Jenna, you ask some good questions. Speaking as the child of a professional artist who doesn’t think we’re in Iraq because some evil cabal of Je -er, “neocons” collaborated with Big Oil to fool the president into invading Iraq for oil while propping up Israel, I have often thought about what seems to be the leftist drift of artistic expression. Especially as I have of late developed a fondness for music and literature produced, sometimes fatally, in Soviet Russia, the ne plus ultra of leftist political thought. Our own political correctness movement, whose “thou shalt nots” are well known and transgressed at the risk of one’s career and reputation, is but a pale shadow of the Soviet Realism that crushed the spirits, perverted the works, and took the lives of innumerable Russian artists. Why so many American artists are eager to coast down the same slipperly slope that led to Stalin and Zhdanov is quite a mystery to me.

As for our own artists, including Bruce Springsteen, I think the public generally takes the art that’s produced for its own merits, regardless of the artists’ political views. No doubt that’s largely due to the fact that we do not share the socialist’s worldview of everything is political. It is comforting to keep certain things removed from the political sphere, including one’s enjoyment of art. Now certainly some art is inherently political, but even so the enjoyment of it is not limited to agreement with its political content. One can admire and even enjoy an artistically well-expressed political argument that one disagrees with.

Furthermore, artists by repute are almost expected to exhibit some eccentricity, which of course must be overlooked in the enjoyment of the art. Political difference between artist and consumer could easily be dismissed by the latter as part and parcel of such tendency.

I’m speaking in general terms, here, and there are instances when an artist’s politics hinder and dissuade the public from enjoying his work. But it seems that those instances are extreme cases that involve artists whose works have not indicated overt political content, such that the later imposition of politics seems gauche. I admit, however, that I’ve not seen enough such instances to be comfortable with a general conclusion about when an artist’s politics go too far in the sense of significantly driving off his consumer base.