I am an old Democrat who’s been traveling around doing shows in Republican towns in the Midwest and it’s making me a better person. I stand up on a theater stage and I hum a note and the audience hums it back and I sing “My country ’tis of thee” and by the “thee” they’re singing so beautifully and are thrilled to do it — they thought I was going to do stand-up but here we are singing “America” and they know the words. It’s a Protestant crowd and when Martin Luther launched the Reformation, he substituted congregational singing for Latin liturgy and clerical costumery and now here are a thousand of them singing four-part harmony, no organ, and they love it. We go into the spacious skies and amber waves and da doo ron ron da doo ron ron and the bright golden haze on the meadow and working on the railroad, songs they haven’t sung since grade school, and I know that they believe a lot of trashy stuff that isn’t remotely true and guess what — I DON’T CARE.

I love these people. Maybe they see me as a guy who’s out to tax the pants off them and confiscate guns and teach gender transition to third-graders but guess what — THEY DON’T CARE. I sing “Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord” and they sing it joyfully. Maybe they belong to a big church with an organ the size of a cattle truck and an organist who loves the eclectic and is contemptuous of the standards and here is this old lefty singing “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder” and this is their first chance in decade to sing “How Great Thou Art” and they put their shoulder to it and sing it with evangelical power.

So maybe they voted for the guy with the ducktail who wouldn’t know “Abide with Me” if it bit him in the butt, but it doesn’t matter.