The progressive politicization of existence is so comprehensive that it often leaves no room for us to shrug our shoulders at the politics of others.
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.
It recently led Constance Grady, a writer at Vox, for instance, to argue that “there’s a dark side to Dolly’s ability to appeal, Christ-like, to all people at all times.” (Incidentally, one wonders exactly where Grady picked up the notion that Christ himself appealed “to all people at all times.” It certainly wasn’t from Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.) In any case, her essay is framed by this query:
Dolly Parton is beloved because she has devoted her career to standing for love. And, usefully, she is willing to be ambiguous about what exactly that love means and how much it includes people that those on different sides of the political aisle consider their enemies. But in a post-Trump America, is Dolly Parton’s love enough?
Enough for whom? is the question. It looks for all the world like the only ones dissatisfied or disconcerted by “Dolly Parton’s love” are Grady, and the Ku Klux Klan, who once protested Dollywood’s annual “Gay Day.” It turns out that Dolly’s public conduct isn’t enough for Grady. This in spite of all of Dolly’s dazzling feats which Grady lists in her opening paragraph:
Dolly is the living legend who sells out arena tours in her 70s. She’s the songwriting genius who wrote “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” on the same day. In recent decades, feminists have begun to reclaim her as a feminist icon. She is an impeccably dressed glamour queen, a business titan whose brand includes her own theme park, a philanthropist whose literacy program has sent free books to millions of children, and on top of all that she helped fund Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine — and then refused to jump the line to get a dose early. She is so beloved that WNYC devoted a full podcast series to investigating how a single figure could be adored by both blue and red states.
As the piece continues, it becomes clear that this last sentence is what really sticks in Grady’s craw. How can Dolly be “adored by both blue and red states” when blue states are populated by people like her and red states are populated by Republicans? America’s universal admiration for Dolly presents the author of the essay with a conundrum: Either Republicans must be better people than she previously thought, or Dolly must be worse.
You can probably guess which of these two conclusions was reached.
Under no circumstances, it seems, can the possibility be admitted that progressives and conservatives might share an uncomplicated love of something that exists independently of their mutual political enmity. Cultural progressivism is, after all, a jealous god, and since it defines all of public life as political warfare, no armistice with the enemy is permitted, even when it comes to music.
For this reason, elite progressives often need constant reassurance that their cultural icons are politically kosher. It’s not enough for celebrities to take one or two progressive positions in public. Dolly is proof of that. You’d think that her longstanding and outspoken advocacy for LGBT people would get her out of jail with Grady, but no. She needs Dolly to sprinkle incense on the altar of blue America, to convince her that any appearance of conservatism she might evince is purely cosmetic: nothing but a reactionary illusion fabricated by her regrettable Tennessee drawl.
Grady’s impatience and intolerance of Dolly’s willingness to love and be loved by red America is palpable throughout the essay. The bad faith on display here, for example, is breathtaking:
. . . as Parton’s 21st-century career revival continues, viewers are willing to see more sinister undertones in her “both-sides-ism.” After all, what do we do when “both sides” includes neo-Nazis and armed insurrectionists waving Confederate flags at the Capitol?
The principle established in this quotation is that Dolly, being from the rural South, should be presumed a QAnon-enraptured racist, hankering after the Army of Northern Virginia, until proven otherwise beyond reasonable doubt. This is offensive and insane. We don’t do this for other celebrities: We don’t assume their sympathy for crimes and atrocities by default, and wait for explicit denouncements from them to redeem their moral standing.
Can we not simply assume that Dolly Parton is not a neo-confederate in the absence of any evidence to the contrary? When her Civil War-themed dinner show, “Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede” was criticized for making light of the Old South and its crimes against black Americans, she renovated it completely and immediately, removing all traces of the Civil War theme and explaining herself thusly:
When they said ‘Dixie’ was an offensive word, I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to offend anybody. This is a business. We’ll just call it The Stampede.’ As soon as you realize that [something] is a problem, you should fix it. Don’t be a dumbass. That’s where my heart is. I would never dream of hurting anybody on purpose.
When then asked the gotcha question of the day about the Black Lives Matter movement, Dolly said, “of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!” Grady’s quite incredible analysis of Dolly’s response concludes that her “actual thoughts on the antebellum nostalgia in which the original attraction trafficked she kept to herself.” Again, you’d think that “of course Black lives matter” weighs pretty heavily against allegations — or even suspicions — of white supremacist “antebelleum nostalgia,” but not in Grady’s eyes.
This progressive politicization of existence is so comprehensive that it often leaves no room for us to shrug our shoulders at the politics of others. This is deeply unfortunate. In a healthy society, we’d only ask about the politics of our neighbors when they, in turn, are asking for our vote. But if to be is to be political, as it is for so many today, then to admire someone is to admire their politics. This is why Dolly Parton so unnerves the politically intoxicated. They’re convinced that the most important thing about her isn’t her lyrics or her music or her theme parks or even her wardrobe, but rather the hidden “R” or “D” that she hides behind the rhinestone veil of her public image. Until they can draw back that veil and make sure once and for all that there isn’t a conservative hiding behind it, these people will never be able to relax and enjoy the music. They’d rather spend their days writing content-free slander about the supposedly sinister silence of apolitical icons. What a way to make a living.