“You don’t have to be an especially devoted consumer of film or television to detect a pervasive, if not total, liberalism,” writes New York‘s Jonathan Chait in an 8.19 piece called “The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy Is On Your Screen.” This is noteworthy? The creative communities that supply television and film have always been left-liberal for the most part, and the hardballers who run the business side have always, with some exceptions, always been obliged to accomodate and promote lefty liberal content.

“The liberal analysis of the economic crisis — that unregulated finance took wild gambles — has been widely reflected, even blatantly so, in movies like Margin Call, Too Big to Fail, and the Wall Street sequel. The conservative view that all blame lies with regulations forcing banks to lend to poor people has not, except perhaps in the amateur-hour production of Atlas Shrugged.”

Wells interjection: The notion that unregulated Wall Street wheeler-dealing led to the 2008 financial meltdown is a “liberal analysis”? How is that an especially liberal thing? Isn’t the applicable term “factual”? Are there any available straight-up, verifiable facts that don’t support the “Reagan Did It” analysis?

Back to Chait: “The muscular Rambo patriotism that briefly surged in the eighties, and seemed poised to return after 9/11, has disappeared. In its place we have series like Homeland, which probes the moral complexities of a terrorist’s worldview, and action stars like Jason Bourne, whose enemies are not just foreign baddies but also paranoid Dick Cheney figures.

“The conservative denial of climate change, and the low opinion of environmentalism that accompanies it, stands in contrast to cautionary end-times tales like Ice Age 2: The Meltdown and the tree-hugging mysticism of Avatar. The decade has also seen a revival of political films and shows, from the Aaron Sorkin oeuvre through Veep and The Campaign, both of which cast oilmen as the heavies. Even The Muppets features an evil oil driller stereotypically named ‘Tex Richman.'”

“[Early to mid ’90s right-wing advocacy groups] Americans for Responsible Television and Christian Leaders for Responsible Television would be flipping out over the modern family in Modern Family, not to mention the girls of Girls and the gays of Glee, except that those groups went defunct long ago.

“In short, the world of popular culture increasingly reflects a shared reality in which the Republican Party is either absent or anathema. That shared reality is the cultural assumptions, in particular, of the younger voters whose support has become the bedrock of the Democratic Party.”