Last Meeting Between The Democratic Party And Hollywood

 

 

Hi. I know the timing is bad for you guys, particularly after what happened last Tuesday.  Although it wasn’t fun for us either, you know. Kind of why we’re here in the first place.

God, this is harder than I thought it would be.  Look, we’ve just got to pull the Band-Aid off.

This hasn’t been working for either of us for a long time. No I need to be completely honest. I don’t think this relationship has ever been healthy. Not for us and probably not the country.

Look I know why its always been awkward. The whole HUAC- Red Scare thing. I know that everybody and his uncle was trying Communism back then and we didn’t deal with it well with you guys.  Honestly you were relatively young, we’d been around for more than a century and I guess we should have been more understanding. But honestly? You guys call us being blind. You were fine with what Stalin was doing. You don’t get to say you’re sorry more than a century later; you guys were all cool with it well past the expiration point. Was what Joe and Dick did you guys pretty horrible? Absolutely. But we didn’t exactly get away with our reputations intact either; they pretty much tarred us with it ever since. Maybe that’s the only reason we hooked up in the first place, the whole common enemy thing.

And you were young and cool and famous and we gravitated towards that because we wanted to be cool too.  We let Jack hang around with the Rat Pack and we thought it got us the White House. We were blind to his flaws too for a long time; honestly the older ones still are. But we did some pretty ugly things as a result of him and you guys kind of acted as go-betweens.

And we never really did learn from those early days.  I mean, actors and politicians have a lot in common, I know.  And we bonded over certain things? You hated Vietnam? We hated Vietnam., though honestly some of your other friends never truly bought that.  We did some crazy shit in the 1970s, basically let you guys hang out with us at the DNC.  Warren and Shirley basically had the ear of the McGovern campaign all the way through. You’d think we’d have learned something from that after losing 49 of 50 states but like I said, we’re slow learners.

And you did say all the right things about Reagan. In hindsight we should have realized that was a problem. He was, for better or worse, one of your own and you turned on him the moment he changed parties.  You said he forgot what he brought him here. Thing is that you guys always had more in common with Reagan than you wanted to admit.  Sure he really did do a lot of things to wreck the government for the rest of us but…you didn’t exactly turn away those tax breaks he gave you. Or really all the other ones that the Republicans administrations have all these years. You say he didn’t share you values and maybe that’s true socially.

This is going to get awkward but we’ve got to tell the truth. I know you and your friends have spent the last twenty years saying all the right things. About the War on Terror, about Occupy Wall Street, defunding the police, all of the right social causes and we are grateful about that. But the thing is…honestly, you have more in common with everybody you’ve been preaching against the last twenty years.

It's not that were grateful for everything you’ve tried to do for us ever since but I think it’s really been a problem of the messengers.  We’ve spent so much of the last twenty years rallying against corporations and the ‘top one percent’ which we should be doing and need to do. The problem is, it never helps when it comes from Mark Ruffalo or Oprah Winfrey or Billy Porter.

Because you guys do have more in common with Elon and the Koch Brothers and yes Trump then the people you claim to be speaking for.  This should be framed as a war between the billionaires and the working class. And you guys, well, you’re not even the upper middle class. You guys are multi-millionaires and some of you, like George and Taylor, are billionaires. You can’t in good conscious claim to speak for the common man when the closest you get to it is playing them in a Netflix series.

And the thing is, the voters do get that. They’ve gotten it for a while, actually and we’ve been pretending it isn’t a problem. We all know the reason why, of course, and that’s money.  We can rage as much as you want about money ruining politics but your problem isn’t with Citizens United, it’s with capitalism.  And since we can’t find an alternate way to exchange goods for services, we have to face the fact that money isn’t going anywhere. Some people will always have more than others. It’s not fair and we need to do something to fix that. But having you guys as the spokesman for it does tend to make us look like hypocrites.

Now I have no doubt you guys do care about all the things you claim to and they are worth fighting for. But the problem is… you guys can afford to think about them and the majority of Americans can’t. To be fair, this is part of our own internal messaging problem and we’re obviously going to have to look at that going forward. But if last Tuesday taught us anything, it taught us that the majority of Americans really don’t care about everything you in particular care about.

They don’t care about climate change. They don’t care about abortion. They don’t care about the rights for the LGBTQ+ community. They don’t care about what’s going on in Gaza or the Supreme Court. They don’t care about what Trump didn’t during in his first term and might very well do in his second. That’s not fair, they do care – but not as much as you or I want them do.

What they care about is the economy. That’s the thing we keep getting into fights with your heroes Bernie and AOC about really, and honestly we should have had that argument with them six years ago. I grant you the platform they thought up was bold and each individual issue alone of their bills would be worth addressing. Some of their other major issues are really extreme and really we shouldn’t be surprised very few of them got elected.

What none of their proposals had seven years ago and still don’t are things to help the blue-collar, working class voter.  Taxing the one percent is something to be done but there’s nothing about how that money gets in to their pockets. Cancelling student loan debts doesn’t help the Americans who’ve never graduated college. Raising the minimum wage doesn’t help if you haven’t been working in awhile or if your job is becoming redundant.  And all of the voting and civil rights in the world do nothing to help them decide whether to pay the electric gas bill or groceries next month.

I admit some of our more extreme members will admit that we have failed these people but their problem is that they don’t seem to think there’s anything they can do – or in fact, should do – to help them.  In their minds, they made their beds when they chose to be born in a red state, couldn’t afford to move to go to college or decided to vote Republican in the first place. And while that is their problem, the fact remains over the last decade its increasingly become clear that you have that exact same attitude. I’m looking at you Bradley Whitford. You may have starred on The West Wing but right now Jed Bartlet would have canned your ass and he would be right too.

Because let’s face it: much as you might advocate for these issues, you’ve been able to afford to do so. That’s something the working class voter knows every time you choose to give a speech at an awards show or tweet something anti-Trump.  You can claim that the Republicans don’t have America’s best interest at heart but it’s not clear you care much about people who aren’t Democrats. And they know that and it’s been a problem.

And it doesn’t help matters when people like Eva Longoria and Laverne Cox talk about leaving the country after election day. I understand you’re scared and upset – hell, we all are – but as people who have such carefully crafted images do you get what a bad look that is? Sorry for all you Latinos are going to be deported, maybe I’ll see you in Mexico on my next shoot. It’s going to be tough for African-American and transgenders in this country, so I’m going to either keep as much estrogen as I can for myself or go to another country where it will be easier to procure. The voters sent a message on Election Day. You don’t like the message they sent, so you’re running away. Understandable to be sure, but it’s incredibly hypocritical and considering how much time and energy we spend accusing Republicans of beating out of touch with the average American that really shows how out of touch you guys have been.

But to be fair, this is at least partially on us. We got so caught up in the Hollywood whirl and the certainty that somehow your aura would get us what we needed that not only have we missed that it hasn’t, we haven’t registered what we were losing. And that is the working class vote. We once managed to get 60 to 65 percent of it in an election. Biden won in 2020 but only managed to get 38 percent. I don’t want to think what the numbers going to be this time but considering that there are always going to be more working class Americans then there will ever be famous people, we have to start trying to convince them to come back to us.

And that means we have to end this. I know this might be painful but let’s not kid ourselves; you guys have gotten a lot more out of it than we have.  You get to appear on political shows, talk to the UN, speak at Democratic fundraisers, even write op-eds for the Times and talk about subjects that, if we’re being honest, you don’t know the first thing about.  Hell George when you started to push Biden out, the first paragraph of the op-ed you admitted your only qualification was that you’d raised a lot of money for Democrats. Robert Reich called you out on that and he was right too.  When they do the autopsy on the campaign, your little act will be a big part of it.

I think the best thing for all of us is for the foreseeable future you keep supporting us in the style we have become accustomed to. The difference is you don’t get to mention our names for the next three years at least. Talk about yourselves, it’s what you’ve always done best; you were really doing that when you claim to be talking about politics.  And it’s not like your business is in any danger yet – and honestly, if it is, the proletariat kind of have a point.

Of course you can always leave the country as you’ve been planning but I have to tell that’s going to be a worse look for you. The next few years are going to be tough for a lot of people who don’t have the options of their own private jet or their own endorsement deals. You’ve said you wanted to stay behind the scenes and fight. Now’s your chance to do just that. Just keep your mouths shut and your checkbooks open.

 

Honestly we’ve been making a mistake even having you sign fundraising emails for the last twenty years.  The only people we’ve convinced are those who are already converted and as we keep finding out, that’s not who we have to win back. I don’t know how we do it actually, but having Michael Moore and Stephen Colbert doing so isn’t help.

Now for the record you guys can still keep talking about what  a shitshow the country’s turning into on your late-night comedy shows or podcasts. The difference is, we’re not going to appear on them either. From now on all Democrats will only appear on news networks  rather than late show, only talk to political media and never appear on another late night comedy show again. And we’re going to start actually campaigning in places that wouldn’t watch your shows to begin with.  Let’s not kid ourselves, many of you may not be around in a few years and we need to find new ways to get the word out.

And by all means make your films and TV shows about the situation, either directly or in thinly veiled metaphor. We do actually like most of your films and TV shows. But I think the best thing for both us and America is that we all stay in our own lane. You guys promote your movies, we’ll promote our agenda for the people.  Yours might be easier to sell, but let’s be honest we have to make ours more palatable.

Before you go, we’d appreciate it if all of you gave us your keys to the DNC offices across the country and turned off all social media feeds tied to us. You’ll just have to post about your next film instead from here on. And if that’s a hardship for you…well, then this clearly was the right decision.