MAGA’s latest heartbreak is Bruce Springsteen, which is to say it is another episode in America’s longest-running misunderstanding, the belief that a song with a big chorus and a working-class accent must be a campaign jingle for conservatism and super-nationalism. This time the offense is the song, “Streets of Minneapolis” framed as a lament and a protest, a hymn for people ground down by policy and indifference. It names Trump. It names ICE. It does not ask permission. And for a movement that once swore Springsteen was theirs, this feels less like disagreement than betrayal.
But the betrayal is imaginary. Springsteen never crossed the aisle; the aisle was wheeled under him like a stage prop.
The anger is theatrical, social-media bonfires, caps in all-caps, the familiar demand that artists “stick to music,” as if music were a neutral mineral extracted from silence. What stings is not merely that Springsteen criticized Trump or immigration enforcement; it’s that he did so in the voice MAGA thought it owned. The denim baritone. The factory whistle of the harmonica. The righteous ache of people who work too hard for too little. How dare he speak that language and not deliver the expected verdict?
This confusion has a long paper trail. It begins canonically, in 1984, when Ronald Reagan, campaigning in New Jersey, invoked “America’s future” and nodded at “the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire, New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen.” The man himself nearly choked on the compliment. Reagan had mistaken a howl for a pledge. “Born in the U.S.A.” was not a victory lap; it was a wound stitched into a chant. It was a veteran’s story told loudly enough to sound like a parade. The chorus was an alarm bell mistaken for confetti.
That mistake hardened into tradition. Every few years, someone in power discovers Springsteen the way tourists discover the ocean, dazzled by the surface, baffled by the undertow. The songs are full of highways, fathers, sweat and faith in tomorrow, ingredients that read as conservative if you skim them the way you skim a menu. But stay long enough to taste and you find layoffs, broken unions, racial borders, wars that come home in pieces, the government as a landlord who never fixes the plumbing. His patriotism has always been anatomical, he loves the country the way a doctor loves a patient, which is to say he notices the disease.
So when “Streets of Minneapolis” names ICE it is not a plot twist. It is the same moral grammar he has used for decades, the insistence that policy is not abstract, that it walks on legs and knocks on doors and leaves people waiting in rooms that smell like bleach and fear. Minneapolis is not a random coordinate; it is shorthand for the American city as crucible, where history goes to be reheated and served to the living. Springsteen sings about streets because streets are where consequences take the bus.
MAGA’s outrage is therefore less ideological than romantic. It is the fury of the dumped who insists the relationship was mutual. They believed the guitar solos were vows. They believed the blue collar in his voice was a uniform. They believed that loving the country required loving its loudest men. Now he has written a song that refuses that equation and the spell breaks like glass.
There is also, hovering behind the tantrum, the unspoken rule that protest is legitimate only when it is nostalgic. You may sing about coal mines that closed in 1979, about a factory that rusted politely into history. But to sing about the present, about deportation vans, about the architecture of fear, feels like cheating. It interrupts the fantasy that injustice is a museum exhibit, safely labeled and behind velvet rope.
Springsteen’s critics ask why he can’t just entertain. The question assumes that entertainment is a form of anesthesia, not attention. It assumes that the working class exists as a mood board, flannel, grit, gravelly hope, rather than as people who bleed when policy sharpens its elbows. “Streets of Minneapolis” is not a lecture; it is an inventory of bruises. If it sounds political, that is because politics is what bruises are called when they form patterns.
The deeper irony is that MAGA’s claim to Springsteen depended on ignoring the very literacy his songs demand. They heard the drums but not the story. They wanted the flag without the footnotes. Reagan’s mistake became a tradition, the anthem without the verses, the chorus without the cause. It is a way of listening that treats art as a mirror, never a window.
Springsteen has always written from the window. He leans out, describes what he sees and trusts the listener to notice the traffic. That some listeners prefer to pull down the blinds is not his problem. “Streets of Minneapolis” does what his best songs have always done, it refuses to flatter the powerful and it refuses to confuse volume with virtue.
If MAGA feels orphaned by this, it is because it adopted a voice without asking what the voice was saying. The country is full of loud songs. It is also full of people who mistake loudness for loyalty. Springsteen, inconveniently, keeps choosing fidelity to the street over allegiance to the stage. That is not a betrayal. It is the job description.
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