What Democrats can learn from Dolly Parton
Rejecting unpopular labels costs nothing and helps to sustain durable support for your causes.
In 2022, Dolly Parton said she would "rather pass a kidney stone" than "get political." The next thing she said was extremely political: "I want us to send our love and hope to our brothers and sisters in Ukraine. So why don't we just dedicate this entire show to them, and pray for peace?"
Throughout her life, Dolly bristled at being labeled a feminist; there are countless permutations of her expressing discomfort with the term, but this 2019 quote in The Guardian most succinctly captures the nuance:
I mean, I must be if being a feminist means I'm all for women, yes. But I don't feel I have to march, hold up a sign or label myself. I think the way I have conducted my life and my business and myself speaks for itself. I don't think of it as being feminist. It's not a label I have to put on myself. I'm just all for gals.
That same year, she dropped the word "Dixie" from "Dixie Stampede" without making a fuss. The year after, she told Billboard, "Of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!" This last was a rare deviation from her usual policy: "I’m all about living an example rather than preaching it."
One label Dolly happily embraced was "Christian," though she was always clear that she didn't want to "shove it down people's throats." Perhaps ironically, perhaps not – Dolly did not attend church, but she did pray.
"Every single day, before I do anything," she told drag icon RuPaul, "I wake up and I thank God for the night and ask Him to bless the day and to bring all the right things. And just to guide me, lead me. And I always pray that He’ll let me uplift mankind and glorify Him."
A faith-centered eulogy in The New Yorker wonders "what it says about Christianity that deeply good people like Dolly find no home in Christian communities." As James Talarico has become famous for pointing out, too little of Christ's teachings are reflected in modern Christianity. Too often, sermons on peace and compassion have been replaced by bloodthirsty tirades about giving Americans "permission to hate again." The church, like so many American institutions, has been utterly corrupted by the will to power.
But something is happening right now in American politics and society writ large. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that we could well look back on this as an era of massive political realignment. A coalitional upheaval on the scale of the New Deal or the Southern Strategy. Whether it's the Epstein files, the Iran War, data centers, or ALPRs – people are fed up with being lied to. You see it in polls, but you also see it in the white-hot rage of ordinary citizens showing up at city council meetings, demanding answers from the elected leaders who, under cover of darkness, signed their community's privacy away to Flock Safety.
The people have had enough with the rich and powerful violating the public trust, secure in the knowledge that they've rigged the system to ensure they will never face consequences. And I think these transgressions will result in a lot of people crossing party lines to deliver a landslide for whichever party can most credibly address those concerns. In theory, this should be an opportunity available to Democrats and Republicans alike – but let's be serious.
The 2026 and 2028 elections are a moment to run up the score. To make the result too big to rig, sure. But just as important, to permanently excise these freaks from the halls of power. To lock up those who have broken the law and let us mourn the countless lives destroyed and turned upside-down by this catastrophic presidency. Now is not the time to pause the game, navigate to the Settings menu, and put the game on hard mode by embracing unpopular labels like "socialist."
It is my personal opinion that a socialist, like a feminist, is a perfectly admirable thing to be. But, like many words, "socialism" means different things to different people. It is one thing for community organizers and Twitch streamers to call themselves socialist. But when a politician calls themselves a socialist, they open themselves up to uncharitable comparisons to any person throughout history who has described themselves using that word. I can think of exactly one politician who is talented enough and popular enough to overcome this self-imposed disadvantage.
This critique also applies to Democrats who are so desperate to be labeled as "moderate" or "centrist" that they throw their values out the window.
When you allow yourself to be summarized with a single word, you cast yourself as a character in a story that someone else is writing. This is something that Dolly Parton understood when she rejected the label of "feminist," even though by any sensible definition of the word she obviously was one. What read to audiences as effortless charm was, in fact, incredibly practiced, strategic behavior. The jiu jitsu she performed in front of cameras was to weaponize the audience's assumptions about how media savvy a woman who looked and talked this way could possibly be.
As Radiolab and "Dolly Parton's America" host/producer Jad Abumrad put it:
"This is a woman who created a several-hundred-million-dollar media empire mining stories of her past. She used humor and charm to control every interview. If a male talk-show host made a joke about her figure, she’d make an even better joke about it. She was always two steps ahead of you. She never allowed herself to be a part of a story of which she was not the author."
For decades, Republicans have weaponized America's cultural memory of the Cold War to menace unambiguously good public programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance and, yes, even Dolly Parton's Imagination Library. They have made Democrats and the programs they support part of a story in which they are not they author.
Republicans call any attempt to build a functioning society a dark communist/socialist plot, whether it's educating our children to not letting people die of preventable disease. The fact that Republicans have made and will continue to make these bad-faith arguments doesn't mean we should give up on fighting for a better world (cough cough, Amy Acton, cough cough).
But maybe we should try not holding the door open for them to make their bad-faith attacks by describing ourselves with labels that are chum in the water for these ridiculous advertisements – which I think are, unfortunately, very effective.
Jon Ossoff is doing a great job, in my opinion. This is just an example of the utter bullshit being piped into living rooms across the country.
