THE LAUDED AUTHOR, PLAYWRIGHT, AND SCREENWRITER DISCUSSES DEMOCRACY AND MORE
AUG 24
By Dr. Joshua Sherman
Tony Kushner won the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award® for his play Angels in America, as well as an Emmy Award® for his adaptation of that play into a mini-series, directed by Mike Nichols. Among his other accolades, Kushner has been nominated for a Grammy® Award (for his work on the musical Caroline, or Change) and is a four-time Oscar nominee for his collaborations with Steven Spielberg (which include Munich, Lincoln, West Side Story, and The Fablemans). In a nearly hour-long discussion, Tony and I talked about democracy, fascism, McCarthyism, “cancel culture,” social media, Trump, Biden, Lincoln, leadership, and forgiveness. Here are excerpts from our conversation:
Sherman: At the Authors Guild WIT Literary Festival in September, you're going to be talking with Rachel Maddow about “Democracy in America Today.” I don't think it's possible to really discuss democracy in America without addressing both freedom of speech and freedom of the press. As I prepared for this interview, I found myself—a member of the press—sort of tiptoeing around what I could or couldn't ask you. I think a lot of that hesitancy is a direct result of the cancel culture that we live in today, in which there's no room for mistakes and no path to forgiveness.
Arthur Miller famously referenced and commented on McCarthyism in his play The Crucible. The political specifics are very different, obviously, but today, we once again are living in a society in which free speech is threatened, books are banned, accusations are made, and voices are silenced on BOTH sides of the political spectrum.
What I really want to ask is: What is your responsibility in calling out hypocrisy on both the right and the left? And how do you, Tony Kushner, navigate a moment in time in which a single wrong comment from you can erase all of the important work you've done, potentially by people who are on the same political side as you?
Kushner: Very nicely put. But I have some problems with a couple of your premises.
I don't believe that there's any equivalency between the threats to free speech, freedom of the press, and other important bulwarks of democracy, that are coming from the left—and the threats that are coming from the right.
If we're talking about “cancel culture,” which is a term I'm not very comfortable with, you're talking about a group of phenomena that are interconnected, that live, to a certain extent, very much on the internet and have to do with a whole host of very complicated progressive political agendas. When you talk about the threat to democracy from the right, you're talking about the fact that one of our two political parties has become an openly declared fascist political organization.
I won't pretend that there isn't a disturbing degree of censoriousness and vindictiveness on the left. One thing that we know about the internet is that it brings out certain problematic aspects of human beings congregating. The anonymity of it. It’s different than if we were in a room together. Certainly, with Twitter or any of the text-based social media platforms, it's very easy to generate a great deal of anger or a rush to judgment. It's hard to be nuanced. It looks like it's a conversation, but it's not really a conversation. It turns into a many-tentacled thing where there are chains upon chains, and everybody's sort of interacting and speaking to one another, but not necessarily speaking with the same level of experience. There are things that are scary about that, and there are things that are worrisome to me about that. But a lot of what feels weird or scary to me about the anger of people younger than me on the progressive side of things is simply unfamiliar to me. Some of it feels to me like it's very new. I think that young people are investigating certain avenues of human organization that were, in part, opened up by people of my generation. And we, in turn, were following roads that were opened up by people who came before us.
I always think about John Lewis during the Occupy Wall Street movement when he was in Atlanta. There was a huge crowd of young people who did this slightly Monty Pythonesque thing. They didn't have a permit, so they couldn't have an audio speaker or amplifier. One person would say something, and then everybody would sort of repeat what the person would yell, and they became like a human megaphone. John Lewis came to speak to these very young people, and they were disrespectful. He got up to speak, and one young person stood up and said, “Why should we be listening to you?” Then everybody goes, “Why should we be listening to you?” They got so cacophonous that John Lewis waited it out a little while, and then he said, “Thank you very much for having me.” He left, and some reporter came running up and said, “Isn't it horrible the way they treated you? I mean, you're John Lewis!” And he was absolutely not going to fall for it. He said, “I am not going to criticize people protesting economic injustice in this country, where there's so much economic injustice. I wish them well, and I'm with them.”
I learned a lesson that day: Who wants to be the old fart saying, “Oh, my God, this is so terrible?” Anything new is going to be difficult. I guess what I'm trying to say is, I see a lot of good coming out of all this. But, I have my frustrations. I have no social media accounts at all, which has made things a little bit easier for me.
But as a writer, I have to believe that my only job is to try and find the truth, which is the hardest thing on earth to do. I'm aware of the fact that there are many obstacles between me and anything that feels like it might have some real relationship to something that could be called “true,” whatever that means. It's so hard to get past all the traps and walls and the things that stand between me and the truth, many of which are internally generated. I have to try and stay true to that purpose, and I can't worry about how people are going to react.
I'm not so naïve as to believe that I'm a person of such profound goodwill and profound decency that I couldn't say anything that could cause harm. There's a great possibility that some of the things that I say are going to cause harm. There are people who don't write or don't speak because they'd rather be silent than run the risk of causing harm. I made the decision a long time ago that I wanted to make my living by writing and speaking. And writing and speaking are acts. As soon as we act, we absolutely run the risk of making mistakes and causing harm. If you really screw up, you live with the consequences, you try and correct your course, and you use the response of other people to correct it. I guess that's my feeling about it.
Sherman: In May of 1993, you were interviewed by Charlie Rose and discussed your Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Angels in America and the “villain,” Roy Cohn. You commented, and this is a quote: “At the time that he died of AIDS, I was moved in a way I never expected to be moved by Roy Cohn. I felt a certain sense of sorrow and grief for him, even though he's a person that I had detested most of my life. And I was kind of upset at the way that he was discussed in the press at the time that he died, because I thought that there was a great deal of homophobia and homophobic gloating over the fact that he had died of AIDS. In a certain sense, his dying of this disease made him a part of the gay and lesbian community, even if we don't really want him to be a part of our community.”
I think that quote is incredibly profound, because it demonstrates your ability to find humanity in everyone—even in those who couldn't share more different beliefs than you. One of the major themes of Angels in America is forgiveness, and that forgiveness is the only way forward. Over 30 years later, in a more recent interview with Walter Isaacson on Amanpour & Co., you spoke about your high school years and the work it took for integration to happen in Louisiana. You were not only inspiring, but optimistic, in stating, “Change can happen—if we work at it.”
At this point, how do you think we can get both sides, left and right, to even begin to have a conversation about forgiveness, about reconciliation, and moving forward—particularly if both sides just want to silence the other? And how do we give a voice to the majority of Americans, who are probably the silent center because they are taking the position you just described in which “they don’t write or don’t speak?”
Kushner: There's actual, literal book banning going on all over this country right now. None of it is from the left. There are obviously times when a person on the right will show up at a college campus, and there'll be a lot of demonstrating and screaming and yelling, and sometimes the person is canceled or the speech is canceled. I don't support that. I do not think that you should cancel speeches. I am unhappy when I hear that in a college class, students get upset about a particular point of view that's being expressed in a classroom and say, “This mustn't be taught.” I have a degree of impatience—that I'll admit to—with the idea that to hear certain arguments is “traumatizing.” I don't deny at all the existence of trauma. Trauma is a real thing. And some people are severely damaged, and even hearing about something can cause them enormous psychic pain. But most college students, I hope, are not in that situation. I believe in the open and free exchange of ideas.
I grew up in a small town in Louisiana. I have a very hard time being in touch now with some of the people that I grew up with who have become Trump voters. All I want to do is scream at them. I'm so angry at them. I thought Americans, even conservative Americans, would never abandon the idea of the rule of law and democracy. I think they've gone off the deep end. And I have to do some kind of fighting inside myself all the time to think, “Okay, how is it that I can make common cause with these people, at least to the extent that we can be citizens of the same country?” Or am I saying that I don't want to be a citizen of a democracy that includes them? I know they don't want to be citizens of a democracy that includes me, unless I'm willing to give up my rights as a gay man, unless I'm willing to say that women should not be able to have control of their own bodies, and so on. Am I saying the same about them? It's a very difficult question.
In terms of what I'll be talking about with Rachel, I’m working on making a film with Steven Spielberg based on the first season of “Ultra” and on her book Prequel. As is true of Rachel and her podcast and in everything she does, working on this is really raising very complicated and very painful, fundamental questions about democracy.
The House of Atreus cycle is one of my favorite plays. There are multiple generational cycles of violence. At the end of the whole thing, Orestes comes to a temple, and the Furies that are after him—because he's killed his mother, Clytemnestra— have to be bribed into letting him go. There's this unsatisfying end to this thing. It's kind of anti-dramatic. It feels anticlimactic, but it's one of the most profound works of art I think we have, because it says that there is no perfect justice in the world. And that is one thing that democracy is always saying to us: If you have a form of government that's rooted in the “demos”—“in the people”—there's got to be a faith in people with all of their screwy, twisted, psychological, ideological formations and malformations. And trying to come to terms with that and trying to share a collective space, that’s the struggle. I don't know if that's an answer in any way to what you're asking.
Sherman: It's an answer to a lot of questions, right? There is no great answer. There is no perfect justice. But, I have to ask: You alluded to no longer being able to find common ground with people from your hometown that you were connected with for decades. Is there really no chance for you to rebuild by way of commonality rather than focusing on what's different?
Kushner: I'm absolutely certain that with my friends in Lake Charles, I can't reach them. I've tried. But they've all decided that every single thing that I believe to be a fact, is a lie. And I don't know that I have any way of getting to them. My hope is that I will be able to go back to the kind of contentious, but at least relatively open, conversations and arguments with people that I was used to in the years before we arrived at this horrible place. Right now, I'm not interested, really. I do love these people. I certainly don't wish them ill.
Sherman: Let’s talk about leadership. America is a representative democracy in which people elect officials to govern on their behalf. What is the responsibility of a leader in a representative democracy? Is it a leader's role to represent the people and follow their wishes, or is it a leader's role to have a vision, correct injustice, and change course to what he/ she/they believe is a more righteous and just direction?
Kushner: When I was working on Lincoln, I read a lot of Lincoln books, and I began to realize that there were many opposing camps that Lincolnists could be divided into. One of the main ones was exactly this question: Was Lincoln’s genius in leading the people and in getting the people to go where he wanted them to go? Or was it in following the people, having a sense of where the people were going, and facilitating that journey? There are many other ways that Lincoln can be divided up, but that was a big one.
The answer is, in a sense, both. Frederick Douglass said this about him in the 1875 speech: “He understood us better than we understood ourselves.” I think Lincoln had a deep understanding of human beings in general and of Americans. I think he was a great genius, which is not a word that I use lightly at all. There aren't many of them. He had a great genius and a profound moral, political, and economic vision. He adhered to it with incredible fidelity, and in his own way, proselytized for it. But he wasn't an ideologue. He wasn't a zealot. He didn't have a program that he shoved down everybody's throats.
It's very clear when you look at Lincoln’s second inaugural address, especially, and at all of his writings and at the way he governed the country during Civil War, this was somebody who had a very clear sense of what was right, what was wrong, what was democratic, and what wasn't. And he absolutely set goals, creating abstract phenomena that he articulated with such power that they became almost material things towards which the country could aspire. For instance, the idea of “Union” was so much of what he used to knit the country together to fight the Civil War. He knew that the war was about slavery. He always knew that, but he also knew that he was going to have a hard time getting farm boys in Wisconsin—who had never seen a slave, a Black person, or anybody other than other farm boys in Wisconsin—to come to Gettysburg and fight. But he created a kind of sacred idea of the mystic chords of memory from every patriot, and this idea of Union. There’s a great thing that he said to his cabinet. I used it in Lincoln. He wasn't entirely sure that he had a solid constitutional footing for the Emancipation Proclamation. He was using the Contraband Laws, these maritime laws, from the early part of the 19th century. He didn't free slaves by saying, “Slavery is bad.” He used a very specific set of legal precedents that came from the seizure of property on boats belonging to hostile foreign powers to free slaves, and he issued the proclamation. He did it in 1863, and people said, “This is tyrannical. You're doing something that the president doesn't have the power to do.” He said, “Well, I don't think that's true, and the courts exist to decide that. They'll certainly let us know what they think of it. But more important than that, I'm going to do this, and the people will let me know if I had the right to do it, because if they don't agree, I'll be out of office in 1864. They'll vote me out.”
The country was not ready as a whole.
Huge portions of the Union did not want slaves emancipated. They were terrified of the idea that 8 million people were suddenly going to be free citizens of the United States with different colored skins than white people’s. That was terrifying to them, and they hated it, and some of them were stone cold racists. Lincoln said, “Well, but we're still going to do it. We’re going to do this thing, because it's the right thing to do.”
In that sense, he was leading the country where it may have not been so willing to go. And they could have voted him out. But, they didn't. Lincoln began a process of transformation in this country. His assassination did terrible damage to that process, unfortunately, but—to answer your question—I think it's both.
Tony Kushner and Rachel Maddow will be discussing “Democracy in America Today” at the Authors Guild Foundation’s WIT Literary Festival at 10 a.m. on Saturday, September 28.
The Authors Guild Foundation’s 3rd Annual WIT Literary Festival is Friday to Sunday, September 27 to 29, at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox.
The lineup:
Friday, September 27:1:30 p.m. Jennifer Egan & Joseph O'Neill 3:30 p.m. Emily Wilson & Stephen Greenblatt
Saturday, September 28:10 a.m. Tony Kushner & Rachel Maddow 1 p.m. Ruth Simmons & Sherrilyn Ifill3 p.m. Cathy Park Hong & Sayed Kashua
Sunday, September 29:9:30 a.m. Jamaica Kincaid & Sandra Guzmán 11:30 a.m. Ruth Reichl & Monique Truong2 p.m. Marie Arana & Luis Alberto Urrea
Tickets on sale July 24 • authorsguild.org/event/wit-festival
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