Tony Kushner Interview in Mother Jones

Excerpt:
MJ: What about the Democratic Party? Can it effectively oppose Bush?

TK: I have said this before, and I'll say it again: Anyone that the Democrats run against Bush, even the appalling Joe Lieberman, should be a candidate around whom every progressive person in the United States who cares about the country's future and the future of the world rallies. Money should be thrown at that candidate. And if Ralph Nader runs -- if the Green Party makes the terrible mistake of running a presidential candidate -- don't give him your vote. Listen, here's the thing about politics: It's not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.

The GOP has developed a genius for falling into lockstep. They didn't have it with Nixon, but they have it now. They line up behind their candidate, grit their teeth, and help him win, no matter who he is.

MJ: You're saying progressives are undone by their own idealism?

TK: The system isn't about ideals. The country doesn't elect great leaders. It elects fucked-up people who for reasons of ego want to run the world. Then the citizenry makes them become great. FDR was a plutocrat. In a certain sense he wasn't so different from George W. Bush, and he could have easily been Herbert Hoover, Part II. But he was a smart man, and the working class of America told him that he had to be the person who saved this country. It happened with Lyndon Johnson, too, and it could have happened with Bill Clinton, but we were so relieved after 12 years of Reagan and Bush that we sat back and carped.

In a certain sense, Bush was right when he called the anti-war demonstrations a "focus group." We went out on the street and told him that we didn't like the war. But that was all we did: We expressed an opinion. There was no one in Congress to listen to us because we were clear about why they couldn't listen. Hillary Clinton was too compromised, or Chuck Schumer -- and God knows they are. But if people don't pressure them to do better, we're lost.

MJ: Is there a tension between the more analytic, complaint-oriented side of your personality, of your work -- it's everywhere in your plays -- and this more pragmatic view of politics?

TK: I think what one has to do is to ask oneself, "Do you want to have agency in your own time?" If you really believe that it's your place to leave the world a better place than it was when you arrived, then how do you get the power? In this country, the most powerful country on earth, you get it by voting the right people into power. There are means of getting the power out of the hands of the very rich and the very wicked. It still flabbergasts me that people didn't see this during the last presidential election. We had had 12 years of Reagan and Bush to prepare us for this outcome. It couldn't have been clearer who we were dealing with. George W. Bush was -- is -- a little robot programmed by his daddy to punish Saddam Hussein and get as much money for the petrochemical bandits. It's absolutely jaw-dropping that Democrats saw that and decided instead that they wanted to send a message to their own party that they weren't happy with it for some relatively minor offense. Why didn't we turn out in vast numbers for Gore? Why did we vote for Ralph Nader or not at all? We would absolutely not be in Iraq today if we had a Democratic president in the White House, and I don't need to know any more than that.

Read the rest here.

My own position is a little different. As noted in a previous post, IF Bush is comfortably ahead here in Louisiana, and IF Nader is running, then Ralph stands a good chance of getting my vote. This is in itself pragmatic: if the Democrat is clearly losing (i.e., more than the margin of error in several reputable polls) then why waste a vote there, when you can help, say, the Green Party as it seeks to reach the matching funds threshold? Kushner notes accurately that politics is NOT seeking a utopian ideal, but I say politics DOES imply putting good ideas into the realm of public debate. And there are MANY progressive ideas that, with the right financial backing, could turn heads--especially heads within the Democratic Party. The conservative elements within the Party (i.e., the DLCers) need us as much as we need them. And we helped them take the White House with Clinton. It's time the DLCers played ball, and got behind WHOEVER wins the Democratic nomination...

But that might be merely wishful thinking on my part.