When did the Left get so boring?

When I was younger I was actually more conservative than now. Not a lot more, but in the context of the general political mood, I was very much a right-winger in those more liberal times. I've moved towards the center as the country has moved right these last decades. Even when I was a staunch conservative (Nixon Youth, I'm afraid to admit), I preferred to hang out with liberals, and even some full-fledged leftists (and one Communists who was thrilled to be under FBI observation.) Much as i disagreed with their politics, they were a more fun group; less "up-tight" that the conservative bunch and blessed with healthy senses of humor.

Somewhere in this political evolution the left lost it's "cool". Lately I find left-wing writers and speakers tediously predicable and unimaginative, and the liberals I meet, and there are plenty of them in the S.F. area, are even more uptight and humorless than the Nixon crowd. Its a strange observation, but there's a lot of Dick Nixon in Howard Dean. Entirely different politics, of course, but the intensity, paranoia and general strangeness are a good match. Like Tricky Dick, Howard is able to live in his own personal reality so thoroughly that it infects those around him. I had occasion to meet Charles Colson in the '70's and Bob Haldeman in the '80's (actually worked for Bob for a bit.) They both spoke of the brainwashing effect of the Nixon White House. i get a similar feeling from the Deaniacs.

This bizarre observation was somehow occasioned by Terry Teachout's column in the Opinion Journal. He wonders why political drama is so awful. Actually, political drama has always been tedious, but in earlier years Broadway producers knew better than to invest in such things. Now, they are too deeply soaked in the New York liberal culture to see clearly.

All these plays were bad, by which I mean they were both crude and predictable, a fact that should surprise no one. Any work of art that seeks to persuade an audience to take some specific form of external action, political or otherwise, tends to be bad. But the line is not a bright one, and it is possible to make good, even great art that is intended to serve as the persuasive instrument of an exterior purpose. (That's why the great cathedrals of Europe were built.) Hence it serves no purpose to assert that political art is ever and always bad, as too many conservatives are wont to do. A conservative aesthete may be emotionally drawn to such sweeping statements as this one, made by a Russian émigré novelist in Kingsley Amis's "The Russian Girl":

Everywhere in the world literature is in retreat from politics and unless resisted the one will crush the other. You don't crush literature from outside by killing writers or intimidating them or not letting them publish, though as we've all seen you can make a big fuss and have a lot of fun trying. You do better to induce them to destroy it themselves by inducing them to subordinate it to political purposes, as you propose to do.

OK, Terry, perhaps I spoke too soon, there might be some overtly political art that is redeemable, even good (I am fond of Picasso's Guernica), but not political drama of a recent vintage, and especially not on the stage in New York, L.A. or S.F. (or anywhere in Europe.) You could say the same for film.

There is still a bit of quality political satire and humorous commentary with a left-of-center perspective, Jon Stewart comes to mind, but most of the rally entertaining voices have moved to the Right. Hard to imagine for someone of my generation, but the Left is officially lame.