Two pieces in today’s NYT highlight the contrasting culture of the Republican Party I grew up with and the one that it has become.
First, opinion columnist David French explains why “To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris.”
I believe life begins at conception. If I lived in Florida, I would support the state’s heartbeat bill and vote against the referendum seeking to liberalize Florida’s abortion laws. I supported the Dobbs decision and I support well-drafted abortion restrictions at the state and federal levels. I was a pro-life lawyer who worked for pro-life legal organizations. While I want prospective parents to be able to use I.V.F. to build their families, I do not believe that unused embryos should simply be discarded — thrown away as no longer useful.
But I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 and — ironically enough — I’m doing it in part to try to save conservatism.
Here’s what I mean.
Since the day Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, the MAGA movement has been engaged in a long-running, slow-rolling ideological and characterological transformation of the Republican Party. At each step, it has pushed Republicans further and further away from Reaganite conservatism. It has divorced Republican voters from any major consideration of character in leadership and all the while it has labeled people who resisted the change as “traitors.”
What allegiance do you owe a party, a movement or a politician when it or they fundamentally change their ideology and ethos?
There’s a whole lot of explanation in the paragraphs that follow, but none will be needed for the sort of people who read political blogs.
Contrast this with Richard Fausset‘s report “Kid Rock Threw the Party. MAGA Faithful Brought the Joy, Rage and Smirnoff Ice.” It’s a typical feature piece, long on anecdote.
Alan Jeanetti, a 73-year-old retired barber, was tailgating with friends before Rock the Country, a touring music festival headlined by the pro-Trump musician Kid Rock. Mr. Jeanetti’s head was wrapped in a star-spangled bandanna. His T-shirt declared, “I Don’t Care.”
Mr. Jeanetti actually cares about many things, including the toll that his political leanings have taken on his personal life. “I have lost so many friends because I was a Trump lover,” he said. “I wouldn’t do that to them.”
On this broiling July day in Anderson, S.C., however, Mr. Jeanetti had a safe space. A tribe. All around him were fellow fans of former President Donald J. Trump, many with big trucks lining the green fields around the outdoor concert venue. Trump flags fluttered above R.V.s and tents, alongside American flags and a few of the Confederate variety.
Some 22,500 people would come on this first day of the two-day festival, according to the local sheriff’s office, drawn by Kid Rock and an abundance of country performers. “It’s going to be another Woodstock One,” Mr. Jeanetti said.
Starting in April in Gonzales, La., and stopping in six other midsize Southern cities through late July, Rock the Country offered a vision of the MAGA movement in pure party mode.
The shows felt like Trump rallies without the former president, unburdened by policy talk, speeches from lesser-known G.O.P. players, and the buzz-kill tendencies of Mr. Trump himself, who tends to noodle at the lectern like a jam-band soloist.
What remained was a snapshot of a maturing American subculture, with unwritten conventions rivaling those of Deadheads or Swifties, and a dizzying mash-up of hedonism and piety, angry rebellion and beer-guzzling pursuit of happiness.
It was also more evidence that Kid Rock, the 53-year-old Michigan entertainer and festival co-owner whose real name is Robert James Ritchie, has emerged as a chief cultural standard-bearer of Trumpism. At the Republican National Convention in July, Mr. Ritchie, who says he golfs regularly with Mr. Trump, performed shortly before the former president’s speech accepting the nomination, leading the crowd in chants of “Fight! Fight!” and setting a defiantly salty tone with his anthem, “American Bad Ass.”
In a phone interview last week, Mr. Ritchie said that Rock the Country had been designed to appeal to the conservative demographic that had made TV shows like “Duck Dynasty” and “Yellowstone” so popular.
I’m sure a lot of these folks voted for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, too. But the sheer vulgarity and hedonism of the crowd—in terms of the music, the slogans they chose to wear, and the like—are the things for which Republicans used to chide and ridicule the left. I’m too young to have first-hand recollections of the anti-hippy days but certainly recall the outrage and disgust over the excesses of hard rock and, certainly, “gangster rap.”
Then again, I find the juxtaposition of “Duck Dynasty,” which I consider trash television, and “Yellowstone,” which is an excellent updating of the Western genre, odd. It doesn’t seem like they’re remotely aimed at the same audience.
Mr. Ritchie, who began his career as a rather apolitical party rapper, has not only ridden the wave of working-class anger that propels the MAGA movement, but he has also done much to shape it. His 2023 protest of Bud Light, after the beer brand partnered with a transgender influencer, sent its sales plummeting.
After the November election, Mr. Ritchie said, he would try to “lower the tone” politically, “and go back to trying to make good music that anybody can enjoy.” But for now, he said, “I’m going to go hard in the paint through this election for my guy, because I believe in his policies.”
[…]
In South Carolina, Kid Rock was the biggest act on the first day of the festival, with the country star Jason Aldean headlining on the second. By late afternoon on Day 1, thousands of people — young and old, overwhelmingly white — had crowded into the open field in front of the stage. Young women clopped across the grass in cherry-red cowgirl boots and Daisy Dukes. Men tried to outdo each other with T-shirts with politically incorrect remarks (“Taxes are Gay”; “Ammosexual”; “I’m voting CONVICTED FELON 2024”).
[…]
It had also been two weeks since a gunman had tried to assassinate Mr. Trump in Pennsylvania, and one shirt seemed to set the tone more than others: It showed Mr. Trump raising his middle fingers, with the words “YOU MISSED,” followed by an expletive.
Again, the reveling in being low class just astounds me.
The conservative movement once proudly defined itself in opposition to the recreational drug use of the leftist counterculture. At Rock the Country, a cannabis tent did a brisk business in prerolled joints and Delta-9 space pops. Another company sold gummies containing a “proprietary mushroom and nootropics” blend, the packaging said, for a “mind-bending experience.” Bud Light was the conspicuous sponsor of a two-story outdoor bar.
A lighting rig facing the stage had been designed, an organizer told the crowd, to resemble a cross, a reminder that “the true hope for the United States is Jesus Christ.”
The juxtaposition just makes my head hurt.
Before Kid Rock’s set, Shane Quick, one of the festival organizers, took the stage and asked the fans to join him in prayer. He thanked God for the military, the police, barbecue and Southeastern Conference football. “Dear God,” he said, “we thank you that just a few days ago, you kept the future president Donald Trump safe from the assassination attempt.”
The crowd went wild. Moments later, Kid Rock took the stage, flanked by dancers who gyrated on poles topped with American flags. He danced and rapped about his rough and rowdy ways. He performed his signature song, “Cowboy,” with its provocative line, “I can smell a pig from a mile away.” At one point he sang in a bluesman’s voice about the nefarious cultural imports of soccer and tofu.
Late in the show, Mr. Trump’s face hovered above the stage in a prerecorded video. He told the crowd they were the “true backbone” of the country.
“Let’s make America rock again,” Mr. Trump said in the video.
Mr. Ritchie said that he hopes Rock the Country will become a regular fixture on the American festival calendar, and predicted that Trumpism would live on as a cultural phenomenon beyond Mr. Trump’s time in politics, like Grateful Dead fans after Jerry Garcia died.
“I think the MAGA movement is probably bigger than Trump at the end of the day,” he said. “Whatever this is, I think it will continue without him.”
I don’t know whether I would call this a “movement,” in that it doesn’t seem to be united by any ideology. Unless “fuck you” counts. I’m not really sure what the hell to call it.
There’s certainly a cult of personality around Trump. But there is also something bigger than Trump. It’s how low-lives like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert get elected to high office.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously declared, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” While both are true, culture seems to dominate politics right now. Certainly, in the MAGA GOP.
