The Conservatism of Artists, and the Hollywood Strike

Considering what Upton Sinclair (among others) had to say about the tendency of artists to conservatism I found myself thinking of the recent Hollywood strike. After all, there seems to me no question that Hollywood's writers, if commonly characterized by mainstream and right-wing commentators as a pack of "liberals," have for the most part produced a thoroughly conservative product, glorifying the rich and powerful, championing traditional institutions like religion, etc., etc., as they obfuscate or elide social realities that do not fit in with orthodox views of the world. Yet amid the deteriorating working conditions Hollywood's personnel have faced this last decade and longer, and the labor battles of more recent times, the writers found themselves personally confronting a less rosy social reality than the one they present in their movies in the process of just trying to pay their bills for having found themselves at the sharp end of neoliberalism-come-to-Tinseltown.

Of course, these days artists in Hollywood as elsewhere are kept on a very short leash by businessmen even more deeply invested in a conservative outlook than they. Yet, for whatever it may be worth, I wonder if their worsening lot and their fights with management have not had an effect on how they see the world.