Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches Politics Quotes

The men Roy lists as his father figures definitely show where his political allegiances lie. Roy is a Conservative with a capital C. One of the main threads tying together all three of the father figures he mentions is that they were intensely anti-communist. Walter Winchell was a columnist, radio, and TV personality who constantly spoke out against communism. J. Edgar Hoover was the first and longtime director of the FBI (some think he also may have been gay), whom the real Roy Cohn assisted in hunting down communists. And there's the biggest communist hater of them all – Joe McCarthy. For more on him, click here.

Martin, Roy, and their allies push and pull behind the scenes in hopes of engineering a conservative Supreme Court. This push was really going on in the 1980s and was in some ways successful: today's Supreme Court is viewed by many as being pretty darn conservative. However, some central issues of the right, like making abortion illegal, have not happened.

Martin hopes that by appointing Republican judges, the conservatives can get their way on certain key issues. In the 1980s, Republicans were against affirmative action, which can be defined as "steps taken to increase the representation of women and minorities in areas of employment, education, and business from which they have been historically excluded" (source). Affirmative action remains a pretty hot political issue. Where do you stand? Is affirmative action a positive step toward righting the wrongs of history? Or is it inherently racist and sexist? What do you think?

Here's a core political debate you still hear today. Liberals and Democrats tend to favor government-sponsored programs to solve the nation's woes, while conservatives and Republicans would prefer to let the free market sort itself out. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the poster boy for the liberal agenda. His Depression era "New Deal" policies were a liberal's dream and a conservative's nightmare. Click here for some Shmoopy thoughts on FDR and the New Deal.

Throughout the play, one of the main points is that everything is politics. Tony Kushner made his mark as a playwright by being the first in many years to make political issues a main focus of his plays. Critic Frank Rich called Angels in America "a searching and radical rethinking of American political drama..." (source).

Despite all his criticism of the way America is being run, Louis is optimistic that the America he envisions is constantly gaining ground. From his point of view, the poor and disenfranchised (women, racial minorities) have inevitably gained more power, despite the resistance they've met from conservatives along the way.

This statement from Louis really offends Belize. Louis isn't trying to say that there's no racism in America; he's trying to get across that it's part of a larger battle, namely of the powerful hoarding power. Do you think Louis has a point? Or is he just being insensitive about centuries of discrimination?

It seems like, to Louis, all religious movements and all the strife over race are really about politics. A battle which he believes "the people" are slowly winning.

Joe refuses Roy's offer to go work in the Justice Department in part because he's just not cool with doing unethical things to protect Roy. Joe hasn't given up on his conservative political values, however. He still feels like the conservative revolution going on in Washington is the correct path for America.

Despite Joe's hardcore conservatism and Louis' equally hardcore liberalism, the two come together at the end of the play.