“He’s a coward.”
So spoke former Star Trek child actor Wil Wheaton at the weekend. His target? Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, one of the biggest stars in the Hollywood firmament. And the source of his ire? A statement last week by Johnson that he would no longer comment on politics because, to his mind, celebrities doing so “only fuels division”.
Johnson, of course, identifies politically as an “independent” in the tripartite American system in which all adults are assigned a political identity via their voter registration. Over the course of his career, he has performed supportive acts for both parties – speaking at the Republican National Convention in 2004 in an apparent endorsement of George W. Bush, and then openly endorsing Joe Biden over Donald Trump in 2020. The latter act, he later publicly regretted, saying that he felt he had helped to fuel division in the US.
Johnson’s “independent” status makes the criticism from Wheaton, and various other Hollywood stars, for his new politically neutral status interesting on a number of levels.
Telling Assumptions
First, there is the assumption about Johnson’s views that is being made: Wheaton, an out-and-out progressive liberal, presumably feels that The Rock’s cowardice is preventing him from expressing the views that Wheaton bravely does. The implicit assumption that The Rock is a progressive is not supported by any data whatever.
But perhaps more importantly, there is the assumption that speaking out in favor of progressive politics in Hollywood is brave. That to do so requires courage. That taking part in an ever-so-self-important, black-and-white montage of Hollywood stars wearing “Tuck Frump” T-shirts and sermonizing about human rights is the height of human bravery, not far off the storming of Omaha Beach.
In fact, the opposite is true: being an outspoken progressive in Hollywood is almost mandatory. Wil Wheaton’s career stalled for many reasons, but wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt is not among them.
The faux bravery of Hollywood progressives, in fact, may well be the most off-putting thing about them. The formulation of their political expression has an almost comically self-unaware quality – “I believe in human rights and I don’t care who knows it” – which seems to imagine that the utterer of the words is the first person in human history to have had a progressive thought. Perhaps that is why it is so ineffective.
After all, if US elections were decided by the balance of Hollywood endorsements, the left wing of the Democratic Party would never lose a primary election, and Republicans would have been locked out of Congress and the White House since at least the days of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In fact, the observable pattern is that the reverse has been true: while correlation does not equal causation, the simple fact is that the decline of the movie industry in Hollywood maps fairly well onto the increased vocalization of far-left views from prominent actors at a time when ordinary US voters have shifted right.
Cynical Posturing or Political Positioning?
In this sense, conservatives should also be wary of piling praise onto The Rock for simply announcing that he will stay quiet. The 10-time world champion wrestler is one of the entertainment industry’s most successful and most intelligent businessmen. It would be somewhat naïve to attribute to principle that which can be explained by rational self-interest. The cynic might expect that if Dwayne Johnson could sell more movie tickets by wearing a trans-pride armband, then that is precisely what he would do.
Or is that, perhaps, too cynical? Here is what Johnson himself had to say in the highly entertaining Esquire interview that provoked Wheaton into his charge of cowardice:
“What I have learned through experience,” he says, “is that I need to keep – need, not want – the main thing the main thing. And the main thing for me, the thing that in the morning I swing my legs out of bed and I run towards, is creating. It’s art. It’s storytelling. I’ve learned I’m going to keep my politics to myself. There are moments when, hey, there’s nothing we can’t talk about. If I’m wrong, I’ll tell you I’m wrong. Or if I feel like I got a leg up and this is the right way to go, I’ll share it with you. Politics is omnipresent and it’s forever. I don’t like it. [Laughs.] I hate it at times. I hate the slinging. I hate all the bullshit that comes with it. Because when I hear you talk about Springsteen, who I love, and this idea that he’s speaking directly to Trump in his concerts, my first thought as you were telling me that, in my head, I went, Oh, then why don’t they talk? They should sit down and talk. I don’t know where that goes, but I do know that’s an important step.”
Buried inside that answer there is, of course, a political message of its own: if Donald Trump seeks to dominate his foes politically, Johnson would like to sit down and talk with them. It is a softer version of Trump’s original 2016 message – the outsider who would like to sit down, talk and make deals. That message proved very popular with an anti-politics electorate. Could it be so again?
Business Sense, but Political Folly?
Talk about Dwayne Johnson running for president has circulated in the US for years: like Ronald Reagan, he is a successful – if sometimes snobbily mocked – actor and entertainer, gifted with rare communication skills and movie-star looks. He has an inspiring life story. The problem, however, in an increasingly polarized electorate, is that he probably simply is not extreme enough to win the nomination of either party. Reagan, for all that the analogy works on some level, was by no means a kumbaya unity candidate – he was a fire-breathing anti-communist universally seen as being on the right flank of his party.
Johnson, by largely staying out of politics – 2008 and 2020 aside – has maximized the audience of his films and his personal popularity. Many of his Hollywood contemporaries, by preaching endless liberalism, have alienated audiences without accomplishing much by way of change.
This is not perhaps a matter of bravery and cowardice. It may simply be an example of intelligence versus folly.
