Tony Kushner on Idealism

Tony Kushner is the author of Angels in America, a play that HBO made into a movie last year. I love Angels in America, and just now while I was bored and couldn't think of anything to do I googled Tony Kushner. Google turned up the following interview, and I thought it was interesting enough to share it.

I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, and was one of few people I knew to argue on his behalf when he decided to run in 2004. I still don't blame him for what happened in 2000 or 2004, but what Mr. Kushner had to say here gave me pause.

Tony Kushner: 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.

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

Tony Kushner: 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.

See the entire interview here.

Postscript, 1/5/05
I googled Tony Kushner again, and this time I found a scene from a play. It's wonderful.
Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy