On the View That "Actors Should Keep Their Mouths Shut About Politics"

It is a common sneer that actors should keep their mouths shut about politics.

As with much that is common, it is almost unheard of for anyone to ask "Why?" in spite of there being abundant and excellent reason to do so. After all, in a society that at least pretends to believe in free speech and a democratic discourse in which every citizen is supposed to participate in some way why should actors be treated as having less right to express their opinions than anyone else?

A common response to that is that actors enjoy considerable platforms without necessarily being experts on the subjects they talk about, so that their opinions get a level of publicity unwarranted by their actual understanding of the issues, possibly to pernicious effect. However, that does not in the slightest make them different from virtually any other public figure, including politicians, high officials in government and business, billionaires. As all these others remind one a hundred times a day, position and wealth are no proofs that one knows what they are talking about--and certainly possessors of all these things remind us that they are not even intelligent enough to know when to remain silent and not remove all doubt that they are a fool.

Of course a possible answer to that is that because of the power these figures wield the public should be informed about their views--because if they are indeed ignoramuses and idiots (as so many of them most assuredly are) this is a matter of legitimate public concern.

I grant that these figures' being ignoramuses and idiots is indeed a public concern worthy of (much, much) more attention than it gets. However, their courtiers in the press do not usually report their views for that reason, but rather treat them as authorities on their subjects (often, on all of them)--often while sidelining people who actually know about the subject matter, even when they possess formal credentials testifying to their competence. The result is that as an answer this is less than completely satisfying.

Accordingly it seems that the sneer at actors speaking their political opinions is really about is two things, namely

1. The low opinion in which conventional wisdom holds the arts, and those who work in them, as actors do, and

2. What Upton Sinclair called "the great art lie" that art and politics do not mix, denying the reality that "All art is propaganda" because they don't admit, or even see, that their propaganda is propaganda, mistaking it simply for "timeless truth" to be spoken of with the gravitas-suggesting fart-smeller's face, as against other people's Message and Agenda.

The stupid hypocrisy of it all is the more blatant because those in the "show business for ugly people" that is politics and wishing they were really in the show business for the pretty people they are not, even while sneering that actors should keep their mouth shut when actors say things they don't like, are ecstatic when a "mere" actor agrees with them.

And even more when an actor who agrees with them becomes President.