Self-satisfied Liberals

Terry Teachout's When Theater Becomes Propaganda: The Problem of Political Art

...I’ve seen, read, and heard about enough contemporary American and British plays to know that the political point of view of most of their authors is well to the left of center. Henry Luce, the founder and publisher of Time and Life, was once asked why he hired so many liberals to write for his magazines, given that his own political views were unabashedly conservative. "For some goddamn reason," he replied, "Republicans can’t write." Well, they’ve learned how, but for some other goddamn reason, they don’t write plays. Of the two hundred-odd new plays I’ve seen in my two years as a working critic, not one could be described as embodying a specifically right-wing political perspective, nor do I know any New York-based playwrights or actors who are openly conservative.

He mentions the cliché that great art "takes you out of yourself."

By definition, it then puts you into somebody else, and in so doing enriches your understanding of reality. To do this successfully, it must be in the deepest sense sympathetic. The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines sympathy as "the fact or capacity of sharing or being responsive to the feelings or condition of another or others." Such a capacity is a sine qua non of all serious art. It is what makes Shakespeare’s villains believable: we feel we can understand their motives, even if we don’t share them. It is also central to the persuasive power of great art. Without sympathy there can be no persuasion. Even a caricature, however cruel, must acknowledge the humanity of its subject in order to be funny. The artist must create a whole character and not simply show the side of him that will most convince us of his villainy.

What I find striking about much of today’s political art, by contrast, is its unwillingness to make such acknowledgments. Instead of seeking to persuade – to change the minds of its viewers – it takes for granted their concurrence. It assumes that everyone in the audience is already smart enough to hate Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and, above all, George W. Bush, and thus does not need to be reminded of their underlying humanity, or of the possibility, however remote, that their intentions might be good. By extension it also takes for granted that no truly creative artist could possibly think otherwise, that good art is by definition liberal (or, to use the term commonly preferred by such artists, "progressive") in its view of the world, and that only progressive thinkers are truly creative. Conservatives are generally thought too repressed or narrow-minded for creative activities.

A very large number of other American artists hold this attitude.

One of them, the novelist Jane Smiley, tipped her hand in a postelection essay for Slate:

The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. I suppose the good news is that 55 million Americans have evaded the ignorance-inducing machine. But 58 million have not.... The error that progressives have consistently committed over the years is to underestimate the vitality of ignorance in America. Listen to what the red-state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the sermons they flock to. They know who they are – they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence. The blue-state citizens make the Rousseauvian [sic] mistake of thinking humans are essentially good, and so they never realize when they are about to be slugged from behind.

Two things are worth noting about this article. The first is that it was written by a well-known, much-admired novelist. The second is that it appears to be representative of the political views of a considerable number of other artists who think that all conservatives (including conservative artists) are evil or stupid, or both. Smiley goes so far as to use the theological term "invincible ignorance," which implies that there’s no point in arguing with such benighted folk, since their ignorance is invincible.

One finds the same quasi-religious language in virtually all of [Tony] Kushner’s plays, used to much the same purpose: it is meant to indicate that disagreement with the author is not merely wrong but evil, and must necessarily lead to damnation. (Conversely, a play like Trumbo [written about Dalton Trumbo by his son Christopher] exists not to persuade anyone of Dalton Trumbo’s goodness – that is taken for granted – but to serve as a quasi-religious ritual of collective self-congratulation, an opportunity for progressives to join together in celebrating a fearless defender of the true faith. That the defender in question was a hack screenwriter who tacitly connived at mass murder on a near-genocidal scale is irrelevant: all that matters is that he “stood pat” when ordered by the House Un-American Activities Committee to inform on his similarly complicit colleagues.)

You might go so far as to say that the authors of such plays suffer from what conservatives call the "entitlement mentality." It isn’t just that they feel no responsibility to make arguments that might prove persuasive to those who disagree with them, or at least haven’t yet made up their minds: they no longer acknowledge any responsibility to their audiences. They appear to believe instead that so long as an artist thinks all the right things, he need not go to the trouble to be amusing, subtle, or even interesting. All he need do is make his characters say the right things, and he’s entitled to the approval of his enlightened brethren. No one else matters.

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What makes political artists think they can get away with such shoddy work? In New York and other American cities of similar political disposition, the answer is plain to see. Look at the 2004 election returns: 82 percent of Manhattan residents voted for John Kerry. No doubt Bush did rather better in the suburbs, but there’s every reason to think that most art-loving New Yorkers are as unswervingly liberal as that statistic suggests. Yet there is no less reason to think that a substantial number of them expect more out of art, and refuse to accept less.

...[F]ilms like those made by the left-wing director-screenwriter John Sayles, remind us that political art need not be simpleminded, much less uncreative, in its view of human behavior. Asked by an interviewer why so few American directors make political movies, Sayles replied, "I think more than being political or not political, it’s often the problem of being complex: The characters aren’t heroic. Sometimes they do things you don’t like, even if you may like them, and it’s hard to know exactly who the good guys and bad guys are, because everybody is a little bit compromised." ...The biggest problem with such political artists as Tony Kushner, Sam Shepard, and Tim Robbins is not that they are leftists, but that they coast on their leftism. Their plays are as self-satisfied as they are simpleminded – and self-satisfaction is the death of serious art and creativity more generally.

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The good news is that most of the art I see in New York, be it on stage, in a bookstore, or at a gallery, is not even implicitly political....