Winehole23
04-16-2010, 04:02 PM
Maybe people are liberal because they went to Hollywood (http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/04/conservatives_and_ideas)
Apr 14th 2010, 17:40 by M.S.
http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w15/hoollywwd290.jpgMEGAN MCARDLE is essentially right (http://www.pheedcontent.com/click.phdo?i=73dc6d166e3f00aa1afea46d75a42b27) in claiming that the academic and entertainment fields are so liberal as to make conservative members uncomfortable. Oddly, though, she fails to note that people who choose to enter academia or entertainment generally make this choice in their early 20s, when a person's political ideology tends to become fixed. Work experience has an enormous influence on this development, not just as a result of the people one is surrounded by, but because of the nature of the values and practices that are built into an occupation. Yet here's how Ms McArdle puts it:
[M]y experience of talking to people who might have liked to go to grad school or work in Hollywood, but went and did something else instead, is that it is simply hogwash when liberals earnestly assure me that the disparity exists mostly because conservatives are different, and maybe dumber. People didn't try because they sensed that it would be both socially isolating, and professionally dangerous, to be a conservative in institutions as overwhelmingly liberal as academia and media.
Well, okay. To some extent. But there's also the process through which the people who did try found themselves shaped by the experience. I got into television in my early 20s in a production firm in New York that was run by people from Arkansas and Iowa; the core group all belonged to the same evangelical church. The people in that company ended up far more liberal than they would have been if they'd gone into different industries in Arkansas or Iowa, not only because of osmosis, but for job-related reasons. The head of the company would sit at loggerheads with the writing staff for hours, coming to terms with the fact that to tell a powerful story, you have to allow your protagonist to do things that are evil. Like Ms McArdle, I don't want to make unfair generalisations about conservatives, but it's not exactly news that show-business people tend to be on the leftish side of the political spectrum in every country in the world, in every period of history. It seems unlikely to me that there's nothing job-related going on there.
On the converse side, I've noticed that a lot of people I knew who held rather leftish political beliefs in college have become quite conservative since they graduated and went to work in investment banking. I doubt that process had nothing to do with the kind of work they were doing. (Nor do I think that they were fake left-wingers in college.) You have to at least consider the extent to which Los Angeles is full of liberals not because conservatives don't go there, but because people who might have ended up conservative if they'd gone to work at Tyson Foods headquarters in Little Rock mainly wind up liberal if they go to Los Angeles and write for television. Similarly, the people who work for television in Little Rock are generally more liberal than their surrounding environment, and the people who work for large manufacturing or retail corporations in Los Angeles are generally more conservative than their surrounding environment. What you do influences who you become.
(Photo credit: AFP)
Apr 14th 2010, 17:40 by M.S.
http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w15/hoollywwd290.jpgMEGAN MCARDLE is essentially right (http://www.pheedcontent.com/click.phdo?i=73dc6d166e3f00aa1afea46d75a42b27) in claiming that the academic and entertainment fields are so liberal as to make conservative members uncomfortable. Oddly, though, she fails to note that people who choose to enter academia or entertainment generally make this choice in their early 20s, when a person's political ideology tends to become fixed. Work experience has an enormous influence on this development, not just as a result of the people one is surrounded by, but because of the nature of the values and practices that are built into an occupation. Yet here's how Ms McArdle puts it:
[M]y experience of talking to people who might have liked to go to grad school or work in Hollywood, but went and did something else instead, is that it is simply hogwash when liberals earnestly assure me that the disparity exists mostly because conservatives are different, and maybe dumber. People didn't try because they sensed that it would be both socially isolating, and professionally dangerous, to be a conservative in institutions as overwhelmingly liberal as academia and media.
Well, okay. To some extent. But there's also the process through which the people who did try found themselves shaped by the experience. I got into television in my early 20s in a production firm in New York that was run by people from Arkansas and Iowa; the core group all belonged to the same evangelical church. The people in that company ended up far more liberal than they would have been if they'd gone into different industries in Arkansas or Iowa, not only because of osmosis, but for job-related reasons. The head of the company would sit at loggerheads with the writing staff for hours, coming to terms with the fact that to tell a powerful story, you have to allow your protagonist to do things that are evil. Like Ms McArdle, I don't want to make unfair generalisations about conservatives, but it's not exactly news that show-business people tend to be on the leftish side of the political spectrum in every country in the world, in every period of history. It seems unlikely to me that there's nothing job-related going on there.
On the converse side, I've noticed that a lot of people I knew who held rather leftish political beliefs in college have become quite conservative since they graduated and went to work in investment banking. I doubt that process had nothing to do with the kind of work they were doing. (Nor do I think that they were fake left-wingers in college.) You have to at least consider the extent to which Los Angeles is full of liberals not because conservatives don't go there, but because people who might have ended up conservative if they'd gone to work at Tyson Foods headquarters in Little Rock mainly wind up liberal if they go to Los Angeles and write for television. Similarly, the people who work for television in Little Rock are generally more liberal than their surrounding environment, and the people who work for large manufacturing or retail corporations in Los Angeles are generally more conservative than their surrounding environment. What you do influences who you become.
(Photo credit: AFP)