A few of our friends on the left appear to be unnerved by Dolly Parton. This isn’t because they don’t like her — quite the reverse. They love her — worship her, even — but they don’t know how to reconcile their Dollymania with their politics.
Dolly chooses to keep her public image almost entirely apolitical, which is strictly verboten by the canons of progressive political piety. Many progressives, especially the woke ones who work in the media, share the conviction of Thomas Mann that “everything is politics.” They believe there is no sphere of life or culture from which zero-sum group power dynamics are excluded. This unsleeping, unsmiling conviction that life is best conceived as a perpetual and all-consuming revolution of the oppressed against their oppressors can lead a person to say very silly things.
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