One of the favorite activities of the modern movement conservative is to claim that, since not every single aspect of the culture panders to him, he is being discriminated against. Having never actually experienced any actual discrimination -- unlike, say, black people -- the right-winger seems to believe that it is an oppression too heavy to be borne that he is sometimes made aware of things that he does not personally enjoy. Liberal arts classes in college taught by liberals? Discrimination against conservatives! Some people don't adhere to the tenents of the Southern Baptist Convention? Discrimination against conservatives! Young people listening to the rappity-hop music? Discrimination against conservatives!
This week has seen a big push in one of the favorite such complaints of the movement conservative: that, because of the preponderance of liberals in Hollywood, conservatives are being discriminated against in Hollywood. Jason Appuzzo, founder of the late, unlamented Libertas Film Festival, was one of the biggest purveyors of this ridiculous myth; Brent Bozell is another. But in the last ten days, we've seen an op-ed by Jon Voight in the right-wing Washington Times in which he blamed American liberals for the murder of millions by the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, and claimed that "if, God forbid, we live to see Obama president, we will live through a socialist era that America has not seen before, and our country will be weakened in every way". The editorial was widely scoffed at, and conservative gadflies, who mistake being made fun of for being blackballed and having your entire career destroyed, immediately came crawling up from the cellar to complain about "establishment entertainment journalists expertly wielding the tools of the New McCarthyism". So says Andrew Breitbart (who, earlier this year, I heard peddle the absurd notion that Hollywood celebrities are afraid to say they support our troops in Iraq, lest they face censure at the hands of the liberal bosses). While conservatives almost universally react to liberal opinions on the part of entertainers with some variant of "shut up and sing" (witness the widespread hostility the Dixie Chicks faced a few years ago), let one of their own get laughed at for mouthing of some ill-conceived right-wing talking point, and we're witnessing the vile fascism of "a town that doesn't embrace free speech anymore". Breitbart's commenters are even worse, claiming that "the old McCarthyism was harmless compared to the new". (Those who wish to compare and contrast may note that Mr. Voight currently has three films in production, and starred in one of the most successful films of 2007, as opposed to, say, Dalton Trumbo, who spent a year in prison because of the blacklist, or Hanns Eisler, who was more or less forced to leave the country and ended up in the hands of the Soviet East Germans, or Alvah Bessie, who never worked in her chosen profession again, or Canada Lee, Bartley Crum and John Garfield, who all died because of the horrible after-effects of coming under McCarthyite scrutiny.)
Meanwhile, the Weekly Standard featured a cover story entitled "Hollywood Takes on the Left", in which David Zucker outlines his difficulties and frustrations in making An American Carol, his long-promised conservative comedy. Zucker, too, complains of a "new McCarthyism" in Hollywood, designed to keep Republicans out, and frets that "conservative films are almost illegal in Hollywood". Even if one ignores the fact that movie studios are owned and run by capitalist multimillionaires who are hardly hostile to the core principles of conservativism, this absurd sense of pseudo-oppression fails for one simple reason: audiences tend to like or dislike movies based on whether or not they're entertaining, not based on their ideological bias. (After all, as conservatives love to remind us, liberal anti-Iraq War films have been duds at the box office.) If Zucker's film fails, it won't be because of some mythical Hollywood liberal mafia; it will be because the movie is preachy instead of funny, and audiences don't like preachy.
Luckily, because of the freedom of speech people like them denied victims of the blacklist in the 1950s, Zucker, Breitbart, Voight, and their ilk are welcome to complain all they like about how terribly oppressed they are; that they actually do so is all the evidence you need of the moral bankruptcy of the modern conservative movement.