Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 was a seminal cinematic event of my early adolescence. I still remember marshaling its talking points in online battles with Iraq War hawks and right-wing bloggers, and it seemed to be about as powerful an indictment of the American political establishment as there could be.

Taken together with 2002’s Bowling for Columbine it captured a political moment — for me and many others — in which the only relevant signifier of political radicalism was openly opposing George Bush.

Moore’s cinematic trajectory since has roughly approximated the path of American liberalism: from its post-9/11 anything-but-Bush nadir (Fahrenheit 9/11, Slacker Uprising), to its quest for universal health care (Sicko), to the populist ferment that accompanied the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the banking bailouts (Capitalism, a Love Story), to the 2008 Obama moment.