Who Is Bruce Springsteen Preaching To?

7 min readBruce Springsteen—man, myth, rock demigod—materializes at a mic as if beamed to it from beyond the clouds, drawing thunderous applause from the sold-out crowd in Phoenix’s Mortgage Matchup Center. Springsteen is decked in a pinstripe shirt and a tie beneath a vest and slim jeans and has traded his once-standard rocker boots for a pair of big-soled running shoes. He’s backed by a 19-member version of the E Street Band, whose ranks tonight include guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, a catalyst for this tour. Before strumming a single note on his Telecaster, the Hall of Famer dives into his first monologue of this “political” show:We are here in celebration and defense of our American ideas. Democracy, our Constitution, and our sacred American promise. The America that I love. The America that I’ve written about for 50 years has been a beacon of hope and liberty, all around the world, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless, and treasonous administration. Tonight, we ask all of you to join with us in choosing hope over fear; democracy over authoritarianism; the rule of law over lawlessness; ethics over unbridled corruption; resistance over complacency; truth over lies; unity over division; and peace over war.The band launches into a spirited performance of Edwin Starr’s classic Vietnam protest song “War.” Then segues into “Born in the U.S.A.” Then segues into “Death to My Hometown.”And that triumvirate kicks off Springsteen’s Land of Hope & Dreams American Tour, which he heralds as “in celebration and defense of America.” As Springsteen’s latest folk song is “Streets of Minneapolis,” about the tragic deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, it’s fitting that the tour opened in Minnesota. In that inaugural show, Springsteen delivered anti-authoritarian screeds that provoked 45/47 into a predictable tirade on Truth Social:Bad, and very boring singer, Bruce Springsteen, who looks like a dried up prune who has suffered greatly from the work of a really bad plastic surgeon, has long had a horrible and incurable case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, sometimes referred to as TDS. The guy is a total loser who spews hate against a President who won a Landslide Election, including the popular vote, all Seven Swing States, and 86% of the Counties across America. Under Sleepy Joe and the Dems, our Country was DEAD, and now we have the “hottest” Country, by far, anywhere in the World. MAGA SHOULD BOYCOTT HIS OVERPRICED CONCERTS, WHICH SUCK. SAVE YOUR HARD EARNED MONEY. AMERICA IS BACK!!! President DJT. These two baby boomers are no strangers to beef. Way back in 2016, when 45/47 was using “Born in the U.S.A.” on the campaign trail against Springsteen’s wishes, the rocker called the then candidate a “moron.” Even though that kind of milquetoast language softened the threat 45/47 posed, I have little doubt that Springsteen’s been sincere in his persistent criticisms, in his apprehension of perils. Nonetheless, gandering around the arena—I count more Black folks on stage than I see in the crowd, not to mention scant brown people—I have questions about Springsteen’s fans, about what their monolithic nature bespeaks of their paradigms.Getty ImagesSpringsteen on his current tour.But of course, Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen’s origin story is rock lore: His father was a moody (possibly bipolar) World War II vet and his mother bread-won for the family as a secretary. He grew up in a two-family house beside a filling station in a working-class Freehold, New Jersey (he still owns a 400-acre farm in the same county), and rehearsed with his first band in a part of town locals dubbed Texas, because it’d been settled by hillbillies who’d migrated from the South. Springsteen struggled in the early days of his career, playing in small bands on the New Jersey shore, once so low on funds that he applied for food stamps, and even after he was signed to a record label and christened the “new Dylan,” his first couple of albums fell short of commercial success.Alas, he’s long lived as a self-proclaimed “rich man in a poor man’s shirt.” One who’s been called the poet laureate of blue-collar generations, who’s been described as a “populist rock star.”In fact, Springsteen’s vast catalog is damn near a paean to populism. Across the last five decades, he’s drawn from Civil War tunes, Irish rebel songs, and chain-gang chants. From the Okie tenant farmer protagonist of The Grapes of Wrath and the disaffected young white man who went on a killing spree in Nebraska and Wyoming. He’s written about disenchanted veterans and laid-off auto workers. About shuttered factories and abandoned towns. About rural communities, fading American glory, and the failed promise of the West. All told, Springsteen’s America ain’t a shiny city on a hill but a burnished small town in the lowlands.Springsteen’s personal politics lean toward the left-wing populism that is a diverse coalition of “the people” versus the elites of big business. To the man’s credit, his music has also addressed the AIDS epidemic, the 9/11 attacks, our wars of choice in Vietnam, Iraq, and Iran, as well as the murders of Amadou Diallo, Pretti, and Good. Not to mention his role in “We Are the World” and his support of groups including Amnesty International and the ACLU and other activism. However, it’s also true that the world he’s mythologized in his music has been co-opted to reify right-wing populist ideals. That while he’s stressed the ways deindustrialization has destroyed small towns (sending jobs abroad and leaving blue-collar workers with nowhere to wear their work shirts for a paycheck), he’s also been parcel to fostering a culture where the residents of those small towns—locales that are seldom America the melting pot—own the most righteous claim to aggrievement. And best believe, grievance is license.The irony is that his sworn baby-booming foe demagogued his way into the White House by seizing upon the grievances of rural America (often cast as the real or true Americans), by trafficking in a far-right populist vision of “the people”—that is, the hate-based, fear-of-the-foreigner, anti-immigrant, illegal-aliens-are-the-enemy-within, people-against-the-people, racial-caste brand of it. And that ressentiment, in extreme cases, has manifest in chants of “YOU WILL NOT REPLACE US!” in Charlottesville or besieging the Capitol in an attempted coup or seething the need to “take back our country.”This article appeared in the Summer 2026 issue of EsquiresubscribeWhich is to say, Springsteen’s long-lauded history of writing songs about people and places dear to him has given his ideological antagonists material to weaponize.Springsteen, by a miracle of endurance, hasn’t taken a one break during the show, soapboxing a few times, always with conviction. For the encore, the lights come up, and before he doffs his vest to reveal a dress shirt drenched in sweat, before he struts around the stage and into the crowd and back onto the stage, he addresses us a final time:We are currently living through troubled times. Our . . . our American values that sustained us 250 years are being challenged as never before....honesty, honor, humility, truth, compassion, humanity, thoughtfulness, morality, true strength, and decency . . . don’t let anybody tell you that these things don’t matter anymore. They do! . . . They are at the heart of the kind of men and women we are, the kind of citizens we want to be, and the kind of country we want to leave for our children. So many of our elected leaders failed us that this American tragedy can only be stopped by the American people.The crowd goes raucous again. Privileged are those who can hear him extolling values that have sustained America for 250 years and not reflect on the fact that chattel slavery brutalized Black people for 246 years. That Jim Crow reigned for 100 years beyond that. That this regime is deep into scheming Jim Crow 2.0. To say nothing of the concomitant oppression of Native Americans and non-European immigrants.While I’ll admit it’s complicated, as much as I believe Springsteen believes in the promise of America, it’s somewhere between surreal and caustic to hear him utter those words in an arena of 17,000-plus people, most of whom—I can’t help but see—look like the 50-plus percent of voters who cast a ballot for 45/47 in all three elections. In a state that 45/47 flipped back to red last election. In an area that has a street named for the dude who laid the foundation of the southern strategy. The same place where my son’s best friend, the one who often picked him up for school and was his study partner, who was among the friends he attended prom with and who helped him plan and co-host a grad party, that same sweet girl voted MAGA last election with the rest of her family. But maybe I’m expecting too much of this concert and of a billionaire (a Forbes valuation he disputes) rock star born before the Civil Rights movement began. Maybe it’s more consequential that he rouses white people. Maybe it’s enough that, even at risk of alienating some of his prime audience, he’s been excoriating 45/47 with language that attempts to meet the gravity of his harms. If it’s true that a portion of his fans have also supported 45/47, maybe his efforts will foster factions in MAGA. And in any case, the pride of Freehold deserves kudos for using his platform to speak truths. For plying his immense gifts in service of the justice America’s professed all along.