For Springsteen Fans Now Angry with Bruce

June 2, 2026

Tags: Colbert, MAGA, MSM, Reichstag, Springsteen
Posted in: Democracy, Other Ideas, Post-Constitution America, Trump

Stephen Colbert is off the air. I waited to write this to make sure that our democracy, despite what Colbert and his regular guest Bruce Springteen are saying, remains intact. It does.

Colbert and the old Springsteen are mourned because the two saw a chance to make a very large amount of money telling people already pre-positioned to believe the sky has fallen. They are living embodiments of the blurring among entertainment, righteous protest, and partisan affirmation. Their audiences increasingly want just confirmation. Springsteen in particular sounds like he’s reciting some AI-scrubbed version of outtakes from the Declaration of Independence; the poetry that reached a hand across barriers seems lost.

They are men of their times. We live in a world of constant media stimulation, with every day being the day the doctor calls with the test results. Americans have convinced themselves they are living through a uniquely apocalyptic moment for freedom in general and the First Amendment in the particular. Every unpleasant event becomes evidence of democracy dying. Social media posts become the Reichstag Fire. A conservative commencement speaker becomes the death of free inquiry. A television cancellation becomes political persecution. It’s all about as shallow as a puddle.

Nothing can simply happen anymore. Not sure? One of the seemingly most critical issues facing our government today is whether to build a ballroom next to the White House. If every Trump-driven event is an existential threat, then every minor programming change must also be existential. Something as transient through our pop culture as a TV show can’t just have become old or irrelevant like “I Love Lucy” and “Father Knows Best”. Every era produces another so-called permanent cultural fixture that instead still ends up disappearing so completely younger people assume it was a local fast-food chain. Vaudeville disappeared. Radio drama disappeared. Video rental stores disappeared. And television shows end. They always end. That is literally the business model.

Instead, fascist, anti-democratic forces must be silencing truth-tellers. We’ll soon, it all suggests, be passing video loops of Colbert hand-to-hand like Soviet-era dissidents shuffling mimeographed manifestos around smoky coffee shops.

It’s funny the resistance chose as its spokesman Colbert, hardly a rebel broadcasting via pirate radio. He hosted one of the most expensive network television programs in the country. He operated with corporate backing and fawning celebrity access. This is a wealthy comic employed by a multibillion-dollar corporation. Springsteen is reputed to be a billionaire himself, and plays to audiences who can swing thousands of dollars for a ticket. But this isn’t an argument that only poor artists can discover truth, but instead a reminder that Colbert and his supporting acts are part of a system of money and influence and corporate greed as big or bigger than MAGA. Their comedy/commentary is no longer sharp or clever. It is simply mocking and humiliating, as crude as when Colbert called Trump “Putin’s c*ckholster” and Springsteen claimed (on Colbert’s show) that those who supported Trump were “small-minded people who got no idea what the freedoms of this beautiful country are supposed to be about.” It is likely Colbert could stand in front of an audience and just say “Trump sucks” over and over to applause. That takes no courage. Our American political culture is exhausted, and the progressive electorate is now dependent on such one-sided narration to tell it what to believe. That cheapens us.

Despite being a Springsteen fan since I was 17, and Bruce was not much older, I’ve never met him. But I suspect today if we met, he would not be interested in talking with a guy like me. Bruce at his angriest in songs like Born in the USA or The Ghost of Tom Joad, was an inclusive populist, talking about the hardships we all shared in one form or another as Americans no matter how we voted. In the blistering song about the death of industrialization in the Midwest, Youngstown, Springsteen does not ask if the forgotten steel workers are Republicans or Democrats. What if in the aftermath of 9/11 Springsteen wrote a song condemning half of all Muslims instead of the prayer that became The Rising?

In his very best music, like his own hero, Woody Guthrie, before him, Springsteen retains hope — at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe, everything that dies someday comes back, I believe there’s a promised land. Artists who once, like Guthrie, translated shared American pain into art now too often exploit partisan identity into dollars. Bruce once not too long ago allowed for sincere beliefs that differed between honest men and women without condemning those who disagreed, because what we shared mattered more than how we differed. He professed we need a conscience, not a party affiliation, to make America great. I am mourning here something larger than just celebrity political disagreement. I mourn the loss of a shared American vocabulary. Bruuuuce!!! Bruce?

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