Interesting interview

Mother Jones interviews Tony Kushner. His latest book is Save Your Democratic Soul. Here's part of the interview - it was too good not to put here.

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(from Mother Jones' website)

MJ: Save Your Democratic Citizen Soul! is targeted largely at young people. Are young Americans today insufficiently prepared for political activism?

TK: I think the country is undereducating its young. I think it's a deliberate, designed, malevolent project by the right to destroy public education. People are more easily manipulated when they don't have information. If you ensure that kids grow up without basic reading skills, math skills, and so forth, then you ensure that they can't act effectively.

On the other hand, there will always be a strong sense of injustice among the young. When I wrote Homebody/Kabul, I thought it was time to think more internationally in part because of the IMF and WTO protests, because of all these kids protesting free-market capitalism.

There are a lot of politically active young people, but I feel that we've misled them. I have great admiration for the essayists and writers on the left, but the left decided at some point that government couldn't get it what it wanted. As a result, it's a movement of endless complaint and of a one-sided reading of American history, which misses the important point: Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we're interested in is talking about when government doesn't work.

MJ: When was the last time that a belief in the system paid off?

TK: It was the day they got that fucking Ten Commandments monument out of Alabama. I found that thrilling. With all the blows that the Bush administration has delivered to the separation of church and state -- we have a president who can't stop talking about his relationship to Jesus while he gleefully murders thousands of people -- it turns out that we still kind of get it.

MJ: Your new play, Caroline or Change, looks back on the Civil Rights era through the prism of 1960s Louisiana --

TK: Caroline illustrates one of the ultimate cases in which American democracy achieved something great. I don't see how anyone can read that history and then turn their back on the system -- how anyone can think it's not important who our justices are, who the president is, who's in Congress.

These things, these ideas, these decisions, these elections really do transform people's lives. We're seeing it now, every day: For gay people, the overturning of the sodomy laws is immensely significant. It's why I think politics is so extraordinary.

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.