The world’s highest-paid actress has just backed Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign.
Scarlett Johansson, a generally thoughtful liberal celebrity who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, said she’d be pulling for Warren in 2020 because the Massachusetts senator is “progressive but realistic.”
But if Warren is the most realistic candidate on the field, we’re in trouble.
“It’s not like her campaign is making these crazy, outlandish promises that seem impossible to reach. There’s a strategy there,” Johansson told The Hollywood Reporter.
Basically, Johansson said, she’s got a plan for that. Except, Warren’s plans are exactly what Johansson says they’re not: crazy and outlandish.
From free college and sweeping student debt forgiveness to a healthcare plan borrowed from democratic socialist Sanders, Warren is incredibly liberal with other people’s money, and there’s nothing realistic about how her plans would actually work.
Most of the proposals from the supposed policy wonk may sound good in theory, but few of them would work in practice. As Phil Klein wrote about her trade policy:
With 10 candidates participating in the next Democratic debate, three stand above the rest: former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts. In an interview with Variety in April, Johansson said she didn’t know if Biden would have a shot.
Perhaps, then, it makes sense that she would back Warren, though in other ways, Johansson’s party may be getting too liberal for her.
Johansson, a 34-year-old Tony Award winner who has not shut down the possibility of running for office, is unique in Hollywood in that she’s not on the far-left, and she regularly pushes back against identity politics.
This summer, she told As If magazine that she shouldn’t be banned from playing a role if she doesn’t have the same identity as the character: “You know, as an actor I should be allowed to play any person, or any tree, or any animal because that is my job and the requirements of my job.”
She even pushed back against the two-party system in her interview with Variety, saying, “It seems like a fundamental problem. It’s hard with a two-party system, it really is. Until we embrace some other way, I think we’re going to continue to have this crisis.”
The two-party system that left us with Clinton vs. Trump in 2016, and could lead us to Warren vs. Trump in 2020, has certainly failed to serve the interests of many Americans.
If it means that Johansson feels compelled to support Warren, who endorsed the Green New Deal and wants a wealth tax to pay for free college, then maybe it’s not just Warren who’s unrealistic. It’s the two-party system that confines voters to picking the lesser of two “outlandish” choices.
