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New York Times
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Bruce Springsteen Will Never Surrender to Donald Trump
Since the 1980s Bruce Springsteen has been writing songs that emphasized, even romanticized, a polyglot vision of America and what it means to be an American. That vision is, broadly speaking, an updated version of New Deal America: one that recognizes not only the dignity and pride of honest labor but also the importance of respecting our differences, whether they are based on culture, gender, ethnicity or race. It's a vision of unity summed up in the phrase that in past concert tours Mr. Springsteen has used to close out the show: 'Nobody wins unless everybody wins.' And when Mr. Springsteen says 'everybody,' he means everybody — including undocumented migrants and border patrol agents, unwed mothers, distant and irresponsible fathers, Black victims of police brutality and the cops who (regret) shooting them, emotionally scarred Vietnam vets and Southeast Asian war refugees trying to make America their new home. The 1980s also saw the rise of an alternative vision of America: one that sought to tear down what was left of the New Deal. Its exemplar was Donald Trump, then a tacky developer and a tabloid fixture. It was based on the idea that could be summarized as: I win only if everybody else loses. Today Mr. Trump is president, and full of petty rage at Mr. Springsteen for daring to criticize him at the opening show on his current European tour. Nothing irks Mr. Trump quite as much as the disrespect of a fellow celebrity. But it's more than that. Mr. Springsteen, 75, and Mr. Trump, 78, are in many respects two opposing faces of modern America as it was built and performed by their generation. They offer their fan bases a promise of entirely different futures. Just as Mr. Trump's 2024 campaign sought to make (his) America great again, Mr. Springsteen's current Land of Hope and Dreams Tour is a nod to his idea of another, more generous vision. The lyrics to the song of the same name offer up an idealistic vision of inclusion with a train packed with 'saints and sinners,' 'losers and winners,' 'whores and gamblers' and 'lost souls.' It promises, 'Dreams will not be thwarted' and 'faith will be rewarded' with 'bells of freedom ringing.' It may also be a reference to Joe Biden's presidential inauguration celebration, where he sang the same tune. Introducing 'Land of Hope and Dreams' as the first song on the tour's opening night in Manchester, England, Mr. Springsteen told the crowd that the United States was 'currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration' that has 'no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.' Mr. Trump heard this as a challenge. The president threatened an 'investigation' into Mr. Springsteen's support for Kamala Harris and blustered on Truth Social that this 'Highly Overrated … not a talented guy' was 'Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK.' Later he put out a fake video in which he hits Mr. Springsteen with a golf ball. Perhaps Mr. Trump worried that a simple, uncompromised patriotic message on offer from a man who is arguably the nation's most beloved male rock star would break through to his fans. The appeal of both men is clear. Mr. Trump and Mr. Springsteen were born three years apart and felt, in their way, like they were outsiders. Both are now very wealthy while credibly professing to speak to and for the denizens of America's working class who live paycheck to paycheck. They reach people who could never in a lifetime earn enough to purchase a membership to Mar-a-Lago (much less buy enough $TRUMP memecoins to have dinner with the president) and may not have been able to see 'Springsteen on Broadway' or in concert (where Ticketmaster's 'dynamic pricing' process sent some of the best tickets of a recent tour into the mid-four-figure range) and still pay that month's rent. Most important, however, each man embodies a competing vision of the much-maligned American dream. Raised working class, Mr. Springsteen started out as a punkish prowler of the mean streets of the late-night, low-rent Jersey Shore but has since evolved into an icon who has come to symbolize an imagined alternative America, one that simultaneously evokes Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass,' Franklin Roosevelt's 'Four Freedoms' speech and Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' prophecy. It's an imagined country that much of the world would like to believe really exists beneath the belligerent bravado of Mr. Trump and his MAGA fans. Mr. Trump's successful businessman act has almost always been based on smoke, mirrors, his daddy's millions and, these days, an elaborate, family-enriching crypto scheme. Ditto his career as a television star, which was based on artifice on the one hand, behind the scenes, and performative sadism in front of the camera. Mr. Trump's political ideology is similarly a sham: exploiting racism, resentment and a need for dominance. Mr. Springsteen is his foil, the counter to his idea that to lift up, one must leave out. Mr. Springsteen, to his credit, regularly shows up at food banks, veterans centers, political rallies and even hospitals. In Manchester, Mr. Springsteen waxed on about 'the America I love, the America I've written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years.' It's a country, he insisted, that 'regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people' but is today threatened, as 'a majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government.' Years ago, Mr. Springsteen explained his own political coming of age. 'My idea in the early and mid-1980s was to put forth an alternate vision of the America that was being put forth by the Reagan-era Republicans. They basically tried to co-opt every image that was American, including me. I wanted to stake my own claim to those images, and put forth my own ideas about them.' These days, of course, Mr. Trump's MAGA movement has been built upon the idea of doing that once more, but without even the Reagan-era optimism. The Tulane University American studies scholar Joel Dinerstein observed a turn in Mr. Springsteen's concert rhetoric in this period, 'away from his youthful reproduction of the individualistic American dream of material wealth' and toward one that envisions 'a collective American dream of self-actualization within a supportive community.' This alternative American dream is 'of a rejuvenated democracy reclaimed by fighting for social justice,' he said. Mr. Trump's deepfake golf ball assault did not deter Mr. Springsteen. On subsequent nights, Mr. Springsteen changed his set list: The show opened with 'No Surrender.' He not only repeated the same speeches but also released a live recording from that night of the tour, where he could be heard saying: 'Tonight we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring!'
Yahoo
12-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Oh, where have you gone, William F. Buckley, Jr.?
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — American conservatism was not always a primary political force in the United States, nor were its ideals and principles well articulated for a mass audience. Then came William F. Buckley Jr. With his precise Connecticut diction and boyish blond hair, Buckley's firebrand form of intellectualism gave conservative ideology a face, name and energy in the decades following Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal America. During the latter half of the 20th century, Buckley was everywhere — on television and radio, his columns syndicated to hundreds of newspapers (he wrote some 6,000 over his lifetime), and he could even be found in the halls of power, including the White House. Through the publication he founded, National Review, Buckley articulated his views cheerfully and with acerbic humor. His tenets were those associated with conservative ideology today — individual liberty, unregulated capitalism, traditional family values and the importance of faith — and he championed them while goodnaturedly sparring with his ideological opposites. 'Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view,' Buckley wrote in 1959, 'it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.' Buckley's influence on American culture will be freshly examined with the June publication of a biography written by a writer that Buckley himself selected: Sam Tanenhaus, a historian and former editor of The New York Times Review of Books. The two got along well after collaborating on Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers and, in the past 10 years of his life, Buckley gave Tanenhaus access to his personal papers as well as substantial interview opportunities. Twenty-five years later, 'BUCKLEY: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America' will be released on June 3. On Friday, Tanenhaus was at Buckley's alma mater, Yale University, for a conversation at the Yale Review Festival. 'He's not just an ideologue. He's a very interesting, more-complicated person than you might think,' said Tanenhaus, whose book comes in at a door-stopping 1,040 pages. 'I was never in the company of someone whose mind worked as fast as his. And he was just a step ahead of you.' Interviewing Tanenhaus was Beverly Gage, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian and biographer of J. Edgar Hoover. A professor at Yale, she often interacts with Buckley's personal archives, which are stored on the campus — the same school with which Buckley had, at best, a contentious relationship. 'One of the things that has always struck me in thinking about Buckley and teaching about Buckley is that he narrated himself as both an insider — he loved to be at the center of things… — and then he [was] this ferocious outsider: 'the most misunderstood man of a movement that came from out in the wilderness to forge through the American consensus of the establishment,'' Gage said. Tanenhaus agreed. Though Buckley's father was fiercely opposed to the New Deal, the family lived 30 minutes away from FDR and frequented some of the same social circles as the president. Buckley was a conservative who attended a college that taught liberal economic policies and he had religion professors who were atheists, and yet he still managed to become the chairman of the Yale Daily News and 'a big man on campus,' Tanenhaus said. Buckley's first book, 'God and Man at Yale,' was a scathing denunciation of the school. The talk covered Buckley's anti-communism, which first showed itself as support of Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator whose name is now synonymous with 'The Red Scare' and the political persecution of supposed communists in the 1950s. Gage suggested that his commitment to anti-communism became 'not only the central part of his worldview,' but allowed him to assemble the team of conservatives that became National Review and promote a common cause. Tanenhaus suggested, too, that his defense of McCarthy forged one of the more effective arguments still used by some conservatives today. 'So, you don't like McCarthy. Does that mean you like communists better?' In the years that followed, Buckley made a 'transition from being the intellectual gadfly, to being someone who's much more directly engaged in politics,' Gage said. He helped to nominate a prominent conservative onto the Republican presidential ticket in Barry Goldwater, then ran a mostly performative bid for mayor of New York that garnered significant national attention for his political views, which he used to create his television brand. His show 'Firing Line' lead to a series of era-defining debates. 'The best thing he had was his ability to listen,' said Tanenhaus. 'The way I call it, a 'predatory attentiveness.' He wanted to know what you were going to say so he could take it apart.' He quickly rose to greater and greater spheres of influence, which culminated in the presidential election of 1979. By that November, Buckley had helped to usher in a new president in Ronald Reagan, whose platform was aligned with much that Buckley had argued for since his days at Yale. It represented a sea change in how America understood its values from the days of progressive politics and large-scale federal actions to one of smaller government, free markets and more traditional family values. 'Reagan was in some ways a creation of Bill Buckley, ideologically,' Tanenhaus said. In the Q&A following the talk, an audience member asked Tanenhaus — who admitted that he doesn't always agree with Buckley or conservative politics — if he had been co-opted by the charm and affability of Buckley. 'It's very complicated,' said Tanenhaus. 'If you were in his company, no matter who you were, then you'd be treated with courtesy and dignity. I'd rather have more of that in a culture than less.' He added, 'Given all the options, all the ways things can go and have gone, I think we're better off with him than without him.'
