Culture Backstory The summer of love to hate.
Artists have the right to share their views.
Doing so is not always noble or wise.
The high priests of speaking out are John Stuart Mill,
an English philosopher, and Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor.
Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends.
Mill warned, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
Niemöller famously ventriloquized the many Germans who kept silent when the Nazis came for the socialists,
the trade unionists, and the Jews.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
Like Mill and Niemöller,
artists and musicians who call out injustice avowedly see standing up for the oppressed as a moral obligation.
Speaking out on world affairs is in vogue, as it tends to be amid political rations,
and much of it is doubtless heartfelt and sincere.
But it can also have other motives and unintended consequences.
Two developments explain the current clamour.
First, the re-election of Donald Trump, a bogeyman for the showbiz elite,
give or take a few country singers and wrestlers.
At a recent gig in Britain,
Bruce Springsteen labelled him an unfit president in charge of a corrupt,