Battleground is a modest little political documentary that begins with a compelling-enough premise: perhaps the surface, the body politic in America isn’t as politically divided as the mainstream media likes you to think it is. The film uses a microcosmic example of a recent Lehigh Valley congressional race that features two seemingly polar opposites when it comes to grassroots political philosophy: on the one hand, there’s die-hard Trump delegate and PA Tea Party chair Tom Carroll, on the other, there’s Greg Edwards, a progressive pastor whose left-reformist political platform is endorsed by none other than populist leftie Bernie Sanders. Right from the outset, it’s clear that these two grassroots populist candidates have their work cut out for them as they both must come to terms with their real enemies—their respective parties’ Wall Street-backed establishment candidates, who represent the kind of prevaricating political middle grounders whose policies are geared toward the more affluent side of their respective parties.
Both Carroll and Edwards make it clear that they’re both concerned with same socioeconomic group: Carroll advocating for the long-disenfranchised white working class, while Edwards sticks up for economically precarious black and Latino underclass. And although both men certainly feel that the system is broken and that adherence to the status quo under previous presidents like Bush and Obama brought permanent damage to their community, it’s hard not to sense there are deeper issues in this documentary that are being ignored or at least conveniently tiptoed around. One of the glaring lacunae in the film and a puzzling blind spot of right-wing populists like Carroll are that the policies of their party (and, more importantly, their hero Trump) are vehemently against the kind of socialistic unionizing that allowed workers at the local Bethlehem Steel (closed in 1995) to have a shot at the middle-class life that Carroll laments is now impossible for the underpaid workers in the Lehigh Valley, many of whom now sort packages for Walmart and Amazon or work in the area’s dog-food processing plant.
Carroll seems completely unaware that the anti-union right-wing Reaganite policies in the 1980s sparked the deindustrialization of America, with American manufacturing jobs soon migrating south to Mexico. So when Carroll spends much of the documentary waxing nostalgia for the golden era of blue-collar America, the end of which was precipitated by the same conservative politicians he supports, one can’t help but feel the presence of too many information gaps that the documentarians should have countered. Battleground only seems interested in making a facile point about the few things Edwards and Carroll have in common, an approach that simply doesn’t go deep enough to make for a consistently thought-provoking film. Optional. Aud: C, P.