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!”
Eric Alterman is a CUNY distinguished professor of English at Brooklyn College and the author of “It Ain’t No Sin to Be Glad You’re Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen.”
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