A letter to Bruce Springsteen from a fan:
Dear Bruce,
I’ve been a fan for as long as I can remember. From “Born to Run” to “The Rising,” from your orchestral country masterpiece “Western Stars,” to your 2020 gem “Letter to You,” always you’re moving us. Always you’re surprising us. With a catalogue of songs shot through with self-doubt and hope, loss and love. Songs populated with characters we know and care about. Crammed with snippets of our lives and yours, radiating with your Catholic impulse toward God’s mercy.
I’ve seen you in concert more times than I’d care to admit (over 50). There’s always something for everyone in your 3-plus-hour sets: You bring out the horn section and background singers for R&B numbers, break things down country-style with acoustic and steel guitars, then come the gospel-influenced numbers that make the show feel like a revival. With the sets always anchored by rock and roll. And those moments where it’s you alone with an acoustic guitar and harmonica, unplugged before MTV “invented” it.
It’s a celebration of American music, your concerts: an invitation for music lovers to gather under one roof and forget our differences. And always, your set lists surprise us. Each night, they’re different—keeping the show fresh for us. And for you and the E-Street Band, too.
Which is why, for the last 45 years, it has been so disappointing to watch you descend to rank partisan politics on and off the stage. Not because you don’t have a right to voice your opinions, but because what you say every election cycle is so predictable. And—dare I say—so boring. And predictable and boring are words I never associated with you.
Your political musings, for as long as you’ve been talking politics, have been reductionistic and repetitive: if Republicans win the White House, the poor will get poorer, the hungry will grow hungrier and the America we love will somehow vanish. It began with oblique on-stage ramblings about President Reagan and the era of greed in the 1980s.
Since 2004, you’ve never failed to endorse a Democrat candidate (Kerry, Obama, Clinton and Biden). Which is why it didn’t surprise anyone when you endorsed Kamala Harris last fall.
“Donald Trump is the most dangerous candidate for president in my lifetime,” you said in a staged video from a local New Jersey diner last fall. “He doesn’t understand the meaning of this country, its history or what it means to be deeply American.”
It’s why it didn’t surprise us when we heard your recent Trump harangue on stage in London. Trump responded by attacking you, and you responded with two on-stage scripted screeds of your own.
“In my home, they’re persecuting people for their right to free speech and voicing their dissent,” you said, forgetting that Facebook and Twitter had deplatformed Trump years earlier, and COVID policy critics, too. But you weren’t finished: “In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death.”
But here’s the funny thing, Bruce: Monmouth County, New Jersey—which includes the town you put on the map (Asbury Park), the town you were born and raised in (Freehold) and the town in which you currently live (Colts Neck)—voted overwhelmingly for Trump and his policies: 54.8 percent to 43.4 percent. In the town you now live, the vote was over 70 percent for Trump (70 percent!).
As you know (but readers of this letter may not) Monmouth County, which lies an hour south of the bluer New Jersey counties closer to New York City, is filled with small beach towns and working-class and wealthy enclaves. Which means, Bruce, you believe the majority of your local friends and neighbors are either stupid or dangerous. Or both. What an irony: You, the guy who wrote “My Hometown,” doesn’t understand much about—and chooses to ridicule publicly—more than half the folks in your hometown and county.
But you’re not just out of touch with your neighbors, Bruce. It’s the factory workers you’ve written about—and purport to care about—in songs like “Factory,” “Mansion on the Hill” and “Youngstown.” In your most iconic song, “Born in the U.S.A.,” the Vietnam vet narrator returns to his old job at the refinery only to hear those hard words from the hiring man: “Son, if it were up to me.”
But if you bothered to talk to refinery, oil and gas workers—high-paying blue-collar jobs—and asked what they thought of Harris given her antipathy to fossil fuels, they would’ve told you she was the dangerous candidate. To their livelihoods. To our nation’s economy. And to national security, which millions of us believe is at stake when it comes to American energy production.
“I’d say 80 percent to 90 percent of [United Steelworkers] oil workers will vote for Trump,” a Texas union leader told Reuters in a story last fall. Are they stupid or dangerous for believing what they believe, Bruce?
You should spend time in Luzerne County in northeast Pennsylvania, a coal mining region in the early 20th century that lost population when the mines closed and factories shuttered? Towns like Wilkes-Barre, Hazleton and Pittston call the county home, which recently turned red after a 50-year Democrat run. They peaked in 2009, with registered Democrats outnumbering Republicans 2-to-1. By 2020, the lead was erased. In 2024, Trump carried the county 59.5 percent to Harris’ 39.5 percent.
Did the working-class folks of Luzerne County change, Bruce? Or did you? Did the voters lose their minds and souls? Or is there something deeper happening there—and across America—worth knowing and writing about? You might surprise yourself if you got to know them.
And one last thing, Bruce. The next time you step up to a microphone in an arena filled with fans to talk politics, remember you’ve invited us to celebrate your music. It’s why we come, many of us stretching family budgets to do so. We come escape the travails of the day, and together experience—as one song title of yours suggests—”all the heaven will allow.”
Remember also that many—possibly half—of your invited guests think quite differently about public policies that might best improve the lives of working families.
Bruce, your on-stage harangues aren’t just predictable and boring: they’re rude. And unbecoming a generous, empathetic host like you. You have every right to do it. But we come to your shows to be moved, not lectured.
We love you. But sometimes it feels like you don’t love us back. Or at least don’t respect us. And the meaningful reasons we come to see you.
From a forever fan.
Lee Habeeb
The post ‘The Boss’ Is Out of Touch With His Neighbors, Factory Workers appeared first on Newsweek.
