Has America Lost a Culture War – to a Bunny?

On February 6, two days before the Super Bowl, The New York Times published a column by culture critic Noah Shachtman titled, “The Culture War Is Over – Bad Bunny Won.” It’s a remarkable claim given that most Americans – or at least most over the age of 25 – had likely never heard of “Bad Bunny” before this year’s big game.

The occasion for Shachtman’s announcement was the selection of popular Puerto Rican singer Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, performing under the stage name “Bad Bunny,” to provide the halftime entertainment. Aside from his habit of grabbing his crotch during performances and incorporating plenty of explicit language and derogatory terms for women in his music, Bad Bunny is known for performing entirely in Spanish.

That last fact, for Shachtman, demonstrated that “English is no longer [American] culture’s lingua franca, or at least not the only one.” As further evidence, Shachtman reported that “a third of American pop music fans listen to music in Spanish,” and “nearly two-thirds listen to artists from other countries.” He noted in particular the popularity in the U.S. (and elsewhere) of K-Pop, which originated in South Korea.

While I’m a devoted football fan, it’s my longtime practice to hit the “mute” button during halftime shows as well as during commercials (so I can use the time to read). Out of curiosity, however, I paused my reading to look at the show and turn on the sound just in time to notice two aspects of the Bunny’s act.

One was, as promised, the crotch-grabbing. The other aspect was aural. At first, my heart warmed to his singing “God Bless America.” Then, however, seeing the American flag followed by the flags of other (probably all) central and South American countries, I realized the point: Bunny wasn’t calling on God to bless this country. Rather, he was defining “America” to include all the countries of the Western Hemisphere, with presumably no hierarchy among them.

As two other Times contributors subsequently noted, Bunny’s usage elaborated the meaning of his proclamation, upon receiving a Grammy award, that “We are Americans.” As the contributors, both of them American academics with Hispanic names, put it, Bunny “wasn’t merely referring to citizenship” [which all Puerto Ricans enjoy], but “was challenging this country’s ever-narrowing definitions of who is – and who is not – American.”

Needless to say, the authors provide not a shred of evidence for that proposition, and the very selection of Bunny would seem to refute it. Rather, I am compelled to conclude, what they actually object to is the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. This is hardly a “narrowing” of the dominant understanding of citizenship prior to the Obama and Biden administrations. What country is there that does not limit its official definition to those who are legal residents?

Notably, in Bunny’s own home of Puerto Rico, there are growing anxieties about “outsiders” coming in and buying up property. Bunny himself has spoken out against this alleged “gentrification.” He apparently does see the conflict between this position and opposing the legitimate enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.

But there was a deeper political meaning to Bunny’s act, as he indicated in a pre-game press conference in which he explained, “English is not my first language. But it’s OK, it’s not America’s first language either.” However, as New York Post columnist Rich Lowry pointed out, while “Bad Bunny’s first language, Spanish, was a colonial imposition in the Western Hemisphere beginning in 1492,” if the rapper had “wanted to associate himself with languages prior to this wave of European settlement, he’d have to sing in, say, Nahuatl or Algonquian.”

(Of course, I will add, there’s no reason to assume that those were the first languages spoken in the hemisphere either.) But as Lowry explains, while the majority of original settlers of North America spoke English, founded “enduring institutions of representative government, and made English the most important and widely spoken language in the world,” the fact that their descendants came to call their country “America” “is an affront to elements in Latin America and on the left,” who suddenly “consider it insulting to everyone else living” in the hemisphere not to be called “Americans” as well.

If the practice of setting legal limits to immigration, or of continuing to call our citizens “Americans,” is a sign of a culture war (an ominous term having roots in Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s seven-year battle with the Catholic Church over control of education in Germany [1871-78]), it certainly wasn’t the U.S. government, or the vast majority of its citizens, who launched it.

Fortunately, following the forecast of James Madison in Federalist no. 10, the “multiplicity of [religious] sects,” as well as the various countries from which immigrants to this country arrived starting in the 17th century, combined with our system of constitutional government, saved us from the sort of interreligious battles that long characterized life in Europe. And the very fact that Americans have welcomed immigrants from many lands, and enjoyed their respective “cultures” (artistic, literary, musical) signifies that aside from some extremists on both Left and Right, there is no obstacle to cultural or ethnic tolerance in today’s America.

But a caveat must be added here. While the United States is inherently a “creedal” nation, based (as Abraham Lincoln argued) on our common dedication to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, its continuance depends as well on a shared, proud loyalty to the country’s history – despite its blemishes (such as no country lacks).

When children are taught that history is a shameful one (as in The New York Times’s phony “1619 Project,” now in use in some 4,500 schools), their willingness to uphold and defend it as adults is weakened. (See most recently, on the overall problem, Benjamin Ginsberg and Dorothea Israel Wilson, The Unmaking of American Citizenship: How Americans Learned Not to Love Their Country and What Can Be Done About It.) Nor will their commitment to their country’s defense and prosperity mean much if they feel no more attachment to it than they do to other “American” countries like Paraguay, Peru, or Mexico.

I will add that while having American youngsters learn foreign languages, as well as acquire an appreciation of artistic culture from around the world, is highly desirable, there is one practice, adopted in the name of tolerance or multiculturalism several decades ago, that weakens the practice of civic assimilation and hence a politics of toleration: the adoption of bilingual ballots (or in some places ballots with many languages) in our elections.

Not requiring voters to have a demonstrated knowledge of English sufficient to enable them to learn about the qualities and programs of rival candidates is a recipe for undermining civic unity. It means that, in areas with (most commonly, Spanish-speaking) voters who lack that degree of political literacy, candidates have an incentive not to tailor their program or their rhetoric to a broad swath of voters, but rather to focus only on promising gains to their fellow non-English-fluent citizens. When elected, such representatives are likely to pose more extreme demands on their colleagues (so as practically to guarantee their own re-election) rather than be prepared to compromise.

Only through a positive civic education, and an insistence on the capacity to understand our shared language, can America live up to its national motto: e pluribus unum.

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.