Economists talk about the resource curse, the curious and infuriating paradox that describes the plight of countries whose abundance of natural resources is unable to produce the same growth as countries with less God-given beneficence.
I'd like to introduce a complementary notion: the Creative Curse. I'll define it as follows: the groups that are most creative and contributory in the arts are the least effective in the political sphere.
This is a paradox I've been thinking about for a while, but a comment by Tony Kushner has encouraged me to commit it to writing once and for all. "Ninety-nine percent of anything that's watchable and can be described as political theater is theater of the left" Kushner observed in an interview in Friday's New York Times on the anti-war plays currently being mounted in Central Park's Delacorte theater and at the Public Theater.
It would be hard to challenge this. Since at least the middle of the 19th century, it was the left that used all the creative stages available as platforms for advocating social justice, challenging institutions and defending the oppressed and the marginalized. Paint and ink were the armaments available, and while these efforts often failed to rise above propaganda, the creative octaneship of the left vs. the right is undeniable.
Indeed, the history of 20th-century American culture is the history of leftist creativity. Throw a dart and you'll hit anyone from Clifford Odets to Walker Evans to Arthur Miller to vernacular music to the Beats to Kushner himself: the transmutation of rage into art. Interestingly, when lefties become righties -- take the case of John Dos Passos -- they often become dimensionless hacks.
We could go back and forth reflecting on the sociological foundation for this, but the animating thread is the subversive nature of art as a depth charge aimed at the status quo. The left has largely been at the ramparts, and its resultant hold on imaginative expression has resulted in the Creative Curse that's left it too comfortable with its role as the opposition, as the reforming angel.
In America, only twice in this century -- with FDR and JFK -- have liberals attempted to reshape the world with a political vision that was momentumed by a creative leap of artistic proportions. (Clinton's presidency was a muddled affair in this regard; how could the "third way," a timidly nuanced dance, truly represent a strong transformative vision?)
As perpetual outsiders, liberals have constructed an ecosystem -- an architecture of desire and hope -- that seeks to influence the culture artistically, to re-imagine the world through drama and fiction and poetry. The conservative movement has taken a completely different approach, and has been wildly successful at it. They aren't interested in the alchemy of philosophy into art, but the muscle of philosophy into practice. They've made the two last struggles of the last 50 years -- against Communism and now against terrorism -- into national theater with clear protagonists, heroes, enemies and values. It's not sophisticated or imaginative theater, it's not draped in ambiguity and moral complexity, but it's theater nonetheless. Fox News is Death of a Salesman for conservatives. Reagan's "Morning in America" was a national opera.
In What's The Matter With Kansas Thomas Frank wonders why so many conservatives vote against their self-interest, and attributes it to the ability of the Republicans to link the Democrats with the wrong value system. I attribute it to the Creative Curse. The conservatives have been brilliantly creative at inventing and articulating a sweeping world view that easily accommodates the incorporation of new issues -- gay marriage, terrorism, globalization. Do they care that their views are unexpressed in the arts? Hardly.
Meanwhile, liberals keep responding with small-scale rocket attacks from the creative perimeter, and that includes everyone from Michael Moore to Bill Maher to even An Inconvenient Truth.
In his new book The Culture Code, my friend Dr. Clotaire Rapaille, the well-known anthropologist, deconstructs the imprints that separate one culture from another. Imprints also apply to other social organizations, including political structures. The early imprint for liberals is "outsider." For liberal boomers it was the multi-mania of the 1960s: the Viet Nam protest; Mayor Daly and his Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago; the struggle for civil rights, women's rights, gay rights. For their parents it was the great union struggle. Gen X and Gen Y have been imprinted by the conservative venom against Bill Clinton, whose dalliance with Monica and impeachment hearings put him on the defensive, where a true outsider resides.
Liberals have been patterned by the Creative Curse, and it's haunting them. If they want to become not just the dominant political segment -- but the dominant turbine of ideas -- they need to extend their energies to the levers of the larger culture, and write a narrative that is as creative politically as aesthetically. When the conservatives mock liberals as "elite," what they're really saying is that they put on performances that satisfy each other's narrow frustrations or longing or anger. Meanwhile, while the left is constructing plays that are, in Kushner's term, "watchable," the right is constructing epics that are winnable.