A debate which comes up from time to time is about why are most artists “progressives” and is this because conservatives don’t have artistic talent. There is, perhaps, something to be said for the idea that the kind of extreme creativity involved in artistic work tends to be unbalancing to a person’s sense of how the real world works, so a wildly creative person is more apt to believe absurd things (like socialism) will work in the real world, but I doubt that this explains the majority of what causes the tremendous skew towards progressivism in the arts. For that, we need to look at selective pressures, envy, and the defense against envy.

First, let’s consider selective pressures. Most of what is called conservatism is about producing the best environments possible for the raising of children. This puts all sorts of restraints on parents and communities for the sake of children. Included in these is needing to earn one’s living in a reliable way, because children (and sometimes a spouse) are relying on one to provide their living for them. The arts, in general, are an extremely unreliable way to earn a living. There’s an excellent reason that the words “starving” and “artist” go so well together. Thus there is a massive selective pressure against people who value family and the raising of children. And the talents that underlie art can, generally, be put to more practical uses, and practical uses pay better. This is especially true if the person with artistic talent has other talents, too.

From this we can see that it’s no accident that a large fraction of artists come from broken homes. Not only does coming from a broken home make a person less likely to understand the value of raising children well (though it can have the opposite effect), it also makes them more likely to seek attention. Putting the talents which underlie art to practical use tends to get you a paycheck but not nearly so often praise. (Don’t get me wrong, people can make art out of love. But it takes a lot of love. It takes a lot less love if you also have a deep-seated psychological need for approval.)

There is a secondary selective pressure on art to appeal to buyers or (in the case of advertising-subsidized art) viewers. This can be done through quality, but it is easier to do it through adding pornography. There is an absurdly large market for pornography that comes with social sanction or plausible deniability. Just check out the short film It’s Not Porn, It’s HBO. The success that this kind of pseudo-pornography brings allows for bigger budgets which makes for higher quality in the output (largely by being able to pay more people to work on it).

The other major thing to consider is envy. If you study history for even a few minutes, one of the most dominant themes you will find is that if somebody put in the work to make something worth having, someone else wants to take it from him rather than make it himself. This gets modified slightly when it comes to competition, where envy wants to win by dragging down others. “He did not deserve first place, I did.” You see this kind of envy constantly in third-rate artists. And progressivism is practical just codified envy; the progressive ideal is that all men are equal by dragging down any who are ahead, justified by fairy tales about how they only got ahead by cheating. This explains why third rates artists are so often progressives. But what of first-rate artists?

Here we come to the universal need of the successful to defend against envy. On an international scale, the primary defense against envy is a powerful army. On an international scale, if you want to steal what others have built, you must take it with an army, and their army being large enough to defeat your army protects them. This does not work within a nation, though, where the state retains to itself most of the use of violence. There are still defenses against envy using direct violence, such as front doors with locks and the police. But within a nation the envious can work within the legal system to enact laws to use this machinery of the state to take what belongs to others and give it to themselves. This is the reason why the rich are usually politically connected; as long as the laws are crafted in a way to allow loopholes, it doesn’t matter what the law is meant to achieve. And this is why, wherever you have a progressive party with enough power, the rich are always members of the progressive party. But it’s not the only reason. It also defends them against excessive envy being directed at them, personally. And this is why we see successful artists being progressives—it (partially) defends them against the envy of third rate artists.

(It should be noted that the individual political views of the artists making it don’t matter very much on collaborative projects, because most artists, and especially most progressive artists, will do whatever they are paid to do. The people who made movies were not wonderfully better people during the days of the Hayes Code, they just did what the men with the money told them to do, and that happened to be to make morally decent movies. So they did. It’s very easy to find the documentation that they didn’t want to.)