Why do progressive worldviews seem more conducive to comedy, and
conservative to action/drama?
I'm not 100% sure that's true, but it's true enough that it's worth addressing. I'll get to where I disagree later.
The latter question is easier: without a manichean certainty that the evil, the "black" of a black/white dichotomy, exists and requires suppression through violence, there is no reason for the action of an action movie to occur. In order then, to depart from the conservative mode of action movie, you either need to create a nihilistic action movie, one in which questions of good and evil are moot and violence is simply a mechanical result of cause and effect (a mode first introduced in surrealist cinema, some horror, and later adapted to action cinema during the French New Wave and the Hollywood Renaissance, later gone burlesque in the cinema of Tarantino, Rodriguez, and, sometimes, the Coen Brothers).
As to comedy, I think we almost have to go to the Greeks. Whereas tragedy showed the ideal condition of man marred by man's inescapable flaws--what would later, in Judaism and Christianity, be translated to "original sin" and the fallen condition of man--comedy celebrated this fallen condition, showing man getting away with it (at least until the last moment, when censorious authorities were appeased by half-hearted punishments of vice). Vice, in other words, is the heart of comedy. Virtue is just plain not funny.
Can we have the luxury
of comedy without the relative stability wrought by conservative
sensibilities?
Well, no. And that's where there's sort of a subliminal "thanks" to tradition mores--to an element of conservatism--in all comedy; without a normative standard, vice has little power to sustain itself, let alone to amuse.
But so many of the best comedies are black comedies,
like Strangelove, hardly escapist or conservative. I tried to
think of good conservative comedy (of recent vintage) and what I can
think of is not really coonservative anyway, but equal-opportunity
skewering to include progressive shibboleths---something like Team America: World Police.
Fun flick, even if I didn't agree with all its politics or views on certain celebrities.
I think you're touching on something important here, though: even political comedy is often apolitical, or at least non-partisan. Comedy is most successful when it addresses human foible--pride, rashness, inertia, insubordination, foolishness--and human foible knows no party.
When it is partisan--when it deliberately satires one side from the point of view of the other--it's usually best served by liberal views on the human condition for the reasons mentioned above. One must sympathize with "evil" for true comedy to be possible.
That said, the one successful comedic voice from the right I can think of is Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco). He's an incorrigible bore in interviews, a whining dandy and fop who actually makes me understand, in a way I never could as a victimized youth, the impulse toward bullying; I'd yank his underwear so high his balls would interfere with his capacity for speech. But his movies are actually quite witty, illustrating the foibles of his trust-fund social Darwinists while pointing out with even greater ferocity the hypocrisy of their critics and the inchoate intellects and unappreciated privilege of the bourgeois socialist (or, in Barcelona, the hilarious gaps in the knowledge of American-hating Euro-bohemians). I don't agree with his politics, but I love his dialogue, and I think his view of human foible is astute.
. . . the eminently likable Shia LaBoeuf . . .
You think? I'm not sold on him at all.
It goes without saying that (unlike Hollywood types) money-hungry
capitalists are without exception dangerous and ignoble in film---and
these days who can argue?
Well, it used to be communists. Nazis were always handy, because no one in his or her right mind doesn't hate Nazis, but you can only use them so many times before you mar your credibility.
I said above that action movies tend to be conservative (when they're not nihilistic) because they're manichean. I think what you're noting here is that when they're not conservative, they're often still partisan because there needs to be that kernel of conflict between good and evil; when they skew left, then, they simply concern themselves with the left's somewhat own absolutes. That capitalists are untrustworthy is, unfortunately (despite the evils of capitalism--Enron, subprime mortgages, Adam Sandler--the capacity of the market to connect goods with their prospective consumers represents the best our sorry little gnat of a species has managed to come up with as a way of dealing with resources), one of those axioms they're willing to accept, their own "black" in the manichean sense.
---High tech intelligence gathering (by the U.S. government, that is)
is Dangerous and Immoral, and axiomatically subject to Unforeseen
Mistakes and Corruption, as are the (white male) practitioners of the
art
Here is where I am pretty much a contemporary leftist. That said, I would more willingly subject myself to such monitoring if I lived in a culture where more or less anything that didn't have a direct, empirically definable victim was essentially legal. If I knew I couldn't be arrested for my sodomy or drug use, I almost thrill to the notion of commiting it to video; if I knew my consumption of transgressive works and treatises wouldn't be seen as threatening, or serve as a bar to my gainful employment, I wouldn't much care about my records being subject to perusal.
---Among U.S. government staffers at the highest levels, twenty- and
thirty-something African-Americans who look like underwear models
predominate, and a good thing too, as they are without exception the
smartest, most heroic and most principled of all government personnel
I think you're missing a more important point here, which is that these sorts are simply the prettiest to look at according to the current aesthetic paradigm. No one wishes more than I that pale, hairy-torsoed bald guys were the flavor du jour, but it's just not the way of things.
Oh, and (POSSIBLE SPOILERS), from what I've heard, Eagle Eye ultimately deals in a less partisan fear, one that also drives 2001, The Terminator, and The Matrix (which is why I partially object to the top poster's characterization of The Matrix as a "liberal" actioner), which is a mistrust of machines, a notion that actually takes us to questions that have preoccupied sci-fi and horror since at least the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
