“Springsteen’s Right Side: A Liberal Icon’s Conservatism”
Christopher Borick and David Rosenwasser
MuhlenbergCollege
Paper presented at the Bruce Springsteen Symposium, West Long Branch, New Jersey, September 26, 2009.
In the mid-nineteenth century Walt Whitman advised a generation of fellow writers to “be radical, be radical, be not too damn radical.” In offering this advice the Good Gray Poet recognized the tenuous position of the artist as social critic. To affect societal change an artist must often challenge conventional ways of thinking and living. Yet in these challenges artists risk alienating their audience and thus jeopardize their ability to stimulate social change. Given these constraints artists must perennially struggle to reach a fragile balance between becoming so radical that their work is ignored or so conformist that they change nothing.
Throughout much of his career Bruce Springsteen has used his art to directly challenge many aspects of contemporary American life. While these critiques are multi faceted, it is generally accepted that Springsteen’s challenges are oriented towards the left wing of American politics. From his war of words with the Reagan White House to his direct assaults on the actions of the Bush Administration, Springsteen has been a persistent critic of conservative leaders and their policies. Most recently, Springsteen’s prominent role in the 2008 presidential campaign, capped by his pre-inaugural performance at the Lincoln Memorial, helped cement his prominent place on the left wing of American politics
Yet even through his long time antagonism of the right, Springsteen has remained a popular mainstream artist whose audience includes many of the same older white males that are the bedrock of the contemporary GOP in America. How is it that a liberal icon such as Springsteen has managed to preserve his appeal across ideological divides in the United States? In this paper we argue that Springsteen has consistently utilized both symbols and language that are widely embraced by American conservatives, thus mitigating much of the polarizing effects that his art might otherwise produce. From his focus on the honor of hard work to his utilization of the average man as a working class hero, Springsteen employees messages that are rife with conservative overtones. So what are Springsteen’s politics? Perhaps we will see him and his politics more accurately and understand his broad appeal more resonantly once we collapse the conventional binary of liberal or conservative and situate him in the more complex tangle of left and right, coast and heartland.
In this article we focus most of our attention on the albums of the Bush years. In many ways the 8 years that George Bush served in the White House were Bruce Springsteen’s most politically engaged period. From 2001 to 2009 Springsteen’s creative efforts turned more to political matters as he simultaneously became more intimately involved in political campaigns. Over the course of his career Springsteen shied away from endorsing candidates for public office. While often critical of policies emanating from Republican administrations, the New Jersey artist did not engage directly in American electoral politics.
This all changed in 2004 when Springsteen threw himself directly into the highly competitive presidential campaign between George Bush and John Kerry. During the campaign Springsteen leant his talents to the Vote for Change Tour that was seeking to raise both financial and voter support for Democratic nominee and his efforts to unseat Bush. Springsteen stated that the concerts were an effort “to put forward a group of ideals and change the administration in the White House. That's the success or failure (of this concert series), very clear cut and very simple."
As the 2004 race came to a close Springsteen made numerous appearances with Kerry at campaign rallies, often performing a number of songs at the events. During these events Springsteen discussed the reasons he had decided to jump into the electoral fray. He noted that he had “been writing about America for 30 years, about who we are, what we stand for, what we fight for. I believe that these essential ideals of American identity are what’s at stake on November 2.” He called on the nation to face “America’ hard truths, both the good and the bad. "That's where we find a deeper patriotism, that's where we find a more complete view of who we are. That's where we find a more authentic experience as citizens, and that's where we find the power to make our world a better and a safer place. (Nichols 1)" While Springsteen’s efforts to get Kerry elected were ultimately unsuccessful, the failure did not result in a retreat from involvement in presidential campaigns.
During the 2008 presidential race Springsteen once again emerged as a presence on the campaign trail, this time offering support for Democratic nominee Barack Obama. This time the popular artist held concerts by himself to rally support for Obama’s presidential bid. Springsteen performed at three large free events in key swing states (Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan). In a concert before 50,000 individuals on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, Springsteen told the audience “I don’t know about you, but I want my house back, I want my America back, and I want my country back." He also stated that he had spent his life “ measuring the distance between the American Dream and the American Reality,” and that "Barack Obama has taken that measure as well. Never has the gap between the Dream and Reality been greater. In the end Springsteen called for an “American Reclamation Project” that would clean up the mess left behind by the Bush Administration (Panaritis et al. 1).
While the Bush years would prove to be the period of Springsteen’s most direct political involvement, they also marked an era where his artistry became more focused on political subject matter. During the time that George W. Bush resided in the White House Springsteen would release four albums of new material; The Rising (2002); Devils and Dust (2005); Magic (2007); and Working on A Dream (2009). With the exception of Working on a Dream, these albums regularly dealt with the politics of the times and the policies that Bush was enacting as Chief Executive. In The Rising Springsteen concentrates on the loss and emptiness that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, generally refraining from critiques on the policy questions that surrounded the event and its aftermath. One notable exception was the album’s first song, Lonesome Day, in which Springsteen offers a prophetic warning about the type of military response that would be enacted as a result of the terrorist strikes. In the song Springsteen advises those in power to “ask questions before you shoot/deceit and betrayal’s bitter fruit.” as the nation steadily moved towards war in Iraq. The eventual war that came would serve as the catalyst for much of Springsteen’s work in his next two albums, Devils and Dust and Magic. In these albums, and in particular Magic, Springsteen would delve deeper into political matters than he had done at anytime during his long career. We will explore these albums in more detail later in the article.
Springsteen’s actions on the campaign trails and his art clearly established him as one of George W. Bush’s most notable critics and positioned the artist on the left of American politics. But even as Springsteen became a more visible presence in the polarizing world of American politics, he remained a very popular figure in the entertainment world. His iconic status was verified in 2009 when he was invited to perform at the consummately mainstream Super Bowl halftime show. And despite modest attendance at his Seeger’s Sessions concerts in 2006, Springsteen’s tour stops with the E Street band continued to draw crowds similar to those throughout his career. His Magic album and its criticism of Bush administration policies sold over a million copies in the United States alone. By most measures Springsteen remains a popular figure who maintains a broad audience even as he has become more explicitly partisan in his politics.
In the remainder of the paper we explore the ways that Bruce Springsteen has been able to remain a popular mainstream artist while taking political stances that are often at odds with portions of his audience. Walt Whitman believed that an artist could lose his ability to connect with a larger audience by becoming too radical, thus reducing their cultural impact. Bruce Springsteen has held that he wants to “find an audience that would be a reflection of some imagined community that I had in my head, that lived according to the values in my music and a shared set of ideals” (Dawidoff 252). Notably he sees this audience not only made up of liberals but conservatives. Springtseen said that “people come to my shows with many different kinds of political beliefs; I like that, we welcome all.” But while Springsteen may welcome all, how do his politically charged art and personal statements avoid alienating his more conservative fans?
To answer this question we look at Springsteen’s artistic efforts in Devils and Dust and Magic through an examination of the language and writing techniques that he employs in his artistry. It is in these tools that Springsteen’s political engagement pushes beyond the partisan and reaches to a broader audience that includes both liberal and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. His choice of words and styles allows him to do the cultural work that he believes necessary. Springsteen is concerned about the direction that his country took under the leadership of the Bush Administration and is working to win support among fellow Americans who may or may not share his political leanings, but who he feels may share his broader values and ideals. He does not attempt to hide his politics as a means of avoiding the radicalism that Whitman warned about. Instead his selection of lyrics, use of individual relationships and dramatic monologues allows him to delve into political subject matter without assaulting conservatives. In fact Springsteen makes artistic choices that may resonate with conservatives as well as liberals.
While Springsteen’s words on the campaign trail may be overtly partisan, his art remains devoid of direct frontal assaults on both Republicans and conservatives. Springsteen never mentions the words George Bush, Dick Cheney, Republican, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, or torture in any of the Bush Albums. Instead the albums of the Bush years are filled with words such as home, drift, flag, work and blood. These lyrical choices by no means engender immediate anger from conservative leaning listeners. In fact many of Springsteen’s word choices may resonate with Republican political narratives that have emerged in the United States. For conservatives there is a longing for an America from the past. The sense that the nation has been taken off course by bad leadership permeates much of the contemporary conservative discourse and Republican narratives. The current backlash against President Barack Obama’s policy agenda provides a perfect example of this longing for a return to some vision of a past America. Without knowing Springsteen’s political leanings it would be hard to identify anything in the Bush Year albums that would peg him as a liberal. Instead his focus on veterans, work and home make his messages easily accessible to the conservatives in his audience. In addition, Springtseen’s regular use of heterosexual relationships as part of the political storylines of his songs provides an accessible entry point to his art for conservatives.
Perhaps no song better captures Springsteen’s Bush Era interests and stylistic choices than “Long Walk Home” off the Magic album. In this piece Springsteen deals in great measure with the concepts of home and drift within the realm of contemporary American life. The song is set in a typical American town, with common features such as grocery stores, a veterans’ hall, barbershop and courthouse. While the setting is familiar, the narrator of the song is not at home. The people of these familiar places are “rank strangers” to the narrator as he passes through town.
The lyrics in “Long Walk Home” could come as easily from a country music song as easily as they may eminent from a progressive rock artist. In the following stanza Springsteen calls on a vocabulary that would strike a chord with any conservative. A father and son, neighbors, flags and values set in stone all take central places in the song.
Here everybody has a neighbor
Everybody has a friend
Everybody has a reason to begin again
My father said "Son, we're lucky in this town,
It's a beautiful place to be born.
It just wraps its arms around you,
Nobody crowds you and nobody goes it alone"
"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"
While Springsteen’s answers to “who we are, what we'll do and what we won't" are likely quite different than those of a conservative member of his audience, there is nothing in the song that would act to alienate a fan with right leaning politics. In particular Springsteen’s reference to “what we won’t” do seems to be referencing policies such as
torture of prisoners in Iraq, but leaves considerable room for interpretation on the part of his desired audience of liberals and conservatives.
* * *
So let’s briefly rehearse the story we are trying to tell about Springsteen’s artistry as it intersects with his politics. He is an artist who believes that his songs do cultural work. As Bryan Garman has demonstrated abundantly in his book A Race of Singers, Springsteen not only belongs in the tradition of Whitman and Guthrie but is keenly aware of himself as carrying on that tradition of—choose your term: populist singer of songs? visionary American idealist? Working class white guy on a social mission inseparable from his sense of sacred vocation? Springsteen says as much to Jon Stewart in his Daily Show interview last March: “you try to find a show that [. . .] contains some way to capture the moment that’s occurring out in the world right now.”
This notion of popular art as capturing the moment implies that Springsteen’s art is less interested in moralizing about what America should be doing than in allowing us to see ourselves. As Garman has put, “Springsteen does not issue a manifesto for change as much as he delivers a state of the union address” (211). In the Bush albums, we wish to suggest, the state of the union is one of existential homelessness and national anomie—a condition that leads Springsteen to press for the reconstitution of community as a first step in regaining some sense of individual and collective destiny.
As the Bush presidency continued to erode the faith of an increasing number of Americans in the integrity of our representative democracy, Springsteen’s sense of mission seems to intensify, issuing forth in the four albums we are calling the Bush albums. Like any artist, Springsteen has evolved, perhaps unconsciously, a vocabulary for this task, and as we have constructed our lexicon of Springsteen key terms, we’ve been struck by their homology with those that Thomas Frank, in What’s the Problem with Kansas?, identifies with the Republican narrative of individualism and victimization of the white working class, a narrative Frank argues has seduced this block of voters away from their traditional allegiance to the Democratic Party.
Home, faith, flag, love, work . . . these are the terms, as Chris has suggested in his discussion of “Long Walk Home,” that dominate the Bush albums.
The opposite of home in the Bush albums is a place called Nowhere. Home and Nowhere comprise an essential ideological geography in Springsteen’s imagination. It is significant that in song after song the speaker does not actually get there. “Long Walk Home” is a signal instance, but we hear it as well in “This Life” from Working on a Dream: “This emptiness I’ve roamed/ Searching for a home.” This site is of course not just literal but a figure for nation. “I want my house back, I want my country back. I want my America back,” Springsteen has said; and we hear in these words the desire to enter some halcyon version of the past. And when that attempt inevitably fails, the singer is stranded in Nowhere.
As listeners to Nebraska know, his speakers have been there before. “State Trooper” ends with the haunting plea, “Hey, somebody out there, listen to my last prayer/Hiho silver-o, deliver me from nowhere.” And this refrain is repeated two songs later, in “Open All Night”: “Radio’s jammed up with gospel stations lost souls callin’ long distance salvation/Hey, mister deejay, woncha hear my last prayer hey, ho, rock’n’roll, deliver me from nowhere.”
We have cited these songs to make clear that the song with which Springsteen opens Magic, “Radio Nowhere,” is a return to this earlier trope of rock’n’roll on the radio as the medium of deliverance.