I Hate Liberals, But All My Friends Are Liberal

I am a bit of a political orphan, though I didn’t used to be. Back in the mid-1990s, it was fashionable to say that you were fiscally conservative and socially liberal, but not anymore. Today, the right is comprised mostly of muscular nationalism and the left of ludicrous economic views. I didn’t change—everyone else did. By the way, that period of time in the mid-late 1990s, when everyone was fiscally conservative and socially liberal, was among the happiest times in our history.

So while I have no home in the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, I find that my circle of friends tends to consist of Democrats, because culturally, I have very little in common with the Republicans. I don’t drive a big ass truck, I don’t wear polo shirts and pleated khakis, I don’t participate in organized religion, and I don’t watch college football, not even for social currency. I’m an artist, and artists are supposed to be liberal—right? Well, in fact, they are. Some of the most fascinating reading I’ve done in the last year was about artists and the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. Hard to believe, but back then the federal government was directly subsidizing art, and all of the best artists were members of the WPA, like Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning. There were many great artists outside of the WPA back then, because they failed the means test to get into the program, and now, nobody knows their names. You had to not just be a great artist—but also poor. And they were all commies.

But there is more to it than that. Lots of people are familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality test, which has been discredited as of late, but most people have taken it at one time or another in their lives, and when you dig into the population data, there are some fascinating findings. But a newer, better personality test is the Big Five, which you might have heard about after Trump’s surprise win in 2016. Cambridge Analytica deployed the test on Facebook, and used language processing to determine people’s Big Five personality type, and then fed political ads to the most suggestible among us. Cambridge Analytica’s role in this has been somewhat overstated, but the overall story is true.

So the Big Five personality typology measures five personality traits: agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. When it comes to the cultural aspect of your political beliefs, openness determines everything—it determines the music you listen to, the art you appreciate, and the movies you watch. It also determines who you choose to associate with. People with low openness scores rarely hang out with people with high openness scores. People who like Lynyrd Skynyrd don’t hang out with the people who like Jean-Michel Basquiat. The intersection of that Venn diagram is the null set.

What is openness?  I purloined this off the internet, off something called thomas.co:

Openness is a characteristic that includes imagination and insight. The world, other people and an eagerness to learn and experience new things is particularly high for this personality trait. It leads to having a broad range of interests and being more adventurous when it comes to decision making.

Creativity also plays a big part in the openness trait; this leads to a greater comfort zone when it comes to abstract and lateral thinking.

Think of that person who’s always ordering the most exotic thing on the menu, going to different places and having interests which you would never have thought of… that is someone who has a high openness trait.

Anyone low in this trait tends to be viewed with more traditional approaches to life and may struggle when it comes to problem solving outside their comfort zone of knowledge.

I think about openness a lot, especially when it comes to music. You see, when I go out to a club, my expectation is that I’m going to hear music that I’ve never heard before. That’s what I want. I don’t go to a club to hear the same old music over and over again. But some people do!  When I first moved to Myrtle Beach, I found myself in the sound and light rental store talking to a DJ from one of the clubs at Broadway at the Beach, the local tourist trap. I asked him about playing there. He said, “Man, when people go on vacation, they just want to hear the same shit over and over again. So we play the same shit over and over again.” No gig for me. And that’s why the South, by and large, has shitball music. There have been attempts to get something going in Charlotte, and Atlanta has a burgeoning underground scene, but it’s nothing compared to Miami or New York. People just want to hear Party Rock Is In The House Tonight for the 10,000th time.

The same is true for art—Charleston has 20 or so different art galleries, but it’s all Bob Ross happy trees kind of stuff—nothing postmodern or avant-garde. There is one gallery in Charleston that flirts with experimental art, but falls short. My wife and I went to every art gallery in Charleston and came up empty-handed. It really is depressing.

I don’t have any hard data on this, but liberals tend to have high openness scores and conservatives tend to have low openness scores. Wall Street leans conservative (although less so these days—Wall Street conservatism is mostly a Gen X phenomenon), and everyone listens to Phish, the Allman Brothers, and the Grateful Dead--and literally nothing else. It all comes down to the openness score, the eagerness to learn and experience new things. During the Lehman days, when I was living in New York, I saw Goldfrapp, Underworld, Throbbing Gristle, Frontline Assembly, and Delerium, to name a few—all avant-garde musical acts. There were no finance dudes there. I have a sky-high openness score, and I can’t hang out with people who don’t. That means that I hang out with mostly liberals, and I roll my eyes when the discussions about raising the minimum wage or income taxes start. But I would rather put up with idiotic economics than put up with the Allman Brothers.

People with high openness scores are constantly in search of beauty—people with low openness scores are constantly in search of tradition: we do it this way because that’s the way we’ve always done it. But what conservatives don’t realize is that tradition is downstream of beauty—what is considered avant-garde today will be tradition twenty years from now. I’m sure you’ve had this experience where you’ve lingered on an easy listening radio station and something like Nirvana comes on. Nirvana is clearly not easy listening, but what has happened is that tradition is downstream of beauty, and what was once considered avant-garde is now considered culturally acceptable. It’s no longer new, and therefore, no longer scary. When Ben Shapiro shat upon Harry Styles for wearing a dress, that’s an expression of tradition over beauty. What my man Ben doesn’t realize is that twenty years from now, we’ll look back at that with a fair bit of nostalgia—and lots more men will be wearing dresses.

It's been said that the word “liberal” has been misappropriated by the liberals. Liberal means free, and political liberals frequently like policies that are coercive. But when it comes to art and music, it’s a much more accurate description—liberals really are “free” when it comes to culture. “Liberal” and “Conservative” really refer to openness, not any underlying political beliefs. The conservatives want to stand athwart history yelling “stop.”  Do you remember the great moral panic in the 1990s about explicit lyrics in music? Tipper Gore and all that, and we got warning labels on the cassette tapes. Now we play that music at weddings. We survived Ice-T, we can survive whatever’s coming next.

Go fuck yourself,

Jared

Music Recommendation: 16 Bit Lolitas – Sedna (2006). I shit you not when I tell you that this is the best bassline in the history of dance music. And combined with the shimmering synth arps in the breakdown—magical. 16 Bit Lolitas has since changed their name to 16BL, for reasons that should be obvious.

P.S. We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards will always be free. Feel free to forward to whoever you like.