The Corsair
In a Hyper-Partisan Era, Dolly Parton Alone Transcends Politics
On Dolly Parton’s Post-Politics
Roughly one year ago, I suggested here tongue-in-cheek that Dolly Parton run for Governor of Tennessee, under the banner of whatever party she damn well desired. Tennessee is a very non-diverse, conservative state with little chance of electing a non-Republican statewide any time soon, despite high rural poverty rates that don’t seem to ever improve. 13.6%, according to the last census, live in poverty. Right now, Republicans have the trifecta — the Governor’s office and both chambers of the state legislature. And it is hard to see signs of that changing on the political horizon. 48% lean Republican (as opposed to 36% lean Democrat). It is as solid a red state as one can imagine, geographically. And yet Dolly Parton — nonpartisan — unites everyone in the state, despite her muted but serious progressive social agenda. Make no mistake about it, Dolly is has the work ethic of a capitalist, but her social agenda is a bit more complex.
And her popularity extends beyond the hills! This week her holiday special cracked the Top Ten, reminding us of her continued pop cultural relevance. “Dolly Parton’s Mountain Magic Christmas will likely be have the biggest audience of any holiday movie the broadcast nets are running this year,” writes Rick Porter in The Hollywood Reporter. “After a week of delayed viewing (not including streaming), the film had 6.98 million viewers, up from 6.18 million for its initial airing on Dec. 1.”
Right and left, it seems, are delighted by Dolly Parton. That having been said — what are Dolly’s politics anyway? The answer is not obvious. I struggled, in part, a year ago, to figure it out:
Her actual politics are not without some mystery. Although Parton, a Sevier County native, comes off as more Democrat than Republican, she has never officially endorsed a Presidential candidate. That, of course, is good for business and one of the reasons why she has been culturally relevant for over half a century. Born in a one-room cabin in the Smokey Mountains, Dolly, one of twelve children, performed on local radio and television by the time she was 10 years old. Like Johnny Cash, her songs have always sided with the lower and working classes against the abuses of the arrogant and out-of-touch overclass. And in an interview with Billboard last year, at the height of the pandemic, she affirmed the Black lives Matter movement. “I understand people having to make themselves known and felt and seen,” she told the magazine. “And of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!”
A Governor Dolly Parton could almost certainly make life better for thousands of her left behind constituents. Incumbent Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee has a solidly anti-LGBT agenda. Parton has precisely the opposite view, but she expresses those views in a down-home manner in a way that generally eludes most Democrat candidates campaigning south of the Mason-Dixon line. "Why can't they be as miserable as us heterosexuals in their marriages?" she joked with Australian News Breakfast from Nashville. "Hey, I think love is love and we have no control over that … I think people should be allowed to [marry]," she continued. One could almost imagine such a line, delivered on the campaign trail, gaining traction in the Smokey Mountains.
Of course it is Dolly’s right to the privacy of her vote. Unlike Tucker Carlson or Joe Scarborough, she does not traffic in the world of daily politics, so her ideological privacy ought to be respected. She puts her money, quietly, towards an astonishing amount of philanthropic organizations, helping everyone from the rural poor in her Sevier County to finish high school to research into the Moderna vaccine. Her philanthropic philosophy is to “just give from (her) heart.” And that is what makes her in these incredibly partisan days and nights perhaps the only post-partisan American, a figure that unites both the right and the left in what can only be properly construed as collective admiration.
As an artist, Parton speaks to the poor working class of all races. She is strongly identified with diversity and inclusion, although without wearing those admirable (though sometimes controversial) values on her well-sequined sleeves. And, Trump notwithstanding, who among us is against literacy? Not Dolly’s Imagine Library.
But Dolly will probably not be running for Governor of Tennessee any time soon. And not, dear reader, for lack of political courage or a desire to make loads and loads more money. Parton appears to be giving it away as quickly as she makes it. Further, she has shown quite a bit of political courage — on Black Lives Matter, in LGBT allyship — at the risk of alienating her hometown audience which gave her her career. Dolly Parton is of her rural poor beginnings, and has never forgotten.
It appears that Parton, who has always had a powerful work ethic, believes that those who have much should give much, to lessen inequality and ease human suffering. It seems only fitting that the most post-partisan American would be such a quiet but stalwart warrior in the lessening of human suffering. Parton was delivered to her parents, in 1946, by the legendary mountain “Dr. Thomas.” The fourth child in a family of tobacco farmers, her parents paid for her delivery with a sack of cornmeal. "On a cold, rainy winter day, Dr. Thomas made his way to the Parton’s tiny cabin in Locust Ridge to help mother Avie Lee with the birth of her fourth child,” says the DollyParton.com sitew. “Her father Lee Parton, paid Dr. Thomas with the only payment he had to give, a bag of cornmeal."
Finally, if you are interested, Dolly Parton also recorded lesser-known song on her discography called “Dr. Robert F. Thomas,” because, quite frankly, as wealthy as she is now she never forgot from where she began.
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She'd have my vote!