Academy Award -winning actor Richard Dreyfuss is certainly no conservative, but he offered pointed criticisms late last week of the identity politics obsessions of the dominant media-entertainment culture. Good. His words were brave and true.

So was much of the rest of Dreyfuss’s interview with Margaret Hoover on Firing Line, most of which was buried under the headlines about his opposition to “identity” obsessions in art.

His opposition was pithy: “They make me vomit.”

By “they,” Dreyfuss meant new rules the Academy is implementing for 2024 saying movies cannot be eligible for Best Picture unless their casts and crews meet numerical quotas for “under-represented groups.”

“This is an art form,” Dreyfuss said. “No one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give in to the latest, most current idea of what morality is.”

Expanding that theme, Dreyfuss said, “I don’t think that there is a minority or a majority in this country that has to be catered to like that.” And: “Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a black man? Is someone else being told that if they’re not Jewish, they shouldn’t play the merchant of Venice? Are we crazy? Do we not know that art is art?”

Dreyfuss is manifestly correct. The worthiness of art, like the content of character, has nothing to do — and should not be seen as or expected to have anything to do — with the color of our skin, much less to whom and how we are romantically attracted.

On the same day the Dreyfuss interview ran on Firing Line, columnist Deroy Murdock gave a speech in New Orleans against the same form of “identity” fetishism in which he noted that (even without quotas), the Academy, purely on merit, has “recognized Halle Berry, Morgan Freeman, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Herbie Hancock, Spike Lee, Sidney Poitier, Prince, Octavia Spencer, Denzel Washington, Stevie Wonder, and at least 57 other black filmmakers.” Alas, the question henceforth will be whether new, minority Oscar winners earned the award through merit or merely because they met the "woke" quota.

Anyway, Dreyfuss blasting the Academy comes just weeks after legendary basketball coach Phil Jackson similarly blasted the NBA for its obsessively race-based politics. This is the same Jackson who spent the 1970s and 1980s, on his own time, supporting Democratic causes and candidates.

Dreyfuss is even more identifiably “progressive” than Jackson. He has said his mother openly identified “as a communist — and she wasn’t kidding,” and he himself served two terms on the board of the liberal organization Common Cause.

We can hope that Dreyfuss and Jackson represent a broader awakening of old-line political "progressives" who recognize a distinction between liberal policy views and the radical rot being pushed by today’s media-entertainment “elites.” Conservatives may not like the former, but at least they are within the American, pluralistic, small "r" republican tradition.

Radical identity obsessions reject that tradition.

Speaking of which, the main topic of Dreyfuss’s interview was the actor’s admirable, long-standing crusade to boost civics education “in defense of republican democracy.”

“We could let slip the greatest idea for governance ever devised,” Dreyfuss told Hoover, while lamenting the populace’s astonishing lack of rudimentary knowledge of how U.S. government is designed.

Speaking of the Dreyfuss Civics Initiative , founded in 2006, the actor said, “I am building a constituency for the return and revival of civics in public schools. … I want the people to remember that they are the sovereign power here.”

To that end, the sole identity that matters is not black, white, straight, or “nonbinary.” The identity that matters is American.