Bruce Springsteen & Losing Liberal America
From the land of hope and dreams to our city in ruins.
I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but I prefer when entertainers wade into politics. I always have. Sentiments like “shut up and dribble” or “stick to acting” always revealed more to me about the person saying it (derogatory). Of course, not all entertainment should be overtaken by politics, but attempts to entirely decouple it from things like music, film, or sports have always struck me as short-sighted, if not impossible, and also kind of fundamentally un-American (though I realize now that it wholly depends on your idea of America, and much of that insistence is about preserving the status quo).
From the perspective of political messaging, which I can’t help but continually dissect, attempting to separate culture from politics is not only myopic, but arguably borders on political malpractice in 2025. With the decline of traditional media and legacy journalism, viral algorithmic culture has filled the void and created the present atmosphere. Hence: We need a Joe Rogan of the left! How do we reach young men!? etc etc.
Andrew Breitbart, an early purveyor of right-wing digital content, famously said that “politics is downstream from culture” and that to change politics, you must first change culture. He was critical in getting that ball rolling during the blog era, and his influence has had serious legs. It’s a shame that only one of our two political parties has taken this idea seriously, and it’s not the one I would’ve picked.
In 2018, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie told The Guardian that Steve Bannon (former employee of Breitbart and Trump’s chief strategist in 2016) deployed the Breitbart Doctrine in “hacking” the Facebook algorithm by psychographic profile, using politically-adjacent cultural signposts to drive swing voters into information silos through paid content targeting. Wylie described a conversation between he and Bannon:
“‘Politics was like fashion,’ [Wylie] told Bannon. [Bannon] got it immediately. [Bannon] believes in the whole Andrew Breitbart doctrine that politics is downstream from culture… And fashion trends are a useful proxy for that. Trump is like a pair of Uggs, or Crocs, basically. So how do you get from people thinking ‘Ugh. Totally ugly’ to the moment when everyone is wearing them? That was the inflection point he was looking for.”
This strategy dominates to this day. This is how we got trad wives, the manosphere, MAHA, and more recently, a similarly positioned right-wing conservation movement.
Bruce Springsteen broke through both the left and right algorithms this week thanks to comments on the first night of his European tour in Manchester, to which the president — hardly ever one to be baited — responded with this:
I can’t be the only one who feels like conservatives experience renewed anger around Bruce Springsteen’s political views every few years, even though they have seemingly never changed. My earliest memory of this was in 2004, when Bruce lent No Surrender to John Kerry as his campaign song.
It stuck with me because this was the first election I really understood, and the revelation that celebrities could use their stages to stand up to someone as important as the president (of the alleged free world!), in protest of a war they correctly believed was bullshit, was genuinely inspirational to my naive little 9th grade self.
It wasn’t just Bruce though. My mom is a standard issue boomer classic rock fan, and used her daily school pickups to take on the project of introducing me to all “her” music. Bruce, Neil Young, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Grateful Dead, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, The Eagles, The Kinks, The Beatles, any group of 3-5 men starting with The.
My mom was never an activist per se, but voting was a non-negotiable and we were a family of news consumers, in a household that included my mom’s parents, regular cable news watchers. Current events were heavily featured in family conversations (as were money and religion, which I was told are actually not topics for out-of-home discourse, only to later become my top 3 preferred topics). Amidst the Iraq war and idealistic liberal organizing like Rock The Vote, I was legitimately captivated as my mom — who had been around my age during the Vietnam War — shared how Ohio was written after the band saw photos of Kent State students shot by the National Guard while protesting. That Sympathy For The Devil was a history lesson. Sweet Home Alabama was a pro-Jim Crow response to Southern Man.
That art could be used to make a historically meaningful statement was new to me. The messages in my musical repertoire had previously been limited to sentiments like “if you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends” (actually a key lesson) and “I want it that way.” (Which way? They never specified… men.)
I wish W. Bush seemed as threatening to me now as he did in 2004, but otherwise, the line between who I was then and now looks like a straight one. My job is to meme the news and I devoted a chapter of my book Democracy In Retrograde to the power of art and creativity as a form of civic engagement, complete with a history of protest songs inspired by my mom’s lyrical explanations.
…This brings me back to The Boss. The following may read as a criticism, but I hope it’ll be received as the observation I intend it to be, because while Bruce may be emblematic of a certain shift, this is certainly not just about him, or even his fault. I write these observations as a fan.
The cultural decline of liberal America and the Democratic Party base can be traced along the trajectory of Bruce Springsteen’s public image. This first struck me when he released his endorsement of VP Kamala Harris.
Face pulled taut by undoubtedly the best plastic surgeons, the legendary artist whose fame was anchored in the sounds of a factory foreman’s whistle and whose anthology overflows with protest lyrics, sits in an empty diner that suggests rural Pennsylvania. (I’m sure Bruce Springsteen-the-person enjoys eating in such a diner, but I would also bet Bruce Springsteen-the-celebrity enjoys 10 times as many meals in Michelin restaurants these days.) He reads an anodyne, campaign-vetted script, staring down the lens of what is clearly a very expensive camera. All the edges softened.
As recently as 2012, Springsteen sang of sending robber barons straight to hell, and while I believe that he truly believes in the promise of America and wants the American dream for all, Bruce is debatably a billionaire. Yes, he is certainly a more economically productive (non-exploitative) potential billionaire than some others I could name, and I don’t begrudge his success whatsoever, but you simply can’t represent any sort of paradigm for the common man if you have multiple homes and rarely fly commercial.
Look at who has fled the reliable liberal/Democratic base. It’s a lot of those rust belt voters who got screwed by globalization and a political system that never even lightly contemplated sending the robber barons to jail, let alone to hell. As the college-educated elite pulled further away both ideologically and physically (rarely overlapping in cultural spaces), the college-educated DC Democrats continued to orient their electoral strategy around voters they were losing touch with, but who they couldn’t stop seeing as critical to their political success.
It’s those men who could’ve kept viewing Springsteen as a model and thus, a convincing political surrogate. Instead, they looked to guys like Joe Rogan because, at just the right time, podcasters and influencers eclipsed A-list celebrity, and he was in their ears acknowledging that their plight and skepticism were legitimate. I don’t believe Rogan is less elitist or more in touch with average people, except when it comes to a certain set of cultural aesthetics. You’re not an everyman if you’re sitting ringside at UFC with the president (of the alleged free world?) and the richest man in the country, no matter how many discredited scientific theories you’re willing to entertain just because “a lot of people are saying it.”
How did this happen? It’s a complicated question, but there have been signs for at least a decade. Lifelong Bruce fans living on blue collar wages were locked out of tours by Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing, so seats that could once be purchased for $75 now cost hundreds or thousands. (There is, of course, a frustrating irony in the Biden admin’s attempts to fix precisely this.) It wasn’t just the unaffordable tickets, though the similarly unaffordable tickets for Bruce on Broadway didn’t help, coupled with the elitist whiff of a Broadway run itself. Then there was the podcast with post-presidency Obama, a partnership rumored to be worth millions, with glossy production that projected a somewhat removed “back when I was poor” energy. (Listen, I love them both, this is just my perception of *the* perception.)
This isn’t a matter of blame. It’s not Bruce Springsteen’s job to remain an authentic blue collar symbol so as to not betray how distant his preferred political party has become. It’s the job of a political party and its elected officials to represent their constituents. And one message that its constituents sent loud and clear is that the old guard of liberal celebrities are not the persuasive or effective surrogates they once were. You could argue that they were a liability in 2024.
I give Springsteen a lot of credit for his comments in Manchester. I’m not one to reject a good intention, even if it’s like that girl in the West Village article said, “You can have a Cartier Love bracelet and still care about immigrant rights.” A nice sentiment, if not rather 2006ish given how things have devolved. More importantly, that limousine liberal vibe is a deeply unhelpful alignment and should not be allowed anywhere near the Democratic Party proper, or their campaigns, for the foreseeable future.
If celebrities want to get political, their artistic medium has always been, and will always be, the most effective and timeless message.
Interesting and important take IMO, but at this juncture I will take anyone and everyone from every walk of life speaking out against the current administration. You never know who is going to hear it, take it to heart and learn from it. I think we need more artists speaking out and writing protest songs and making other sorts of protest art, not less!!
I think that using our voices and presence are the most important actions we can take at this time. I respect everyone who does so. Criticizing a rock star for doing so because they live a privileged life and are using their First Amendment right to defend our democracy is a misplaced and possibly damaging criticism. I DO believe the Democrats need to update their approach but until they do we need ALL the voices we can get to reach as many people as possible.