(CNN) – They know everything about glory days on the head – the legendary terrace that is the spiritual house of fans of Liverpool – the English Premier League champions.
But they are more used to legends such as Kenny Dalglish or Mohamed Salah who bangs in goals than political cries for help. So it was surreal to watch middle -aged British in addition to thousands of British, while Bruce Springsteen complained the democracy crisis of America on a holy football football.
“The America I love … A beacon of hope and freedom for 250 years is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treacherous,” said Springsteen, on Wednesday evening at Anfield Stadium.
The newest warnings from the boss for authorism on his European tour were passionate and attracted great cheers. But they seemed to be about the heads of some fans who do not live in the swirl of tension, constantly rattling American national psyche.
Liverpudlians waited for decades for Springsteen to play the Beatles’ birthplace, whose “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” said his life when he heard it on the radio as a young person in New Jersey.
Most had a hhh-hungry heart for a party. They have a great show. But also a lesson about American citizen.
“Tonight we all ask you who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, to increase your voices, to stand with us against authoritarianism and let the freedom ring!” Springsteen said.
His European Odyssey unfolds because Western democracies are re -shaken by right -wing populism. So his determination to comment on breaking, is therefore raising various questions.
What is the role of artists in what Springsteen calls ‘dangerous times’? Can they make a difference, or should stars of entertainment and sports avoid politically and stick to what they know? Fox News -Polemist Laura Ingraham once told Basketball icon LeBron James, for example, that he should just keep their mouths and dribbles.
Springsteen’s grim Paeans to steel villages and down-on-their-luck cities made him a working class ballade. But when blue voters storm to the right, does he really speak for them?
Then there is a problem that Springsteen explicitly tried to answer in Liverpool this week: is it rough but noble America that he has been mythologized for 50 years?
How Springsteen and Trump the same social grounds of mine
Trump certainly wants to bring the art to heel – given his threats on social media “Very overestimated” Springsteen, Taylor Swift and other superstars and his takeover of the Kennedy Center in Washington. Every center of liberal and free thinking from pop music to Ivy League universities is vulnerable to authoritarian impulses.
But it is also true that celebrities often wore with their trendy political views, especially preaching during Hollywood Awards ceremonies. However, Springsteen has been social comments for decades. And what is the use of rock ‘n’ roll, if not on rebellion? Rockers usually run in their wild -haired childhood instead of in their mid -70s, but desperate times require desperate measures.
Strangely enough, given their transatlantic dialogue from recent weeks, mines Trump and Springsteen the same political terrain – the economic and spiritual erosion of the globalization of industrial heart countries.
“Now that the whitewashed windows of Main Street, and empty stores, no one seem to be there, does not want to come down here,” Springsteen sang in 1984 in “My Hometown” long before Trump set his sights on the Oval Office.
The White House sometimes refers to similar notes, although neither the boss nor Trump would welcome the comparison. “The main street in my small city, looks very worse than it probably did decades ago before I lived,” said Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt in March quite less poetic.
Political error lines also shift. In the US and Europe, the working class rejects the politics of hope and optimism in dark times.
And the Democratic politicians who supported Springsteen – as defeated 2004 nominated John Kerry, who borrowed the “No Sprender” Van Springsteen as his campaign, and former President Barack Obama – did not succeed in recovering in the industrial scourge that acted as a catalyst for Trumpism.
Political landscapes are shifting in England and the US
There are also warning signals in England. The British tours of the boss often coincided with political hinge moments. In the 1970s he found synergy with the smoky industrial cities of the North. In his period ‘Born in the US’ he chose the side of miners who collided with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. A new BBC documentary revealed this week that in the 1980s he gave $ 20,000 to a support group of a strikers.
Liverpool, a soulful, earthy city directly from the Springsteen Oeuvre is an old Labor Party Heartland. But in a recent interim election, Nigel Farage’s populist, Pro-Trump, reform party destroyed a worker of nearly 15,000 in Runcorn, a dilapidated industrial city, 15 miles upstream from Liverpool on the Mersey river. This blast showed that the working class of Labor “Red Wall” is in the deep danger and could follow American states like Ohio by shifting to the right while employees reject progressives.
Minister of Labor Lisa Nandy, whose Wigan constituency is nearby, warned In an interview with the new statesman Magazine this month that political tensions reached a breaking point in the north.
“People have seen how their city centers fall apart, their lives have become more difficult in the last year and a half … I don’t remember time that people worked so hard and had so little for it,” said Nandy, painting a photo that many Americans will be known.
In another sign of a seismic shift in British politics last week, the reform came a third place in an unprecedented result in a parliamentary interim election in a one -off industrial heart outside Glasgow. Scotland has so far been immune to the populist wave – but times are changing.
Yet there is not much evidence that Trump or his populist cousins in the United Kingdom solve meaningful Hartland pain. They have always been better in making use of vulnerability than repairing. And Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” would hurt the arms by reducing access to Medicaid and food aid while the rich large tax reductions are handed over.
“When the circumstances in a country are ripe for a demagogue, you can bet that someone will appear,” Springsteen told the crowd in Liverpool and introduced “Rainmaker” a song about a Conman who says that droughts affected by drought tells that “White’s Black and Black is white”. While the E -Straatband struck, Springsteen said, “This is for the precious leader of America.”
A struggle for the soul of America
Springsteen has its ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’. But Trump has his new ‘Golden Age’. He claims that he can “make America big again” by attacking observed bastions of liberal power, such as elite universities and the press, with mass deportations of immigrants without papers and by being a challenge.
Springsteen gained this implicitly as On-American while in Liverpool he drains extra meaning in the lyrics of ‘Long Walk Home’, a song that for Trump’s first election win for a decade before the victory of Trump dates: “Your flag flies over the court building. Who we are.”
The boss sent fans in a cool summer evening and begged them not to give up his country.
“The America that I have sung for you for 50 years is really real, and regardless of the many mistakes, is a great country with a great people and we will survive this moment,” he said.
But his fight with Trump for the soul of America will continue. The contrast would be sharper near Americans if he tours our soil, the most openly politicized phase of half a century -long career.
Maybe in the 250th birthday year of America in 2026?
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