Ken Casey, the founder and front man of the Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys, is the physical, attitudinal, and linguistic personification of Boston. Proof of this can be found in the way he pronounces MAGA. To wit: “Magger,” as in, “This Magger guy in the audience was waving his fucking Trump hat in people’s faces, and I could just tell he wanted to enter into discourse with me.” A second proof is that “enter into discourse” is a thing Ben Affleck would say in a movie about South Boston right before punching someone in the face. The third is Casey’s articulation of what I took to be a personal code: “I’m not going to shut up, just out of spite.”
The aforementioned discourse took place at a show in Florida in March. Video of the incident has moved across the internet, and it has provoked at least some Dropkick Murphy fans—white, male, and not particularly predisposed to the Democratic Party in its current form—to abandon the band. Casey accepts this as the price for preserving his soul. “I think everything we’ve been doing for the past 30 years was a kind of warm-up for the moment we’re in,” he told me. The band is most famous for its furious, frenzied anthem “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” but it is also known, among certain high-information voters and union activists, as a last repository of working-class values. As white men have lurched to the right, the band is on a mission to convince them that they’re being played by a grifter. “Thirty years ago, the Reagan era, everyone was in lockstep with what we were saying,” he said. “Now people say our message is outdated or elite or we’re part of some machine.”
Casey and I were talking on a sunny day this spring at Fenway Park (inevitably), where he was filming a promotional video for the Red Sox’s Dropkick Murphy Bobblehead Night (July 11, in case you were wondering). Casey, who is tattooed up to the neck and carries himself like a bartender, is amused by the idea that anyone would consider him an elitist. He is, after all, a writer of both “Kiss Me, I’m Shitfaced” and “Smash Shit Up.”
“They take the fact that we don’t support Trump as us being shills for the Democrats,” he said. “They love to call us cucks, which I find ironic because there’s a good portion of MAGA that would probably step aside and let Donald Trump have their way with their significant other if he asked.”
There’s also a bit of grace to be found in the culture war, as Casey discovered at the now-famous Florida show.
“These two guys had their MAGA shirts and hats and a cardboard blowup of Trump’s head, and they’re in the front row, so they’re definitely trolling,” Casey said. “We’ve had this before, guys with MAGA hats just shoving it in people’s faces.”
Casey addressed the audience, first with an accusation: “Where the fuck are all the other punk bands?”
The answer is that the bands are scared, just like so many others. Punk bands are no exception, which is a small irony, given the oppositional iconoclasm of so much of punk, and the movement’s anti-authoritarian roots.
It’s striking that few singers, bands, and movie stars—so many of them reliably progressive when the stakes are trivial—seem willing to address the country’s perilous political moment. (Casey’s friend Bruce Springsteen is a noteworthy exception.) Intimidation works, and complicity is the norm, not the exception. “You’ve got the biggest bands running scared,” Casey said.
The latest Dropkick Murphys album, For the People, is compensation for the silence of other quarters. Only a minority of the songs on the album address the political moment directly, but those that do were written in anger. The first single, “Who’ll Stand for Us,” addresses the betrayal of working Americans: “Through crime and crusade / Our labor, it’s been stolen / We’ve been robbed of our freedom / We’ve been held down and beholden.” Fury runs like a red streak through For the People.
“The reason we speak out is we don’t care if we lose fans,” Casey said from the stage in Florida. “When history is said and done, we want it known that Dropkick Murphys stood with the people and stood with the workers. And it’s all a fucking scam, guys.”
He then addressed the Trumpists in the front row. “I want to propose, in the name of decency and fairness—I’d like to propose a friendly wager. Do you support American workers? Of course you do. Do you support American business? Obviously. I don’t know if you are aware, because we don’t go around bragging about it, but Dropkick Murphys only sells American-made merchandise.”
The wager was simple: He’d give the man in the Trump shirt $100 and a Dropkick Murphys T-shirt if his Trump shirt had been made in America. If the fan lost, he’d still get the Dropkick Murphy shirt.
Casey knows a safe bet. The shirt, of course, had been made in Nicaragua. But Casey felt no need to humiliate the Trumpist. “He’s a good sport!” Casey told the cheering crowd. “He’s taking the shirt off! We’re taking crime off the street! God bless your fucking heart!”
After the show, Casey, as is his practice, left the stage through the audience, and talked to the Trump supporters. “There was him and his son, and they were the nicest two guys. It made me think, I have to get past the shirt and the hat, because they were almost doing it for a laugh, like it was their form of silent protest. This guy said, ‘I’ve been coming to see you for 20 years. I consider you family, and I don’t let politics come between family.’ And I was like, Wow. It was a good lesson. But how many families out there in America have politics come between them, you know?”
Casey says that identity politics—and especially the exploitation of identity politics by Trump-aligned Republicans—alienate from the Democrats the sort of people he grew up with. Recently, the band performed at an anti-Trump protest at Boston’s City Hall Plaza. Afterward, Casey told me, “even people I know said, ‘Oh, you were at that rally? I always knew you were gay.’”
He continued, “This is why people in labor and the left want us to be involved in some of this protest. MAGA, they use this male-masculinity issue the way they use trans and woke to divide. They’re teaching the young males that this is the soft party.”
Although Casey personally leans Bernie philosophically, he’s realistic about the left and about the Democratic Party’s dysfunction. “If I think about all the people I know in my life that have shifted over to Trump voters—AOC ain’t bringing them back. I actually like her, but it ain’t happening.”
Who else does he like? Someone who can speak to people outside the progressive bubble. He likes Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, a successful Democratic governor of a red state. “I’m not against going full-on progressive,” he said, “but if it’s not going to be that, you got to find a centrist. It can’t be mush. It’s got to be someone who can speak the language of that working-class-male group that they seem to have lost. That’s why I love the idea of a veteran, whether it’s Wes Moore or Ruben Gallego, or even Adam Kinzinger, who’s talking about running as a Democrat.”
He’d rather not have to think about electoral politics this much, he said at Fenway. But he is still shocked that so many people in his life fell for Trumpism. “My father died when I was young, and I was raised by my grandfather, who was basically like, ‘If I ever see you bullying someone, I’ll kick the shit out of you. And if I ever see you back down from a bully, I’ll kick the shit out of you.’”
“I’ve just never liked bullies,” he continued, “and I don’t understand people who do. It’s really not that hard. I wish more people would see that it’s not hard to stand up.”
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