Why is Hollywood primarily liberals?

[Sci]

I had assumed Jack tortured Graem so that he would die and the writers could quickly forget about that absurd plot twist. Alas.

And, I know, an absurd plot twist on 24? Ridiculous!

How many Presidents has that show burned through now?

 

[Gaith]

Well, it's partly LA and geography. Coastal areas tend to be more liberal than islolated, landlocked ones. There's greater ethnic diversity, due to immigration, and thus more exposure to varied and/or foreign cultures. Liberal-minded people tend to flock to cities in search of like-minded people (viz., the NYC/SF gay districts). Coastal land is more expensive, thereby attracting wealthier and better-educated people - and better-educated people tend to be more liberal. Remember your Colbert: "Reality has a well-known liberal bias".

And then there's the ocean winds. It clears out the cobwebs and bs that accumulates in our minds. In Nowhere, Idaho, however, that muck just gets blown from town to town, if it moves at all.

I also highly recommend this Esquire article from a few years back. Wait, darn, only a sample is publicly available. The main point is that conservatives tend to like their art as moralistic and ideology-driven as themselves. Great (dramatic) art reflects the chaos of life, but conservatives tend to like tidy moralistic parables without (realistic) depictions of liberal sexuality, adult language, etc.

But while Hollywood/LA is indeed primarily liberal, it's not just SoCal - it's SF, Portland, Boston, New York, DC, etc.

 

[Aragorn]

^ Do you have a bumper sticker that says "What would Colbert do?"

How many Presidents has that show burned through now?

Season 1 -- Unnamed, unseen president
Season 2 -- David Palmer, but Jim Prescott invoked the 25th Amendment and was president for a few hours, then Palmer got his power back
Season 3 -- David Palmer
Season 4 -- John Keeler, then Charles Logan
Season 5 -- Charles Logan for the season, but Hal Gardner would've taken over after Logan was removed from office
Season 6 -- Wayne Palmer, then Noah Daniels
Redemption -- Noah Daniels
Season 7 -- Allison Taylor
Season 8 -- Allison Taylor (to begin with, anyway)

 

[Nowhere Man]

Short answer: conservatives, true conservatives either are not concerned with those type of things or The other thing is some of them live in a little religous bubble and people who may have real talent end up bieng brainwashed and supressed in the name of the lord.

Long answer: I'd say that there has been a great mixture of Liberals and Conservatives in hollywood. John Wayne, Charelton Heston,Bing Crosby and Ronald Reagan come to mind.That was in the 60's, and it does seem that there are more liberals in hollywood than conservatives.Mel Gibson and John Voiht would be the more recent conservatives. The problem these day's is the cable news networks have contributed to the polarization of America, which desinigrates and alienates the middle. The other problem is that some people are labeled liberal just because they oppose war or are for universal health care and some people are labeled conservative just because they support war and are agianst universal health care. It is not fair to throw these labels around so loosely when we all know life is not so blach and white. The truth is most of the people who claim to be conservative,like the ones mentioned above, do not practice those values. Theres plenty to go around. Liberals have hollywood and conservatives have Nashville. I think Tobey Kieth has made a lot of money on pushing conservatives values on the rest of us just as much as Michael Moore has made money pushing liberal values. It's up to us to say i'm going to enjoy these people's talents for what they are and ignores the rest. Take the Beatles, thier music can be enjoyed without thinking about thier liberal views. We have to learn not to buy into all of the bullshit Hollywood is selling and I think most of us are smart enough to do that. After all, we are Star Trek fans, we should be tolerant and understanding.

 

[Gojirob]

There are a lot of factors. I think history plays a huge perhaps overriding role. When Hollywood has been attacked, from the beginning its come mostly from the right. Even in the 20's and 30's, when it was content-based, and then into the 40's and 50's, when frankly innocent dissent and past association were demonized. Many past conservatives who did well were more in the libertarian mode. If Clint Eastwood needed the tough desk sergeant who supports Callahan over the objections of the Captain, the guy could be gay or even hard-leftie, and all Clint would want is : can he play it up? That may like as not still be the rule, but I have to believe less so in the age of punditry.

While some doctrinaire junk may be at play, history again plays a role. I never liked Patricia Heaton's ELR character (or ELR itself, for that matter). But to think about that moment mentioned above where her vote created an awkward silence, I point to more recent history and punditry. The people at that table like as not thought : "This is someone who could one day be denouncing us on some talk-show or column, saying what bad people we are, telling about all the crap we 'made' her put up with, and maybe even going before some committee like a modern HUAC."

An extreme and unlikely example, but by and large, the right of shows and op-ed pages has not been Hollywood's friend, and the mistrust is likely very visceral. We've gone from a Hollywood culture where seemingly any church-goer in a small town got a full-on veto to one where religion is sometimes sneered at, prolly in objection to the past veto as much as anything. To use examples outside Hollywood, I think the hope is that the conservative you're dealing with is a later-life Barry Goldwater, and the fear is you're dealing with a Zell Miller, once your workmate, now your strident accuser. I think the relatively recent example of Kirk Cameron on Growing Pains prolly comes up in such fears.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Creative types tend toward being rather open-minded and Bohemian, almost by definition, which is anathema to the Right Wing personality and ideology. Right Wingers tend more toward editorializing and propagandizing than creativity.

That's true only of the extremist fringe who in the past couple of decades have dominated the right and driven out all other conservative voices. They claim to speak for all conservatives, but most rank-and-file conservatives would disagree to at least some extent, if they could only get a word in over the screaming voices of the pundits.

There are certainly plenty of creative people who are conservative. There are a number of writers who are outright libertarian, from Ayn Rand to Robert A. Heinlein to Star Trek novelist Diane Carey (who has run for political office on a far-right platform).

Well, as always, the code here is "liberal" for Left Wing and "conservative" for Right Wing, and the implication I got from the OP is that we're talking about the social aspects of the political spectrum. I don't know anything about Diane Carey, but Heinlein was hardly a "social conservative." Since the Arts in general are about self expression, and therefore free expression, you're far less likely to see Right Wingers-- they're the ones who are trying to censor free expression.

 

[Christopher]

While I tend to think the statement that Hollywood is made up primarily of liberals probably has some flaws in it, in the spirit of discussion in this thread, I will add another possible reason. A good possibility would be McCarthyism and how it basically attacked the movie industry. Certainly, after that, there would be a bit of paranoia of Republicans in film who might try and ruin their careers.

There were plenty of Republicans who disliked McCarthy's witch-hunt tactics and saw him as a liability to their party's credibility. He was not representative of the Republican rank and file, and the more free rein he was given to show what a creep he was, the more the Republicans themselves turned against him. Joseph Nye Welch, the man who famously chastised McCarthy by asking, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?", was himself a Republican. Before that, seven Republican Senators had been openly protesting McCarthy's tactics for years. In 1954, Republican Senator Ralph Flanders compared McCarthy to Hitler and introduced a resolution to censure him. In the vote, 22 Republicans joined 44 Democrats and 1 independent in favor of the censure, while the other 22 Republicans present voted against.

So I'm sure nobody blamed the Republican Party as a whole for the excesses of Joe McCarthy. That would, after all, be the same kind of paranoid, witch-hunt thinking that McCarthy embodied. It makes little sense to assume that his opposition would think the same way he did.

I don't accept the premise of the OP. The business element of Hollywood is very conservative. And that's not a small element--there's a reason it's called the film business. Note that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, who puts on the Academy Awards each year, was initially formed as a Union-busting measure by rich producers and studio moguls. As stj wisely pointed out, antiunionism isn't a strong measure of the left. Though AMPAS was a failure in its attempt to destroy Hollywood unions, the conflict between the various unions (WGA, SAG, DGA, etc.) and business people who control Hollywood rages on. Witness the recent WGA strike, which took months to extract the smallest of contractual concessions from the stuidos.

That's an excellent point. The "Hollywood is liberal" myth is based on the assumption that Hollywood consists entirely of the people we see in movies and TV, the actors and name directors and producers, the celebrities. But they're just the face of an operation that runs much deeper. Hollywood is a business and the celebrities we see are its product. The people running the business, as you correctly point out, are as far from liberal as you can get on labor issues, and probably on others as well. It's a cinch that Hollywood doesn't want the government telling it what to do (and that's a point where liberals and conservatives can find common ground; since Hollywood is in the business of speech, it's a free-business issue for the right and a free-speech issue for the left at the same time). And hell, the whole reason the film industry moved to LA in the first place, aside from the climate, was to get away from the taxes and fees they'd have to pay if they'd stayed in the East (since at the time the West Coast was more undeveloped and freer from regulation). So the whole formative impulse behind Hollywood was a conservative, pro-business, anti-regulation one. And as a business, Hollywood remains as conservative as you'd expect any big business to be, regardless of how liberal its more famous employees tend to be.

Well, as always, the code here is "liberal" for Left Wing and "conservative" for Right Wing, and the implication I got from the OP is that we're talking about the social aspects of the political spectrum.

But that's just it. When you reduce the discussion to Far Right and Far Left as the only options, that's not a spectrum. A spectrum is a continuum encompassing everything between the extremes. The kind of dualistic thinking that pundits today insist on, caricaturing every political position as one of two opposing extremes, is just a way of denying the truth that there is a spectrum, that both "liberal" and "conservative" encompass a wide range of different views, and that you can't truly understand an issue like this if you continue to define it in terms of crude stereotypes.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

...but Heinlein was hardly a "social conservative."

Nor is Eastwood a "social conservative." He has supported conservative candidates who tend to be considered almost RINOs by the social conservative crowd - Schwarzenegger, McCain, etc. He's pro-choice, pro-civil rights and takes a rather jaundiced view of groups like the NRA.

 

[Greg Cox]

I believe that Eastwood also took some flack from the Religious Right over MILLION DOLLAR BABY . . . for reasons I can't divulge without spoiling the ending.

 

[Nerys Myk]

I believe that Eastwood also took some flack from the Religious Right over MILLION DOLLAR BABY . . . for reasons I can't divulge without spoiling the ending.

Eastwood and Freeman's characters get married. Its hardly a secret.

 

[AJBryant]

My take is that they're primarily liberals for two reasons: Most of Hollywood doesn't seem to have gotten anything beyond a high school diploma (i.e., they're largely uneducated) and most of Hollywood develops very early a strong sense of entitlement based on an exaggerated sense of their own worth.

 

[sidious618]

My take is that they're primarily liberals for two reasons: Most of Hollywood doesn't seem to have gotten anything beyond a high school diploma (i.e., they're largely uneducated) and most of Hollywood develops very early a strong sense of entitlement based on an exaggerated sense of their own worth.

I thought liberals were supposed to be OVEReducated. Get your gross generalizations of us right.

 

[Harvey]

My take is that they're primarily liberals for two reasons: Most of Hollywood doesn't seem to have gotten anything beyond a high school diploma (i.e., they're largely uneducated) and most of Hollywood develops very early a strong sense of entitlement based on an exaggerated sense of their own worth.

By most of Hollywood, are you generalizing Hollywood as an industry of actors? Of course, many Hollywood actors are college educated, so even that's nonsense.

 

[OmahaStar]

Are conservatives too grounded in reality?

Um, what? You lost me there.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Tobey Kieth has made a lot of money on pushing conservatives values on the rest of us

Ironic, since he is a Democrat.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

My take is that they're primarily liberals for two reasons: Most of Hollywood doesn't seem to have gotten anything beyond a high school diploma (i.e., they're largely uneducated) and most of Hollywood develops very early a strong sense of entitlement based on an exaggerated sense of their own worth.

That's not an opinion, it's simply provocation.

What I just said is not an opinion, but a fact, and for this reason:

If you know anything, you know that self-identified liberals are not predominantly limited to high school educations.

Therefore - assuming that you're not very poorly informed - a claim that liberalism in a group is associated with limited education is a deliberate insult, not an honest opinion.

And of course, attempting to insult a group of people based on their presumed education is snobbish and does not speak well of the poster.

Tobey Kieth has made a lot of money on pushing conservatives values on the rest of us

Ironic, since he is a Democrat.

Yeah, Keith is quite the cynic where his career is concerned.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Tobey Kieth has made a lot of money on pushing conservatives values on the rest of us

Ironic, since he is a Democrat.

Yeah, Keith is quite the cynic where his career is concerned.

So you're saying Democrats can't be conservative? NOW who's the absolutist?

 

[Captaindemotion]

I believe that Eastwood also took some flack from the Religious Right over MILLION DOLLAR BABY . . . for reasons I can't divulge without spoiling the ending.

Eastwood and Freeman's characters get married. Its hardly a secret.

And can you believe that sex scene? I can't believe people got so worked up about Brokeback Mountain and ignored Brokeback Mount-Freeman ...

 

[Temis the Vorta]

One, Conservatives make boring movies.

Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger make boring movies?

My answer to this question is: why is the business world primarily conservatives? Because right wingers want to go into a profession that will make them money and show biz is notoriously dicey in that regard.

No, because people who make a lot of money want to keep it and make more of it, and thus they tend to favor political policies such as lower taxes and decreased government regulation of business. People generally drift more toward the conservative side of the spectrum as they get more prosperous, even if they didn't start that way.

The percentage of people who start with ideology and base everything on that is quite low, although those who do think that way assume that everyone else does too. Most people are more practical. Their political views are shaped by experience and circumstance, evolve over time, and don't automatically fall into stereotyped molds.

Maybe those at the top,( just like in any industry) but I've a feeling most Hollywood denizens (as well as Professors) have bills to pay, kids to send to school, problems at work and home and all sorts of "real world" problems. Not every actor is Tom Cruise.

Absolutely. Only a tiny percentage of actors are rich. Most are working stiffs trying to get by, living from job to job.

In my experience, people's political views are shaped pretty early in their lives. I know rich people who are left-wing and poor people who are right-wing. A bit of hypocritical self-interest may seep in to how they behave (privately), but their public persona often is at odds with their financial self-interest.

But yknow what, we're just talking about financial right-wingers. The more interesting question is why aren't there more "culture war" type right-wingers in Hollywood, in the Mel Gibson mold.

On the other end of the spectrum, people can take only so much dirty hippy stuff too.

Avatar seems to be doing pretty well.

I don't accept the premise of the OP. The business element of Hollywood is very conservative.

That's true, but business of any sort is conservative. The question remains, why are writers, actors and directors left-wing even when they get feelthy rich (at least they are publicly left-wing) and particularly why are they left-wing in a non-financial sense? Why are they less religious and less likely to oppose such things as gay marriage, abortion, universal health care, legalizing pot and all the rest than Americans in general?

 

[Kegg]

Because of this.

No, really, in centuries to come I'm sure this would be the refrain if everyone hadn't forgotten it already.