How Hollywood's Behavior Since November Proves Why The Democrats Must Cut Ties With Them For The Future of the Party

 

On Sunday in my article on Alex Gibney’s The Dark Money Game I made it clear that the story of the film and the man who made the film illustrated the problems between both sides. I think I’d better reemphasize it before we begin.

To be sure there’s no confusion, I completely agree that the actions that the Republican party and so many aspects of the conservative movement in the last half-century go against so much of what America should stand for. But where I differ from so many of my leftist colleagues here and elsewhere is that the conservative movement at every part of it what it did understood what it needed to do to realize its vision in a way that the progressive movement has never realized.

The electoral strategy of Republican candidates from Richard Nixon onward, the strategies of Newt Gingrich in the House and Mitch McConnell in the Senate, the establishment of organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist society, along with the rise of conservative media on every level, has been based on a fundamental understanding of the people behind it. In order to  get their racist, misogynistic, homophobic agenda policy they had to at the basic level convince a significant portion of  electorate it was in their best interest. This meant at every level organizing politically to get the mandates they needed in every branch of the government to do what they needed. This took a lot of planning, patience and willingness to play the long game but they had a goal in mind and they spent all of their effort realizing it.

By contrast during this exact same period of time, when theoretically all of these avenues were just as available to those with a progressive agenda, the left basically concentrated its energy in the fields of academia, liberal journals, activist movements and in certain case winning over the minds of certain members of Hollywood – in short every field but the political one. Furthermore this battle was essentially being waged for completely different kinds of combatants. The left went for the college educated, the right went for those who couldn’t get beyond high school. The left’s battle was waged entirely in the urban scene, the right the rural scene. It wasn’t even being waged in the same states as we all know; the left has concentrates its battles on the coasts; the right has waged in the South and middle America.

And conveniently eliminated from so many histories of this period is the fact at nearly every level it was far more effective for the right then the left. Starting in 1968, the Republicans won five out of six Presidential elections with four of them massing over 400 electoral votes for the winning candidate. When Bill Clinton won in 1992, just two years later the Republicans took control of both houses of Congress and would hold them for a dozen years, their longest stretch since before the Great Depression. During the 21^st century the Republicans have controlled the House of Representative for three stretches totaling 16 years (until at least 2026 with the most recent) and the Senate has been going increasingly Republican over the last fourteen.

The decision for the Democrats to embrace the causes of civil rights and equality was the morally right decision. But it has come with a huge political cost. They have not won the majority of the white working class voter since 1964 and in the last election Kamala Harris carried just over a third of that. Rural America has been moving further away from Democrats ever since the narrative of flyover country and MAGA took place; in 2024 Harris carried just eight percent of rural America. And as we’ve seen with recent elections, so many of the minority coalitions that the Democrats have needed to win just to be competitive across the board have been increasingly trending Republican in recent elections. For the Democrat party the only way forward is to try and meet the voters where they are clearly going.

The left, not surprisingly, doesn’t see it that way. As they increasingly have made clear in their scholarly essays the answer to the problems Democrats face is the answer to every single question on policy, elections or anything else. They have to go more to the left. No matter how many times these positions end up costing Democrats votes and cementing the Republican hold on power they simply shrug it off. They have the usual catalog of excuses but they basically come down to the same position they’ve always had: we are absolutely right and anyone who doesn’t agree with us is part of the problem.

For a group of people who are very proud of how successful and educated they are compared to the idiotic Republicans (who have gone to the same universities they have) the left’s inability to see that their strategy isn’t working – not just for them but is endangering America as a whole – has been an unindicted co-conspirator in the rise of MAGA and the conservative movement has a whole. At its core is the simple fact that has been true about the left since the days of abolition and continuing to this day: they see the world through a moral lens and people must do the right thing even if there’s no gain for them to do so. They could have done everything that they excoriate the far right from doing but the main reason they didn’t is because that would have required long-term planning, willingness to make compromise short-term to achieve their goals and most importantly winning over a certain part of the electorate. The left would have to play politics which, like everything else in society, is beneath them. The right has in a sense managed its gains by willing to play a game of checkers with its voters and the left has made it clear that they won’t even bother to play chess with those people unless they learn it themselves.

And it’s clear just six months after Trump’s return to the White House that when it comes to a certain group of the left – Hollywood – they refuse to acknowledge that they’ve failed. They have essentially resumed the strategy – if you could call it that – that they’ve been using for the past ten years. They have engaged in symbolic gestures – Shonda Rhimes resigning from the Kennedy Center is the most prominent example; left the country entirely – Rosie O’Donnell, having engaged in a twenty year feud with Trump has fled to Ireland, no doubt serving as a shining beacon to all the members of the LGBTQ+ community who can’t afford to; attacking the administration on late night comedy (I’ve written about that extensively) and continuing to vilify those who even consider such things as trying to acknowledge that their approach is the wrong one, despite the fact it has clearly not been working.

In a sense the fact that Hollywood has turned on Bill Maher because of his White House visit was inevitable. Because let’s not kid ourselves, he could have come back and told everybody that Trump was everything that the world had been saying and he would still have been vilified for it by that same circle because he chose to go. This has been the biggest blind spot of the left historically and the one contradiction they have never gotten past.

The only way to deal with any member of the GOP, well before Trump’s run but especially now, is to dehumanize them completely. They can’t appear on mainstream media because that gives them a voice and Fox News, which is the only place they can appear on, should be banned from all networks. The mainstream’s media must abandon objectivity covering Trump but by telling ‘the truth about him’ his most devoted followers will reject it and it only confirms what the left already knows. And even those Republicans who have served with Trump and choose to become part of the fight against him are only valuable because they’ve seen the light. It doesn’t undue their years of being Republican and conservative; they can only be trusted for the moment. Left unsaid of so much of the left’s acceptance of the Cheney’s and Romney’s of the party is the fact they are only a temporary allies to be discarded when the eventual victory comes.

Now I’ve never liked Bill Maher as a comedian and I’ve never been thrilled about his politics. But having recently done a series on the role of Late Night in the era of Trump, I have a grudging respect for Maher. Because alone among late night comedians he is the only host who is trying to play by the old rules of comedy: You make fun of everybody in power and when the other side wins, you make fun of them equally. He has called the right on its bullshit but he has frequently pushed back against the left, which as they have made clear you don’t do. And alone among his ilk he is the only late night host who invites either conservative media personalities or Republican official on his show. The fact that he chooses to chew them out as much as the Democrats he invites is usually ignored by those on the left who feel that should not be giving a voice.

And it is worth noting that as early as spring of 2022 he acknowledged that the left’s ideology and its refusal to acknowledge its reality had always been the Democratic Party’s biggest problem with white working class voters. I prominently dismissed this in one of my articles; now it has the portent of prophecy.

No matter how many times Maher has made it clear he is not now nor will ever be a Republican – something he doubled down on the week before his White House visit -  during the Biden administration in particular he was increasingly viewed as a Republican. I grant you that his own routines certainly have the sound of the Fox News viewer but it also reflects in a sense how much the traditional late night viewer and the left has shifted. In fact Maher himself reflected on that last fall in a segment that seems particularly pertinent. It had to do with Robert F. Kennedy’s wife and I’ll let him do the same

“His wife is Cheryl Hines, who Larry David was quoted describing as ‘the best person I ever met, the one person in Hollywood who doesn’t have a single enemy. Well, now she does…because she didn’t throw her husband under the bus when her husband made a decision about something, which she’s made plain she disagrees with.

After posting  Whitford’s quote:

“Well, you know what I think is not gutsy? Mansplaining to a woman – but of course, not to her face – how she should sacrifice her marriage, all so you could read something on Twitter that met with your approval…There’s an ugliness to the left they never used to have…Going after the wife, even the mafia doesn’t do that. In theory, liberals are compassionate. In practice, this guy can’t even understand one of the most basic dilemmas common to all humans – that when you’re married, sometimes you have to swallow some shit.”

 

In keeping with the left’s attitude the magazine Salon took more objection to Maher’s position than anything Whitford said or did. The loyalty that he’s in defense of is met with the adjective ‘apparently’. You can see in the article that they seem to hold Maher in contempt for taking Hines’s side (they don’t even print Whitford’s tweet, which is typical).

 

Maher then quotes Obama for his speech at the convention where he critiqued the idea that the only way to ‘win’ was to ‘scold and shame and out-yell the other side.”

 

Bradley, did you go to the bathroom or something when that came on?” Maher says. “Because it’s almost like he was talking to you by name.”

 

Maher acknowledges all of how Trump drives people insane, his relationship with Whitford saying he used to know him: “He wasn’t this guy.” And in a note of more compassion than Whitford or social media shows Hines he said: “He may relish writing Cheryl Hines off; I’m not writing him off.”

Now I don’t know what Larry David thought during this same period about what the woman who had been on Curb Your Enthusiasm in some form for nearly a quarter of a century was doing now. I don’t know if he said anything to defend Hines during this period or now. But considering that this week David has written an op-ed comparing Maher’s visit to the White House to a visit with Adolph Hitler, it is clear that he has by doing so, once again, proving Maher’s thesis when he was defending Hines.

I imagine, for the record, it’s probably been incredibly hard for Hines during this same period. I also know that her friends in Hollywood have no doubt shunned her for not doing the right thing, which in their minds is going to a White House function with a suicide vest under her clothes and detonating it at the appropriate time. That is a very extreme view which I don’t support at all – but given the left’s attitude towards everybody who isn’t them they’ve no doubt been thinking every single person who’s ever worked for Trump at any point can only redeem their existence by doing so. That is the ugliness Maher talked about and they’ve only doubled down on it since.

Now if you’re looking at me to provide a strategy to defeat the MAGA movement, I’ve basically written in this article. But it is a strategy for the Democrats. And part of that strategy – which I see signs that they are coming to realize is one they must accept – is to permanently excise the worst parts of the far left. Minimizing the role of Hollywood to all but the fundraising level would be an excellent first step.

Of all the so called allies among the Democrats that they’ve made during this period they have helped the party the least and done the most damage to it. In temperament and exclusionary attitude they represent the worst part of extremist parts of politics and unlike those of the far right, there is no electoral gain to be found by having them be the voice of the party – if anything, they have taken votes away from the Democrats. Their voices are as loud, strident and lecturing as the right’s can be but the only people they convince to vote are the ones who already agree with them and they push away far more. And the hypocrisy of trying to argue against the evil of the 1 percent being made by members of the ten percent is one of the few moral high points the Republicans have had during my lifetime. People like Oprah and Shona Rhimes may be the same color as the majority of the people in states like Mississippi and Alabama but in terms of wealth and status they have much more in common with the Trump’s of the world and we can’t pretend that hasn’t been a drag on the Democratic brand.

I could argue that this should be a ‘New Rule’ but in fact it’s one of the oldest ones in politics, one that the Democrats seem to have forgotten. So I’ll close with this: the Democrats need to cut Hollywood lose. We have won without them, and we can again.