It’s award season in Hollywood, and it looks like the big winner will be progressive politics.
At the Golden Globes and Critics’ Choice Awards this month, the fight against sexual harassment and the feminist demand for equity in the entertainment industry took centre stage, while liberal ideals like racial justice, freedom of the press and human rights rang out in acceptance speeches, red carpet interviews and tweets from the stars. To judge from the chatter after the Oscar nominations were announced last Tuesday, we can expect something similar at this year’s Academy Awards.
This is hardly the first time Hollywood has displayed a progressive slant. What makes actors so liberal?
Polling data on actors’ political views are hard to come by. But there’s evidence beyond award-show behaviour and Instagram feeds to suggest that the stereotype of the liberal actor squares with reality. For example, where Hillary Clinton received three votes for every one that went to Donald Trump in Los Angeles County as a whole, actor-heavy areas like the Hollywood Hills recorded even more-lopsided tallies. Likewise, the Centre for Responsive Politics reports that individuals and firms in the television, movie and music industries gave $84 million (Dh308.95 million) in campaign contributions during the 2016 election cycle, with 80 per cent going to Democrats.
Three explanations for Hollywood’s liberalism are worth considering. The first focuses on social characteristics that actors share with other liberals. Statistics from the American Community Survey, which is carried out by the United States Census Bureau, back up the common-sense assumption that acting is primarily a blue-state occupation. Fifty-seven per cent of working actors live in California or New York.
What’s more, at a time when educational achievement has become one of the best predictors of political attitudes and voting, more than 50 per cent of actors have at least a bachelor’s degree, as compared with a third of all adults in the labour force. Finally, many actors belong to unions — the Screen Actors Guild or the Actors’ Equity Association — and unions typically nudge workers Left. These things might be enough to give acting its liberal cast.
But acting doesn’t score high on other factors usually associated with progressive attitudes. Census Bureau data show that 44 per cent of actors are women. Pollsters and political scientists have found a major gender gap in contemporary politics, and we’d expect a field where men have the numeric edge to pull to the right. Democratic-inclined racial minority groups, Hispanics especially, are also underrepresented among actors.
In addition, Hollywood was politically progressive long before California became a Democratic stronghold, before going to college became widespread and when the Screen Actors Guild was still in its infancy. So it’s unlikely that Hollywood’s current demographic profile can fully explain its liberal tendencies.
A second hypothesis looks not to statistical correlations but to history. According to the historian Steven Ross, in the early days of Hollywood, in the 1910s and 1920s, most actors were apolitical. Charlie Chaplin, who parlayed the anti-authoritarianism of his tramp persona into explicit political commentary, was the exception that proved the rule. His politics wasn’t well received.
But by the 1930s, the story had changed. The trauma of the Great Depression drew screen actors into progressive politics. Enthusiasm for the then United States president Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal ran strong among actors, though not among arch-conservative movie moguls like Louis B. Mayer. The Screen Actors Guild was formed during that period. The looming threat of anti-Semitic fascism further politicised screen actors in an industry that had become an ethnic niche for Jews.
Actors’ liberal politics would wax and wane over the remainder of the 20th century, growing muted under McCarthyism and amplified later when there was social unrest — the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War era (think Jane Fonda). But you can trace a more or less straight line from those early formative events to today.
There is, however, a third explanation worth pondering: that the emotional requirements of acting are conducive to progressive politics. “The overwhelmingly liberal orientation of actors,” Ross has written, “can be partially understood as a byproduct of the demands of their craft. Playing a variety of characters, many of whom they did not necessarily like, fostered a sense of empathy and ability to understand issues and people outside their personal experience.”
Ross suggests that empathy develops as actors gain experience on the job, but we can also speculate that empathetic people are more likely to become actors. Either way, is there any evidence that empathy correlates with liberal ideology?
Surveys show that liberals see themselves, anyway, as more empathetic and kindhearted than conservatives, a self-conception reinforced by political rhetoric. But in a recent paper, psychologist Adam Waytz and his colleagues report a more nuanced finding: The main thing distinguishing liberals and conservatives in this regard isn’t how empathetic they are overall; rather, the key difference is how much empathy they feel for specific groups. Where conservatives empathise foremost with family members and country, liberals extend the bounds of empathy to include friends, the socially disadvantaged and citizens of the world, to whom they’d like government to lend a hand.
It’s not implausible that empathy could help explain actors’ progressive sympathies. If that’s the case, though, it testifies to the remarkable human capacity for hypocrisy that, until now, the bounds of empathy among liberal men in Hollywood have not stretched to include female actors subject to sexual and economic exploitation.
— New York Times News Service
Neil Gross is a professor of Sociology at Colby College.
