Springsteen isn’t a “critical patriot,” he’s a partisan hack, but I love him anyway

For a man who claims to be driven by principle, he has an odd habit, one dating back to the 1980s, of only entering the fray when a Republican is in office, either sleeping through Democrat Presidencies or somehow believing all our problems are solved when we elect a Democrat.

“I believe in critical patriotism,” legendary singer, songwriter, and long term foe of President Donald Trump, Bruce Springsteen explained on a recent PBS special devoted to finding America in song. “I believe that’s the definition of a patriot, you know, that you love your country so much that you are willing to look at it clearly, recognize its faults, encourage it to be a better place, and believe that you carry in your heart the country that is waiting.”  Taken on its own, it’s a reasonable, even powerful construct.  Every American is guaranteed the right to free speech and has the ability to speak out for what they believe in.  Loving your country and being proud of it doesn’t require you to believe it’s perfect.  Throughout history, critical voices have been essential for meaningful change and patriots have used their voices to make the country a better place.  John Quincy Adams, the son of America’s second President and himself America’s sixth, spent more than a decade Congress after losing his bid for a second term, fighting against Southern slaveholders, fearing the awful institution would one day split up the union as it eventually did.   At the time, one of his adversaries Henry Wise described him as the “the acutest, the astutest, and archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed.” Frederick Douglass, the former slave who became one of America’s first true Civil Rights activists is another perfect example.  He loathed the awful institution of slavery with a fierce, unforgiving passion, not surprisingly given his personal experience as a slave, but ultimately revered the Founders and our founding documents, separating the laws and principles from the people who administer them. “A wise man has said that few people have been found better than their laws, but many have been found worse…Shall we condemn the righteous law because wicked men twist it to the support of wickedness? Is that the way to deal with good and evil? Shall we blot out all distinction between them, and hand over to slavery all that slavery may claim on the score of long practice?” He asked.

There are, of course, many others who fit the description of critical patriots, those who loved their country yet devoted their lives to critiquing a perceived flaw or flaws and seeking a remedy.  In fact, there’s an argument to be made, as Springsteen himself alludes to, that this is what patriotism requires.  Blind love of something and the belief that something must be perfect because of that love alone is not nearly as meaningful as loving something despite its flaws, in some cases we might even say because of its flaws.  The latter, I believe, many would agree is the more principled position, but the key lies in the notion of a principle in the first place.  Principles, like morals, aren’t contingent things, subject to the ebbs and flows of political power and human affairs.  They are instead supposed to be fixed in place, existing beyond the matters of the moment, above them in a way that makes the moment subservient, lesser, not as important.  John Quincy and Frederick Douglass were opposed to slavery whoever was the President and whoever controlled Congress.  They’re fight wasn’t with the people who happened to occupy positions of power at the time, but with the institution itself independent of those people.

The same, however, is not true of Springsteen.  Instead, his criticisms and the underlying passion seem entirely contingent on whether the occupant of the Oval Office is a Democrat or a Republican, a trend that dates all the way to the Presidency of Ronald Reagan.  Back then, he was far less politically vocal and preferred to let his work speak for itself, but it was during the 1985 Born in the USA tour that he began playing the anti-war anthem “War” and insisted in concert that blind faith in your leaders will get you killed. Though he was telling people in 1988, “Don’t vote for that fucking Bush, man,”  referring to Reagan’s successor, Springsteen’s modern, progressive political persona did not truly develop until the second Bush Presidency.  In addition to actively campaigning for a candidate for the first time, John Kerry followed by Barack Obama, he released one of his darkest, most focused albums lambasting the second President Bush for our failures in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, 2007’s Magic.  He described the Bush Administration as a “Freudian nightmare” and a “disaster,” and claimed Americans had “justifiably lost faith in the American dream.”  “After the disaster of the last eight years, we need somebody to lead us in an American reclamation project,” he said while speaking on behalf of President Barack Obama.  Even then, there were indications this was extremely personal, rather than principles or policy when he insisted, “Despite the terrible erosion to our standing in the world, we remain for many people a house of dreams, and 1,000 George Bushes and 1,000 Dick Cheneys will never be able to tear that house down.”  In addition to railing against the Iraq war, justifiably in many cases, the title tragic to Magic was widely seen as claiming President Bush was a liar, a trickster, rather than merely someone who made a bad decision in good faith.  As he intoned, “Trust none of what you here (Trust none of what you here), And less of what you see,” and promised “I’ll cut you in half, While you’re smiling ear to ear, And the freedom that you sought’s, Drifting like a ghost among the trees.”

This all ended after President Obama took office, however. Then, Springsteen went almost completely silent– I’ll explain the “almost” in a moment because it only emphasizes the point. As if the challenges facing this country had been solved by electing a Democrat, he had next to nothing to say about the state of America until Donald Trump arrived on the scene in 2015, when the Boss suddenly re-emerged, combining personal attacks with complaints about policy, even recycling the themes from “Magic” into a new track, “Rainmaker” released in 2020.  Before Trump became President for that matter, Springsteen was insisting “The republic is under siege by a moron, basically,” “The ideas he’s moving to the mainstream are all very dangerous ideas – white nationalism and the alt-right movement,” “The whole thing is tragic. Without overstating it, it’s a tragedy for our democracy,” “This is a man whose vision is limited to little beyond himself,” and “He has a profound lack of decency that would allow him to prioritize his own interests and ego before American democracy itself,” but it wasn’t really until his recent, Land of Hope and Dreams, No Kings tour that he actually spelled out some of the details of his concerns beyond the personalities involved.  Having been to a show at the Prudential Center in Newark earlier this year myself, these concerns centered on a few key things, shared widely in progressive circles:  President Trump’s supposed threat to democracy and expansive use of executive power, his immigration policy, and the war in Iran.  At least in principle, these might be the sort of principled things that drove previous critical patriots, but in practice, one would have to ignore the entire Obama Presidency to arrive at the conclusion that first George W. Bush and then Donald Trump were somehow unique in undermining the things Springsteen holds dear.

Unless he slept through the eight years between January 2009 and January 2017, however, Springsteen should certainly be aware that it was President Obama who first and quite brazenly declared that he had a pen and a phone in an authoritarian power grab.  Back then, we couldn’t wait on Congress to act, and therefore, a Democrat President used that declaration to do things he himself said couldn’t be done through his authority alone, bragging about subverting democracy to cheers from his supporters.  As President Obama put it himself in 2011, “We can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job. Where they won’t act, I will.”  After radically extending the power of the EPA and other agencies, he proceeded to issue sweeping, dare I say authoritarian orders across government spending, infrastructure, broadband, manufacturing funding, youth employment, and supposed consumer protections, but that was just the beginning.  In 2014, he went even further, creating the equivalent of new immigration laws after failing to pass a bill through Congress, as was the agreed upon path to that point as everyone familiar with Schoolhouse Rock is aware.  Though he had previously declared, “I’m president, I’m not king… I can’t just make the laws up myself,” and even more specifically, “With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case. There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system,” he went ahead and did so anyway, creating a new DACA expansion that granted unlawful work permits to so-called Dreamers and eventually illegal alien parents.  In the wake of these authoritarian power grabs, 26 states took him to court and blocked the action.  Where was Springsteen and his concerns about democracy then?

In this case, Springsteen would likely argue that the end justified the means.  While he’d have to ignore that President Obama was nicknamed the “deporter in chief” in some circles and that he was the original cager of immigrant children, he would probably claim the principle of protecting illegal immigrants was more important than that requiring elected officials to follow standard legislative procedure.  To do so, however, he would have to ignore the reality that President Obama extended this some authoritarian thinking to making war, which in principle Springsteen has been adamantly against for decades.  It was President Obama who infamously led from behind in Libya while completely ignoring the War Powers Act, which required him to regularly report to Congress and gain their blessing for continued military action.  As of May 2011, the Obama Administration had been engaged with our allies in military action in Libya to overthrow the tyrant Prime Minister Muammar Gaddafi though the previous administration had struck a deal with him over a potential nuclear weapons for more than 60 days without congressional authorization as the law demands.  In fact, by June 2011 the Obama Administration faced a bipartisan lawsuit filed by ten members of Congress.  As they put it in their complaint, the suit sought injunctive and declaratory relief to “to protect the plaintiffs and the country from a stated policy of defendant Barack Obama, President of the United States, whereby a president may unilaterally go to war in Libya and other countries without the declaration of war from Congress.”   They continued, “The decision to intervene in a civil war and expend what is now approaching $1 billion at a time of great economic stress is one that raises a host of concerns for our political system,” noting that it “has resulted in the loss of U.S. aircraft in combat operations.”  President Obama completely rebuffed these claims, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton callously remarked “We came, we saw, he died,” and Libya was left in such a state of disarray that the United States lost four men including an ambassador in Benghazi the following year.  The troubles there persist to this day, but where was Springsteen?

Nor was this the only instance where President Obama insisted he was the sole authority on life and death decisions.  In secret, his Administration developed a policy that made him judge, jury, and executioner of even American citizens in the War on Terror.  As Politico reported in 2016, “President Barack Obama has to personally approve the killing of a U.S. citizen targeted for a lethal drone strike outside combat areas, according to a policy Obama adopted in 2013.  The president also is called upon to approve drone strikes against permanent residents of the U.S. and when ‘there is a lack of consensus’ among agency chiefs about whom to target, but in other cases he is simply ‘apprised’ of the targeting decision, the newly-disclosed document shows.”  Incredibly, these strikes could be authorized against US citizens even if there was the potential to capture them alive for charging and trial.  “While officials had previously claimed people were only targeted when capture wasn’t feasible,” the actual policy adds the caveat “at the time,” meaning “an assessment that capture is not feasible at the time of the operation.”  Even Politico admitted, albeit in some rather hazy language that came dangerously close to political spin, “That suggests the U.S. can go forward with a strike even if there’s reason to believe it might be possible to capture someone at some later point, perhaps if he transits between one place and another.”  As a result of this policy, at least four US citizens were killed.  In 2011, the fourth of these deaths was in Yemen – not even a country we were in conflict with at the time – and perhaps even worse, three other individuals were taken out who weren’t even targets.  While trying to eliminate radical cleric and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, three more died including 16-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki and Samir Khan.  “It is clear and logical that United States citizenship alone does not make such individuals immune from being targeted,” Attorney General Holder wrote to Senator Patrick Leahy in the aftermath. “Rather, it means the government must take special care and take into account all relevant constitutional considerations, the laws of war, and other laws with respect to U.S. citizens — even those who are leading efforts to kill their fellow, innocent Americans.”  Obviously, they did no such thing, but where was Springsteen?

Earlier, I mentioned that he was “almost” totally silent throughout this, but in a case where the exception proves the rule, he did release a politically charged album in 2012, Wrecking Ball, which was largely devoted to the plight of the economically disadvantaged in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown.  In “Death to My Hometown,” for example, which he performed on his recent tour, he assails those who destroyed small town America without firing any shots or dropping any bombs:

I awoke from a quiet night, I never heard a sound
Marauders raided in the dark and brought death to my hometown, boys
Death to my hometown
They destroyed our families’ factories and they took our homes
They left our bodies on the plains, the vultures picked our bones

Though President Obama was in office at the time and therefore, was responsible for both the economy including any reforms to prevent such a thing in the future and holding those responsible for the crisis to account, Springsteen didn’t reference him once, even obliquely, nor remotely suggesting that politics had anything to do with the reality that not a single person was held accountable.  Instead, he simply pretended that the President was completely powerless and rather incredibly, he even managed to sneak in a shot at the former President, George W. Bush, and his handling of Hurricane Katrina.  In “We Take Care of Our Own,” he sang, “From the shotgun shack to the Superdome, There ain’t no help the cavalry’s stayed home, There ain’t no-one hearing the bugle blown.”

Taken together, it’s impossible to conclude that Springsteen is anything other than a partisan hack, promoting Democrats no matter what they do and savaging Republicans even when they do the same thing as Democrats, or at times have nothing to do with the current challenges facing the country.  This, however, is fine by me.  After all, I am a partisan hack myself and in no possible future could I see myself voting for a Democrat, but the difference is:  I readily admit it and do not pretend I’m anything otherwise, cloaking my partisan activism in critical patriotism.  While I wish Springsteen would be self aware enough to do the same, I still love him anyway, or as I have been joking with my wife, Tony Soprano style:  Bruce Springsteen and Donald Trump are heroes in this house, end of story.  To which she responds, this might  be the only house in America where that’s the case.