Bruce Springsteen's (and Jeep's) Call for National Unity

 

There’s a chapel in Kansas

Standing on the exact center of the lower forty-eight.

It never closes.

All are more than welcome

To come meet here, in the middle.

It’s no secret the middle has been a hard place to get to lately

Between red and blue

Between servant and citizen

Between our freedom and our fear.

Now, fear has never been the best of who we are.

And as for freedom, it’s not the property of just the fortunate few.

It belongs to us all.

Whoever you are, wherever you’re from

It’s what connects us.

And we need that connection.

We need the middle.

We just have to remember the very soil we stand on is common ground.

So, we can get there.

We can make it to the mountaintop

Through the desert

And we will cross this divide.

Our light has always found its way through the darkness

And there’s hope on the road up ahead.

Everyone who knows me knows that Bruce Springsteen is my favorite rock and roll musician. To be sure, part of that is due to the fact that he did his greatest work during my high school, college, and early graduate years. The soundtrack of my long-departed youth, indeed. Bruce also, as a native of Freehold and Asbury Park, New Jersey, was a link to my own Northeastern roots during my 19 years of "exile" in Dallas. Listening to his first three albums (especially) conjured up to mind the region I loved (and still love), even as I missed it while living in the flat, scorching Southwest. Most of all, however, I have always loved Bruce because he is among the most intelligent and thoughtful of the popular musicians of my era, rivalled only by the even more prolific, protean Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and perhaps the country/rock troubadour Steve Earle.

Springsteen also has had a certain mystique in his hesitancy―unlike contemporaries like Bob Seger, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, and even Dylan (here)―to lend his name to commercial enterprises. Hence my surprise to learn he had agreed to speaking these words, words about national unity, no less.

The ad was largely considered one of the best of an evening marred by one of the most disappointing games in recent memory. The longing for unity is an admirable one, to be sure. Predictably, however, his call was met by criticism both from the Left and the Right. Self-righteous critics on the Left (for an example, see here) whine that, in light of the previous four years of Donald Trump and the MAGA-hatted hordes, "Springsteen is ultimately preaching reconciliation without reckoning," not to mention that "he’s sticking up for a car company whose products are hastening the death of our planet — a death that the boomer demo being courted with this two-minute clip won’t have to witness," and even that his use of the symbolism of the chapel in Lebanon, Kansas, suggests a Christian nationalism (really?) [For the Boss's E Street sidekick, guitarist Steve Van Zandt's (aka The Sopranos' Silvio Dante) curt Twitter responses to such nonsense, see here and here.] The criticism has been even more strident on the Right, for whom Bruce's call for unity and occupying the "Middle" is said to be disingenuous in view of his consistent criticisms of Trump and what he represents (for one of many examples, see here).

Perhaps the trouble is with the commercial's use of the term "Middle." The "Middle," is, I suppose, in the eyes and mind of the beholder. And compromise or middle ground is, frankly, not plausible (or possible?) between the current iteration of the Democratic Party, of which Springsteen is a member, and MAGA-hatted Trumpism, the de facto stance of today's G.O.P. The problem is exacerbated by the nature of a commercial advertisement, where brevity disallows any expression of nuance.

Let's be clear, however. By "the Middle," Springsteen was not speaking in terms of some ideological scale of traditionalist political positions, in such a way that historical figures such as Humphrey, on the Left, and Reagan, on the Right, would not qualify. If he were doing so, I would hope that his Right Wing critics would acknowledge that the movement that has occurred has been largely asymmetrical, in the form of the increasingly rightward radicalization of the Republican Party. Indeed, in my own lifetime it has moved from a business-oriented, anti-Communist big government Keynesianism (Eisenhower), to small government anti-Communism (Reagan), to anti-government, authoritarian anti-"socialism," defined as anything to the Left of their own, rightward-trending position. The Democrats, by contrast, have moved from FDR and Truman to Clinton, Obama, and Joe Biden. You didn't see any leftward movement? Neither do I.

By "the Middle," however, what the Boss is calling for is the rise of a rational, reasonable sphere in which discussion and the free flow of ideas (i.e., what historically has been called "liberalism") can co-exist even with the actors holding firmly to their own considered opinions. It is a sphere which, for all practical purposes, would span the Center-Left to the Center-Right, one which in which Barack Obama, Joe Biden, the Clintons, Chuck Schumer, Paul Krugman, Jamelle Bouie, Eugene Robinson, and E. J. Dionne (on the Left side of things) can co-exist peacefully and fruitfully with Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, David Brooks, Kathleen Parker, Tim Miller, Michael Gerson, and Steve Schmidt (on the Right side of things).

Of course, such comity cannot reasonably co-exist between strident sectors of the academic Left and the even more strident denizens of the decidedly not academic extreme Right of Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan and their ilk. But disagreement need not imply hostility. Unity need not imply ideological uniformity. One of the most meaningful moments of Jeep's commercial was the concluding dedication "To the ReUnited States of America." We have a long way to go. But that doesn't mean we can't hope.