Dolly Parton Spent 50 Years Refusing to Be a Political Weapon. The Scene Made Her One in a Week.
Betsy Phillips is right that renaming the airport for Dolly is a rare and lovely moment of Tennessee agreement. Then she spends the rest of the column arguing that the agreement proves conservatives are frauds. Dolly declined the nation's highest honor three times to avoid being used exactly this way.
Start where Phillips starts, because she starts somewhere beautiful. Nashville at night from a descending plane really does look like rhinestones on black velvet, and naming that airport for Dolly Parton really is the rare idea that everyone in this state, left and right, can raise a glass to at the same time. She is right that it feels good to share reality with people you usually argue with. She is right that Dolly earned it. For about three paragraphs, the column is exactly as generous as its subject.
Then it can't help itself.
She found unity and reached for a knife
Having noticed that conservatives loved Dolly too, Phillips does not sit with the nice thing. She turns it into an indictment. The fact that Republicans are grieving a woman who loved gay people, gave books to kids who "didn't earn them," and sang about how hard it is to be a woman becomes, in her hands, proof that Tennessee conservatives are either hypocrites or secret liberals showing "their true colors."
Read the move slowly, because it is the whole column. Conservatives love Dolly. Dolly held some progressive positions. Therefore conservatives secretly hold those positions, and their politics are a lie. That is not an argument. It is a syllogism with a missing middle, and the missing middle is a simple, human thing Phillips cannot seem to allow: you can love a person without adopting their platform.
Loving someone is not endorsing them
People are not policy briefs, and affection is not agreement. A conservative can treasure Dolly Parton's warmth, her wit, her staggering generosity, and her voice, while disagreeing with her about any number of political questions. That is not hypocrisy. That is the ordinary grace of a functioning human being, the ability to love someone you don't line up with. Most people manage it every Thanksgiving.
Phillips treats that capacity as a contradiction to be exposed. But it is the opposite. It is the exact thing her own column celebrated for three paragraphs before it soured: the ability of people who disagree to stand in the same room and love the same thing. She had the insight in her hands. She just could not resist crushing it to score the point.
The receipts Phillips left out
If Dolly were the quiet progressive the column implies, she had five decades and a hundred microphones to say so. She did the opposite, on purpose, over and over.
- She declined the Presidential Medal of Freedom three times, twice from Trump and once from Biden, explaining, "if I take it, I'll be doing politics, so I'm not sure." She turned down the nation's highest civilian honor from both parties to avoid being claimed by either.
- She wrote "World on Fire" in 2023, a plague-on-both-houses song aimed at "greedy politicians, present and past," who "wouldn't know the truth if it bit 'em." Not a left anthem. A pox on the whole business.
- She shut down Elizabeth Warren's campaign for using "9 to 5" at rallies, and she happily recorded with Kid Rock. She refused to be anyone's mascot, in either direction.
Phillips reads Dolly's charity as coded progressivism. But Dolly never coded it that way. She rooted it in her faith and her Smoky Mountain childhood, not in a party. Giving books to children and showing up for flood victims faster than the government are not Democratic policy positions. They are Christian ones, and Appalachian ones, and Dolly's own. Reading them as secretly-left is not seeing her more clearly. It is seeing her less clearly, through a lens that cannot register a traditional woman doing traditional good.
Where Phillips is right
She is right that Dolly's kindness was, in the truest sense, not neutral. Loving people the state was busy legislating against, in the years it was doing so, was a stand, and it cost Dolly nothing to duck it and she didn't duck it. Credit where it's due: Phillips sees that Dolly's warmth had a spine. That part is fair, and it is the best paragraph in her column.
But "her kindness had convictions" is a different claim from "therefore she was on my team and so are the conservatives who miss her." The first is true and worth saying. The second is the thing Dolly spent her whole life declining to let anyone say about her.
Why it matters
For one week, Tennessee agreed on something, and the agreement was about a woman who made a career, and a faith, out of refusing to divide people. The right response to that was to let it be what it was. Instead the column used the moment of unity to explain that the other half of the state doesn't really mean it, doesn't really know itself, and is loving Dolly by accident. That is how you take the one thing everyone agrees on and turn it back into the thing everyone fights about. Dolly knew better. "You don't have to use it like a weapon," she said of belief, "when it could be a tool."
Dolly Parton spent fifty years refusing to be anyone's political weapon. She managed it through Trump, Biden, Warren, and Kid Rock. She could not survive one week of tributes without a columnist picking her up and swinging.
What you can do
Rename the airport. Raise the glass. And when you're told that the conservatives grieving Dolly Parton are frauds who don't understand their own hearts, remember that the woman herself turned down the highest honor in the country, twice from one party and once from the other, precisely so no one could do to her what is being done to her now. Honor her by refusing to make her a weapon. She'd have liked that better than the airport.