“We need to buy a movie studio.”
Amid the conferences, panels, meetings and informal conversations in the wake of the presidential election, this idea has been a near constant among conservatives who feel like the country is slipping through their fingers. Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee combined raised just more than $1 billion, and all we got are these lousy T-shirts. Since conservatives are losing the culture, goes the argument, which in turn leads to losing at politics, maybe that money could be better spent on producing some cultural ammo of our own?
It’s a bad idea.
Let’s first acknowledge that Hollywood is overwhelmingly, though not uniformly, liberal. Hollywood constitutes a major part of the Democratic Party’s financial base and, arguably, the constituency liberal politicians fear — and revere — most. That’s why all of the post-Newtown talk of the Obama administration “going after Hollywood violence” was nonsense from the outset.
In August, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait wrote an interesting essay arguing that the right-wing culture vultures of the 1990s were right: Hollyweird really was eroding traditional conservative values. A committed liberal, Chait is grateful for this effort: “We liberals owe not a small measure of our success to the propaganda campaign of a tiny, disproportionately influential cultural elite.”
Chait makes a strong case. But just as there’s a problem with conservatives drawing straight lines from the silver screen to social decay, there’s a problem with drawing similarly unwavering lines to progressive triumph.
Hollywood produces culture, but it also takes its orders from it. For instance, according to today’s pieties, the gun is an evil right-wing talisman. And yet, every year Hollywood vomits up a stream of films that cast guns as the solution to any manner of problems. Martial arts stars notwithstanding, you’ll be hard-pressed to find an action movie in which the star’s most trusted sidekick isn’t his gun."
I hate to sound like Bill Clinton with it depends on the meaning of is, because that's appropriate here in this discussion.
Are we talking about Liberals, or Hollywood/pop culture stereotypical Liberals? Are we talking about people who believe in liberal democracy, or are we talking about people who are anti-establishment, leftist-socialist, revolutionary hippies/hipsters?
Hollywood is the entertainment capital, not just of America, but perhaps the rest of the world as well. It's also one of the biggest homes of Corporate America. When I think of Socialists, I don't think of Corporate America. I think of people who run left-wing rags and political action committees, and people who run for office promising a fairer society, thanks to a bigger, stronger, national government. As well as a lot of guys who look like they should be introduced to razors, shaving cream, and a good barber shop. And women who go around claiming that eating meet is animal cruelty, while wearing leather jackets and leather boots. I don't think of millionaires and billionaires who run Fortune 500 companies, like in Hollywood.
There are plenty of people in Hollywood that produce a lot of left-wing friendly programming and movies, as well as music. But you have to understand that entertainment is a big business, first, not a political action organization. If there's a lot of money to made in producing left-wing friendly entertainment, someone in Hollywood or in the broader entertainment industry, is going to produce that entertainment. So maybe it's not Hollywood that is left-wing (which is what we're really talking about here and not liberal) but maybe the country is more left-wing, socialist even, then it was in the 1950s.
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