Dolly Parton: Icons And Institutions

On icons and institutions fading away

At the beginning of 2026, I found myself repeatedly at loggerheads with the MAGA influencers on social media. I disagreed with the performative sadism of making memes and gloating on the internet over people ICE were shooting. I regarded the emerging Iran War as stupid and entirely in service to another people. I also thought the sabre-rattling over Greenland and the subsequent anti-European animosity made gullible dupes of Trump’s supporters.

For that, I was predictably called a Britcuck Europoor, impotently lashing out against the Great Colossus, who went where it liked and did what it pleased. I was ‘Anti-American’.

The thing is, I wasn’t and never have been.

When Dolly Parton died, Donald Trump ordered the Stars and Stripes across the USA to be flown at half-mast. This, I thought, is the America I like—mawkish, perhaps overly sentimental, but also well-meant. I believe Donald Trump would have been saddened to learn that Dolly Parton had died, because, like him, she was an American icon.

As an outsider who has never set foot in the United States (and probably never will), my perception of America comes almost entirely through signs and symbols, personalities, and ‘stars’. In this regard, Dolly Parton was the anti-Trump. Where Trump represents the tough-talking, though amusing, New York sleazeball hustler, Dolly was rhinestone-and-moonshine homeliness and bubbly charm.

It’s how non-Americans want Americans to be; it’s the America we like because it isn’t threatening and signals a benign hegemon who means well. It isn’t ‘radical’ in the same way another icon, John Wayne, wasn’t radical, but a tough and fair dispenser of justice and common sense.

America’s icons tend to be strivers and achievers, despite the forces aligned against them. Dolly Parton, famously, grew up dirt poor in a one-room cabin on the banks of Little Pigeon River, Tennessee. Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Muhammad Ali and Madonna all garnered iconic status as outsiders, regardless of how engineered that status often was.

Woke was a catastrophically poor cultural formula because it fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Americanism, as represented through larger-than-life individuals.

In 2014, as woke was gathering momentum, Dolly Parton appeared at the Glastonbury music festival in England. She was regarded as the ironic act, the act that the feminists and output of the UK’s extreme left education system could laugh at and look down upon. In fact, she brought the house down. For that half hour or so, their cynical, carefully manicured opinions dissolved in an earthy, nostalgia-tinted authenticity that reached ‘under the skin’ of superficial, inorganic dogmas.

In my opinion, Madonna and the rancid message she sent to young women and girls represented an earlier form of woke, more skilful in its message but no less insidious. Dolly Parton, on the other hand, speaks to women as they are, which is why Dolly endured and retained a dignity Madge could only dream of.

America's Toxic Rebrand

In Britain, our icons were born out of long-settled socio-cultural arrangements and institutions. David Attenborough is not a striving go-getter from outside the system; he is the paternalistic voice of God instructing and educating. The fact that British icons also include Queen Elizabeth II, Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill speaks for itself. Even people who embody the rags-to-riches myth, such as Michael Caine, represent class rather than an individual.

We British are drawn to the ‘free soul’ charting their destiny across untamed landscapes and economic possibilities: the less crass, the more wholesome, the better.

There’s poetic symbolism in David Attenborough and Clint Eastwood reflecting the preferred icons of their respective nations, and both being truly ancient in terms of years. The institutions have decayed and hollowed; the subversion is complete; the lonesome, self-reliant wanderer of the High Plains will also die.

Nothing emerges to replace either. We’re left chasing an echo of a dream.

Perhaps Donald Trump once dreamed of leading a movement where Dolly Partons surrounded him and not Howard Lutniks and Mark Levins. Perhaps ordering the flags of the nation to be lowered for an old country singer is an implicit acknowledgement of it.

In Britain, Bulldog populists stand dumbstruck as the very institutions they look to for succour and meaning spit venom in their faces. As the icons fade and the dreams become harder to grasp, we find ourselves looking for islands in streams in the desert of data centres, asylum seeker HMOs, and Turkish barber shops.