The Politics of Dwight Schrute

Dwight Schrute's politics are a running theme/joke on The Office. Most people simply assume he's an unreformed fascist. Rainn Wilson himself (the actor that plays Dwight) has noted that Dwight would "make a good Nazi". He loves authority and hierarchy, makes frequent references to German ancestors who fought in the second World War (subtly hinting they weren't fighting for us), and even muses that he would be a good prison guard at a Japanese prison camp. Oh ya, and he delivered one of Mussolini's speeches to a sales conference once (in his defense he didn't realize it was a Mussolini speech - although he was a natural).

I was recently thinking, though, that rather than a fascist Dwight could have also been a shoe-in for the Democratic Party presidential nomination circa 1892/1896 as a traditional American populist. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century American populism has been on my mind lately because of a project I'm working on this winter for the Encyclopedia of Populism that I mentioned in an earlier post, and I recently put these two together.

Here's the scene - Michael Scott (aka Steve Carell, the manager of The Office) is at Dunder Mifflin headquarters in New York fully expecting to get a new job at corporate. So before he leaves, he appoints Dwight as the new manager. Dwight is reorganizing how things are done at the office, and delivers this message to his co-workers, which reflects three of the major planks of the Populist Party:

1. An increase in the money supply (Schrute bucks)

2. Restrictions on immigration and suspicion of ethnic diversity, and

3. Lectures on vocational/industrial/agricultural topics for adult education (in this video he only mentions a sort of vocational/industrial theme to the lecture, but in later scenes that actually feature his lecture, he gets into agricultural issues as well.


People normally just note and laugh about "Schrute bucks" in this episode - but I think the other stuff is interesting as well, particularly the educational component. The lectures and adult education organized by the Populists influenced the development of the land grant college system and the cooperative extension system. It was part of a tradition going back to Jeffersonian republicanism that considered mass education as the real key to true democracy and the end of aristocracy in America.