Springsteen’s rock sermon
It was a surprise birthday gift from her husband. Former Obama communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, received a flight to Manchester, England for Bruce Springsteen’s second “Land of Hopes and Dreams” show there. Springsteen made headlines and drew fire from “His Lordship” Trump for his monologue against the actions of America’s wannabe dictator.
“In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration,” Springsteen told fans. “There’s some very weird, strange, and dangerous shit going on out there right now,” he said later, before reciting a bill of particulars not unlike those in the Declaration of Independence. Springsteen assembles his set list to tell a story. He opens with “No Surrender.”
Palmieri reflects in The Bulwark. What struck her most was his hopeful message, “We will survive this moment.”
Survive. The concept hit me with a wave of relief. It was a courageous affirmation of the exceptional nature of America when I needed to hear it most. Even as he acknowledged the ways the president has undermined democracy, and the failures of our system of checks and balances to protect the country from a demagogue, Springsteen was saying there is an innate resilience in the American people. Surviving is what we do.
He now sings “Long Walk Home” as a prayer for the country.
Palmieri reflects on her years in campaign work and on Democrats’ failure to stop a Trump second term. She has been at a loss for how Resistance 2.0 might find its North Star and shakes her head at her own failure to imagine something more meaty than “Democrats should do more podcasts.”
Springsteen’s rock sermon — resolute, unapologetically and authentically patriotic — feels like that North Star. Our charge: to protect the America we love and limit the Trumpian damage until we get through this. We are better than Trump, stronger, with deep roots in this country’s faith in itself. Trump cannot understand that coming because that kind of faith is beyond his comprehension.
The problem is how to hold back barbarians at the gates with hopes and dreams. Palmieri admits her own failure of imagination. Perhaps Resistance 2.0 starts with inspiration. The same old, same old ain’t cutting it. “Adapt or die,” says Billy Beane in Moneyball (2011). I wrote about Democrat’s strategic thinking being medieval three years ago. I wrote about the DNC’s dispiriting winter meeting in February. I’ve attended local protests against Trump’s predations only to see the same, mostly aging hipsters and activists who always show up. Their tactics have not evolved since the 1960s. The same tired chants don’t sound like greatest hits. They sound like tunes from Lawrence Welk’s Champagne Music Makers.
What Springsteen wields is a love of country that for 50 years has felt genuine. He tells American stories that ring truer than patriotic kitsch, the cheap knock-off Trump peddles. In Springsteen’s America, Trump is an archetypal villain, Palmieri writes:
He is the con man who preys on the vulnerable, the guy who ruined the boardwalk in “Atlantic City,” the “Rainmaker” who makes vulnerable people believe “white is black and black is white,” and, perhaps most aptly, the rich man who wants to be king from “Badlands,” which goes on to describe a king who will not be satisfied till he rules everything. But just as any Springsteen villain is never the focus of a song but the obstacle to be overcome, the Land of Hopes and Dreams tour isn’t just about Trump. It’s about how America survives him.
Lefties must find their inner Springsteens. They already know the songs. Now they must tell the stories and listen, not recite talking points and 50-year-old chants.
Ted Glick offers advice for engaging Americans who may have fallen under the spell of the medicine showman. But he begins with this from my favorite Davos panelist.
“Contact engenders more trust, more solidarity and more mutual kindness. It helps you see the world through other people’s eyes. (p. 358) . . . The thing we all need to remember is that those other folks are a lot like us. The angry voter venting on TV, the refugee in the statistics, the criminal in the mugshot: every one of them is a human being of flesh and blood, someone who in a different life might have been our friend, our family, our beloved. (p. 378) . . .Choose the path of compassion and you realize how little separates you from that stranger. Compassion takes you beyond yourself.” (p. 391)
-Humankind, A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman
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