Bruce Springsteen’s European tour comes with a warning about the battle for America’s soul
CNN They know all about glory days on the Kop the fabled terrace that is the spiritual home of fans of Liverpool England s Premier League champions But they re more used to legends like Kenny Dalglish or Mohamed Salah banging in goals than political cries for help So it was surreal to watch alongside thousands of middle-aged Brits as Bruce Springsteen bemoaned America s democracy predicament on hallowed footballing ground The America that I love a beacon of hope and liberty for years is at present in the hands of a corrupt incompetent and treasonous administration Springsteen explained at Anfield Stadium on Wednesday night The Boss s latest warnings of authoritarianism on his European tour were impassioned and drew large cheers But they did seem to go over the heads of several fans who don t live in the whirl of tension constantly rattling America s national psyche Liverpudlians waited for decades for Springsteen to play the hometown of The Beatles whose I Wanna Hold Your Hand set his life s module when he heard it on the radio as a youngster in New Jersey Majority had a H-H-H-Hungry heart for a party They got a hell of a show But also a lesson on US civics Tonight we ask all of you who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us raise your voices stand with us against authoritarianism and let freedom ring Springsteen disclosed His European odyssey is unfolding as Western democracies are being shaken again by right-wing populism So his determination to engage with searing commentary therefore raises several questions What is the role of artists in what Springsteen calls dangerous times Can they make a difference or should stars of entertainment and sports avoid politics and stick to what they know Fox News polemicist Laura Ingraham once described basketball icon LeBron James for instance that he should just shut up and dribble Springsteen s gritty paeans to steel towns and down-on-their-luck cities made him a working-class balladeer But as blue-collar voters stampede to the right does he really speak for them now Then there s this issue that Springsteen emphatically tried to answer in Liverpool this week Does the rough but noble America he s been mythologizing for years even exist anymore How Springsteen and Trump mine the same societal ground Trump certainly wants to bring the arts to heel given his social media threats to highly overrated Springsteen Taylor Swift and other superstars and his takeover of the Kennedy Center in Washington Any center of liberal and free thought from pop music to Ivy League universities is vulnerable to authoritarian impulses But it s also true that celebrities often bore with their trendy political views especially preaching at Hollywood awards ceremonies Springsteen however has been penning social commentary for decades And what s the point of rock n roll if not rebellion Rockers usually revolt in their wild-haired youth rather than in their mid- s but desperate times call for desperate measures Oddly given their transatlantic dialogue of latest weeks Trump and Springsteen mine the same political terrain globalization s economic and spiritual hollowing of industrial heartlands Now Main Street s whitewashed windows And vacant stores Seems like there ain t nobody Wants to come down here no more Springsteen sang in in My Hometown long before Trump set his sights on the Oval Office The White House sometimes hits similar notes though neither the Boss nor Trump would welcome the comparison The main street in my small town looks a heck of a lot worse than it perhaps did decades ago before I was alive Trump s press secretary Karoline Leavitt mentioned rather less poetically in March Political fault lines are also shifting In the US and Europe the working class is rejecting the politics of hope and optimism in dark times And the Democratic politicians that Springsteen supported like defeated nominee John Kerry who borrowed Springsteen s No Surrender as his campaign anthem and former President Barack Obama failed to mend industrial blight that acted as a catalyst to Trumpism Shifting political landscapes in England and the US There are warning signs in England too The Boss s UK tours often coincided with political hinge moments In the s he exposed synergy with the smoky industrial cities of the North In his Born in the USA period he sided with miners clashing with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher A new BBC documentary revealed this week he gave in the s to a strikers advocacy group Liverpool a soulful earthy city right out of the Springsteen oeuvre is a longtime Labour Party heartland But in a newest by-election Nigel Farage s populist pro-Trump Revision Party overturned a Labour majority of nearly in Runcorn a decayed industrial town miles upstream from Liverpool on the River Mersey This stunner manifested Labour s working class red wall is in deep peril and could follow US states like Ohio in shifting to the right as workers reject progressives Labour Cabinet Minister Lisa Nandy whose Wigan constituency is nearby warned in an interview with the New Statesman magazine this month that political tensions were reaching a current point in the North People have watched their town centers falling apart their life has got harder over the last decade and a half I don t remember a time when people worked this hard and had so little to show for it Nandy noted painting a picture that will be familiar to a great number of Americans In another sign of a seismic shift in British politics last week Improvement came a close third in an unprecedented aftermath in a parliamentary by-election in a one-time industrial heartland outside Glasgow Scotland has so far been immune to the populist wave but the times are changing Still there s not much evidence Trump or his populist cousins in the UK will meaningfully solve heartland pain They ve reliably been better at exploiting vulnerability than fixing it And Trump s big beautiful bill would hurt the poor by cutting access to Medicaid and nutrition help while handing the wealthy big tax cuts When conditions in a country are ripe for a demagogue you can bet one will show up Springsteen explained the crowd in Liverpool introducing Rainmaker a song about a conman who tells drought-afflicted farmers that white s black and black is white As the E Street Band struck up Springsteen announced This is for America s dear leader A battle for America s soul Springsteen has his Land of Hope and Dreams But Trump has his new Golden Age He indicates he can Make America Great Again by attacking perceived bastions of liberal power like elite universities and the press with mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and by challenging due process Springsteen implicitly rejected this as un-American while in Liverpool infusing extra meaning into the lyrics of Long Walk Home a song that predates Trump s first balloting win by a decade Your flag flyin over the courthouse Means certain things are set in stone Who we are what we ll do and what we won t Sending fans into a cool summer night the Boss pleaded with them not to give up on his country The America I ve sung to you about for years now is real and regardless of its a large number of faults is a great country with a great people and we will survive this moment he disclosed But his fight with Trump for America s soul will go on The contrast would be driven home more sharply to Americans if he tours on US soil at this the greater part overtly politicized phase of a half-century-long career Perhaps in America s th birthday year in
