In 2024, there is a basic incoherence in the establishment/anti-establishment split.
The post Is the GOP the Party of Normal, or Is It Punk Rock? appeared first on The American Conservative.
In 2024, there is a basic incoherence in the establishment/anti-establishment split.
One of my prized possessions is an electric guitar painted and signed by Green Day. My father won it at a charity auction and gave it to me. Growing up, at least one of the albums Dookie, Nimrod, or American Idiot were loaded up in the CD player in Dad’s truck at all times.
I went to college in Berkeley, California, where the band came up in the ’90s. Three decades on, the punk-rock trio still has their mark on Berkeley. One local doctor known for liberally writing certain prescriptions has a signed Green Day record on the wall. Legend has it he once performed the same service for Billie Joe Armstrong.
For me, the pandemic ended when a group of college buddies and I saw Green Day at San Francisco’s Oracle Park on a beautiful summer evening in 2021. On Monday, I saw them again at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. I knew going in that Billie Joe and the boys would have some silly anti-Trump display. I was right. At one point, Armstrong held up a Trump mask with “IDIOT” sharpied across the forehead. Lyrics to the band’s hit song “American Idiot” were changed to “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda.”
Those kinds of digs don’t really really bother me.
But it got me thinking about what Vivek Ramaswamy said at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee:
Our message to Gen Z is this: You’re going to be the generation that actually saves our country. You want to be a rebel? Show up on your college campus and try calling yourself a conservative. Say you want to get married, have kids, and teach them to pledge allegiance to your country. Give it a try, I bet it’ll be pretty liberating.
There’s another side to the GOP’s messaging. In the 2024 election cycle, Trump and the GOP has leaned into the label “common sense” rather than “conservative.” Similarly, others have suggested that the left, with its trans-kids, race-essentialist-education, and abortion-on-demand agenda, is waging a war on normality, and the GOP is the only party standing in the breach.
Which is it? Is the American right at its core countercultural, or is it the natural expression of the American political tradition?
Many political commentators on the right suggest the former. They certainly have a point, given the left’s stranglehold on almost all major American institutions public and private. From Hollywood to Harvard, from the United Auto Workers to Wall Street firms, liberalism is in the driver’s seat. The only way to take these institutions back, these commentators believe, is by acts of radical infiltration or subversion—depose or destroy. The left is the machine. To be on the right means to rage against it.
Green Day’s antics on Monday night, however, suggest that the right still represents normal America. I tend to agree; I think that’s a good thing.
Admittedly, punk rock emerged in the 1970s America with strong anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian themes. With its punchy lyrics and distorted sounds, punk is at its core non-conformist. Its non-conformity was always focused more on the cultural order, specifically traditional American values, rather than the economic order. Take “American Idiot”: While the lyrics present as a rebellion against a corporate and media establishment (“one nation controlled by the media”), it’s the normies who are portrayed as brainwashed “idiots.”
Green Day rages on behalf of the machine rather than against it because the liberal machine in America today is fundamentally non-conformist—or, more properly, anti-normal. One’s gender can change on a whim. Americans with wives and kids are “weird” while 40-year-old cat ladies on SSRIs are heroines. A presidential candidate can go from publicly identifying as Indian to identifying as black when it seems politically convenient, and no one in the corporate media blinks an eye.
The left makes no bones about the need for their cultural agenda to be enforced from the top down—parents have no right to know about what their child learns in the classroom, much less their child’s gender transition. It knows the American people will never go for it on their own. In our current system, playing to the interests of normal people seems a pretty good way for the GOP to win elections. There’s always a place for punk rock on my Spotify, but I guess you can count me among the normies.
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