Dolly Parton died this week at 80, and the tributes are pouring in from every direction imaginable. Country fans, Hollywood, LGBT advocates, evangelicals, people who agree on almost nothing else all found something to love in her. That alone tells you something. But the part of her story worth sitting with right now is what she did with the hand she was dealt, and how it stands in stark contrast to a political movement gaining real influence in this country.
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Parton was born into real poverty, the fourth of twelve children in a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains. Her family had nothing. She worked. She wrote songs, she sang, she built a career one small step at a time, and she kept building until she became one of the wealthiest self-made women in American entertainment. She called her success stewardship, something she was responsible for using well, not something she’d earned the right to hoard or something to feel guilty about.
That distinction is missing from the politics of the Democratic Socialists of America, a movement that has gone from fringe curiosity to a real force shaping the Democrat party. Their own membership data tell the story: 80 percent of members over 25 have a bachelor’s degree, over a third have a graduate degree, and yet nearly half report household incomes under $60,000, more than double the national rate for college graduates.
These are people who did what they were told would guarantee stability. It didn’t. Parton faced the same gap between expectation and reality, arguably a far wider one, given where she started, and her answer was to work hard and work smart with what she had. A significant number of DSA members have gone the other way, deciding the entire system is illegitimate and needs to be dismantled rather than accepting the same deal Parton did. Eliminate private insurance. Nationalize major industries. Abolish the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court. Treat success itself as evidence of exploitation.
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Parton came from deeper poverty than most DSA members will ever know, and she never treated the people who succeeded around her as the enemy. She built a children’s hospital wing and donated millions to medical research. She mailed hundreds of millions of free books through her Imagination Library. She paid displaced neighbors’ bills after the 2016 Gatlinburg wildfires. She gave because she had built something to give first, and she never framed that giving as an apology for having succeeded.
The gap between Parton and the DSA isn’t talent or luck, though she had some of both. It’s what you do when the outcome doesn’t match the expectation. Parton’s answer was to work, build, give, and let the results speak. The DSA’s answer, for a growing number of highly credentialed people who feel the deal they were promised never arrived, has been to treat the whole structure as rigged and demand it be replaced rather than adjust their own expectations to match reality.
America just lost someone who proved the first path still works, even for someone who started with absolutely nothing. It would be worth remembering that lesson before we let a very different one define a major political party.
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Image via Picryl.