Politics is the great leveler: It makes even the most inspired and insightful voices sound banal.

In his hurriedly cobbled-together new song railing against “King Trump’s” immigration policies, the supremely talented Bruce Springsteen sounds like a million other angry Blue Sky posters as he lambasted the “occupier’s boots,” brought down against “Citizens [who] stood for justice.”

Accepting her Song of the Year Grammy on Sunday, Billy Eilish offered support to anti-ICE protestors by mouthing the mindless slogan, “Nobody is illegal on stolen land.”

Artists have every right to express their opinions about current events. But what’s telling is the dispiriting contrast between the imaginative power of their best work and the tired tropes that almost always define their political utterances.

I wrote about this phenomenon in 1998 when the New Yorker magazine asked acclaimed writers to address President Bill Clinton’s problems arising from his sexual dalliance with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. Instead of providing enlightening perspective into the sordid story, these writers proved as screechy and partisan as all the other gasbags bending our ears back then.

E.L. Doctorow wrote that Zippergate “is the unseating of a........

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