Liberal Method Actors and Conservative Character Actors
by Robert Haston
(Author of The Origin of Political Species)
Why so few conservative actors?
Liberalism and Hollywood are almost synonyms, and no one seems to be asking why. Just as Hollywood is the location most associated with liberalism, the most common core trait assigned to liberals is empathy - the ability to look at things from the perspective of another. The next most commonly noted trait is novelty seeking. You could consider novelty seeking the emotion that makes someone want to look at things from a new and different viewpoint. Thus they have the drive to do something they are inherently good at.
What I find interesting is how the metaphors we use for liberals and conservatives stem from the physiological sensations that come with their trademark emotions. Liberals are more sympathetic because you have to empathize before you sympathize. You must feel the suffering before you act on it. Consider the popular attack ad that highlighted Obama complaining about how we bombed Iraqi civilians. This sort of empathy must be anathema to the conservative base. The trait most commonly associated with conservatism is fear. For those who don't have the time to research mortality salience and conservatism, simply consider the core messages of the conservative's own political advertisements during the last two election cycles.
Empathy and sympathy create feelings in the chests of "bleeding heart" liberals. Fear on the other hand grabs those who "go with their guts". By our own definitions, we are of two tribes, the "gut people" and the "heart people". You could extend these to further latitudes. Liberalism is synonymous with intellectualism. Consider the top of Harvard versus rock bottom of Annapolis accreditation of the two presidential candidates, or the meteoric rise of "Joe the Plumber" to iconic political spokesman. Conservatives have 41% more children. The pronounced affect that Sarah Palin's sex appeal had amongst male conservatives was an enlightening surprise. You could label the two the parties of "Hearts and Minds" versus "Guts and Nuts".
I've been comparing all these modern effects to the greatest environmental change since the dinosaurs - the dawn of human culture which really took off about 60,000 years ago. We now know that the period since had made as many changes in the human genome than the 1.5 million years before. This was a transition from a billion years of small troops fighting for supremacy of genes to larger and larger tribes and supremacy of cultural memes. This transition from "me and my genes" to "we and our memes" still echoes to this day between the high birth rate, anti gay, anti birth control "Focus on the Family" conservatives and liberals who have been transitioning from "It takes a village to raise a child" to "We are the World".
The term liberal actor seems redundant because it is redundant. Acting isn't just related to empathy, it is itself hyper-empathy. We first need to differentiate between true acting and character acting. True acting is taking on another character. The far end of this spectrum is method acting, where before playing the character, the actor tries to mentally become the character. He may even live in the same neighborhood. Consider the span of characters played by actors such as Sean Penn or Heath Ledger. Regular old liberal empathy is just standing quietly in someone else's shoes. Method acting is not only trying just to become the character, but typically making the character "larger than life".
Character acting is simply playing a singular type of character, typically an extension of oneself. For example, Chuck Norris was a karate champion who moved on to make movies which centered on him kicking bad guys in the head. Fred Thompson is the ultimate political character actor, going back and forth from Hollywood to Washington either playing a politician, or being one.
Of the very few conservative actors that make up the exception to the rule, most are character actors, and most of these are alpha male action movie character actors, such as Norris, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and of course Arnold Schwarzenegger. Once you remove the alpha male character actors from this already miniscule group, you are left with just a few, such as James Woods, John Voight, and Kelsey Grammar. Dennis Hopper would have made the list, but he voted for Obama.
You could quibble about their style, and their bios don't look like liberal breeding grounds, but their sheer scarcity speaks volumes. Kelsey Grammar is a very interesting case. The one thing that makes people more conservative (repeated in over 250 studies) is mortality salience-the thought of one's own death. Grammar's father was murdered when he was young. His two half-brothers were killed by a shark while scuba diving. His sister was abducted and murdered. He nearly died of a heart attack. Given how powerful our life experiences can be, this is ample proof for the case of nurture conquering one's nature. Given that twin studies have never shown that more than 40% of conservatism is heritable, the real question is why conservative actors aren't simply a minority instead of almost nonexistent. The fact that otherwise conservatives may just be going along to get along in liberal Hollywood offers one answer.
So it turns out that the people who are most connected with empathetic liberals are the Olympic athletes of empathy. Expecting to convince an elite actor to stop being empathetic is like expecting Lance Armstrong or Michael Phelps to learn how to be a bad cyclist or a rotten swimmer.
Virtually no one would disagree with the assertion that just like great musicians, such acting skill would have to be in their genes. Yet to assert that the traits that makes someone a good actor (a greatly heightened desire and ability to slip into someone else's skin) also makes them liberal somehow falls somewhere between incomprehensible and scandalous.
Once again, if people understood this sort of thing, it would defuse politics, just as other books such as Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps have answered that song from the movie My Fair Lady "Why can't women be more like men?" Liberals or Conservatives can't think like each other simply because their brains are built differently. We can keep up the pretense or accept the reality and see what kind of society we can build with the tools we have, not the ones both sides wish the other side had.
Robert Haston, January 2009
