Clueless Democrats Trot Out Hollywood
The party doesn't get it: Most voters hate what those people stand for.
By Thomas Frank
LA TIMES
July 29, 2004
BOSTON — Anyone interested in understanding the folly that has reduced the Democratic Party from its position of strength four decades ago to its current feeble state would do well to attend some of the parties accompanying the Democratic convention here this week. While the party's leaders wax earnest and eloquent behind the militarized perimeter of the city's convention center, its corporate sponsors — mostly conglomerates with some critical business pending in Congress — hire the city's hippest nightclubs and most prestigious cultural venues, where they dispense top-shelf liquor, live music and the intoxicating presence of celebrities to delegates, journalists and politicians alike.
In the few days I have been here, I have attended lavish soirees thrown by regional telecom giants, consumed the free lunch proffered by other regional telecom giants and gotten word of '60s heroes feted by weapons manufacturers. But the picture came together for me only at an afternoon get-together sponsored by a film industry lobby called the Creative Coalition.
The event, at the Ritz-Carlton, featured the usual accouterments of contemporary sumptuosity: tiny hors d'oeuvres featuring colossal mixtures of world cuisines, an open bar and a panoramic urban view. My first hint that there was something different and decidedly nondemocratic about this party was when, immediately upon arrival, I was ushered into a corner where none of this sumptuosity was available and told to stay there and not to mingle with everyone else because I was with the press and was hence a suspicious and second-class character. (As it turned out, the solution to this insulting situation was simple: I removed my press credentials.)
Once I was back among the partygoers, the reason for my sequestering became clear: There were celebrities here. Indeed, the entire party was a transplanted bit of Southern California, complete with the social hierarchy that, it seems, must be imposed whenever celebrities appear anywhere. According to this hierarchy, people like me and my colleague, a disheveled reporter from a French monthly, must be kept far away from the presumed object of our attention, the minor Hollywood figures who were now wandering among us.
I was concerned at first that I would be unable to distinguish the stars from the non-stars. Was it this fellow over here in the shaved head, wrap-around sunglasses and unbuttoned shirt? The guy wearing the beret? The man in the perfect double-breasted suit, pompadour hair and the brilliant purple tie? Or the sullen lad in the pseudo-working-class get-up, the tattoos and the shirt from the '50s? (In Hollywood, working-classness is forever associated with '50s-ness, for reasons that remain obscure.)
Before long, I learned to identify the celebrities because they were the ones who were always illuminated by portable spotlights and were constantly talking into cameras. The father of a famous comedian was there. A star from a favorite TV drama. A guy from a celebrated Broadway musical. And a member of the famous acting family whom everyone referred to simply as "the Baldwin."
The Democrats are today a party that has trouble rallying its historical working-class constituency, losing more and more of its base every four years to some novel culture-war issue invented by the wily Republicans: blasphemous art, Ten Commandments monuments in courthouses, the dire threat of gay marriage. Behind their success stands a stereotype, a vision of liberals as an elite, a collection of snobs alternately permissive and moralistic, an upper class that believes it is more sophisticated and tasteful than average people.
It is a pernicious doctrine, and yet there is a grain of truth to it. A grain of truth that get- togethers like this one — where minor stars swap righteousness with lobbyists, politicians and local venture capitalists — magnify into life-sized lessons in liberal elitism.
Now, it is an article of faith among American intellectuals that Hollywood movies are populist products; that they are uncomplicated translations of the public's desires into attractive images; that stars are stars because we love them; and that countries like France that resist Hollywood movies do so because they are snobs, dedicated to some daft mission civilatrice in which they will bring culture — in the form of arty, disjointed black-and-white films — to the masses. Masses, that is, who yearn in their hearts for nothing but more Hollywood fare.
If this were true, the problems of the Democratic Party would be over. After all, as this party makes clear, when Hollywood stars decide to get out there and do their patriotic duty and stump for the candidate of their choice, the candidates they support are usually Democrats.
But somehow it never seems to help. Somehow this glitzy world of risque dresses, pseudo-transgressive stylings and velvet ropes (i.e., the things that make up "creativity") has precisely the opposite effect on a huge swath of the American public. They hate it, and they hate everything that Hollywood has come to stand for. After all, Hollywood stars are as close as America comes to an aristocracy, and being instructed on how to be kinder and better people by pseudo-rebellious aristocrats can't help but rub people the wrong way.
What the stars' Democratic allegiance illustrates for this segment of the public is not the glamour of Democratic candidates but their repulsiveness and shallowness and insufferable moral superiority; their distance from the historical Democratic base of average Americans. For them, Hollywood's superficial leftism only validates the ludicrous claims of the Republicans to be the party of the common man.
And when the party was over, a woman in a headset barked, "C'mon celebrities," hustling the exalted ones into the elevator, on to their next party. That left the old-fashioned idealists, the delegates with their imperfect faces and imperfect lives, back in the convention hall, trying to win an election.
Thomas Frank is the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America" (Metropolitan Books, 2004).
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