identical. Here was the hyperliberal reaction of the Trump era, a splenetic mixture of fear and sentimentality. Fear of Russians, Republicans and sinister algorithms. Sentimentality about how minority identity groups were all good liberals, and only the frail shell of Ruth Bader Ginsburg protected America from a new dark age.

Was this entertainment, or was it masochism? If you want to understand the spectacular implosion of liberalism over the past five years — how it became twitchily paranoid, how it abandoned skepticism and tolerance, how it embraced irrationality and identity politics — all you need is a Netflix subscription and the heroic fortitude required to sit through these movies.