Revisiting 1980s Rock Stars’ Embarrassing Record of Political Incompetence

Desperate to somehow remain culturally relevant, Bruce Springsteen continues his Captain Ahab-like obsession with President Trump, now to include an October 3 pre-election politicized concert near Washington, D.C.  

What’s perplexing is that anyone pays any attention at all to Springsteen and his fellow aging 1980s millionaire entertainers, who apparently believe that they possess some sort of extraordinary geopolitical wisdom.  

The contrary is actually true.  Few things in life have aged more poorly than the smug left-wing political sermons of Springsteen, Sting, Billy Joel and Phil Collins most saliently.  Had Americans followed their urgings instead of Ronald Reagan’s, the Cold War may very well have continued to this day or even ended with a different victor.  

Take Sting’s insufferably sanctimonious “Russians,” perhaps the quintessential example of celebrity political foolishness masquerading as sophistication.  

Released in 1985, the song amounted to a European-style lecture aimed squarely at Ronald Reagan and supposedly reckless American opposition to Soviet expansionism.  “We share the same biology,” Sting crooned, warning that Reagan’s firmness toward Moscow risked nuclear annihilation.  

Reagan didn’t blunder into nuclear war, obviously.  Rather, his leadership rebuilt American military strength, deployed intermediate-range missiles in Europe over hysterical left-wing objections, called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire,” launched the Strategic Defense Initiative and applied relentless economic and strategic pressure against a decrepit communist system ready to collapse under its own corruption and inefficiency.  

Before the ‘80s had ended, the Berlin Wall fell.  The Soviet Union soon collapsed, and Eastern Europe was liberated.  The Cold War ended without the United States firing a shot at Moscow.  

Closer to home, recall Billy Joel’s “Allentown,” another anthem built upon leftist jeremiad.  Joel mocked America’s rising patriotism with his lyric, “…they threw an American flag in our face,” then lamented steel town struggles with the embarrassingly misguided lyric, “So the graduations hang on the wall, but they never really helped us at all.”  

Seriously?  

One of the worst pieces of socioeconomic advice imaginable is the notion that education somehow “never really helped.”  Rudimentary economic data shows precisely the opposite.  Americans lacking a high school diploma face dramatically lower lifetime earnings, significantly higher unemployment rates, shorter life expectancy, higher incarceration rates and substantially reduced economic mobility.  The gap between high school graduates and dropouts remains enormous, and college graduates generally fare even better financially.  

In any event, contrary to Joel’s theme, America emerged from Reagan’s 1980s more prosperous and powerful than ever.  

Bruce Springsteen, meanwhile, elevated anti-American self-pity into an art form.  

Many casual listeners mistakenly infer “Born in the U.S.A.” as patriotic from its chorus, but it’s a bitter denunciation of America generally and the Vietnam War specifically, including Springsteen’s infamous line about being sent “to go and kill the yellow man.”  

Apparently, fighting communist aggression in Southeast Asia — after communist aggression in Korea had already cost millions of lives — amounted, in Springsteen’s telling, to nothing more than racist imperial slaughter.  

That framing ignored another rather inconvenient fact:  The communist regimes America opposed were genuinely monstrous.  

North Vietnam’s victorious communist government imposed prison camps, political purges and widespread repression after the fall of Saigon.  The Khmer Rouge next door in Cambodia murdered roughly two million people in one of history’s most horrifying genocides.  In contrast, South Korea — defended by American blood during the Korean War — ultimately evolved into one of the world’s most prosperous democracies instead of becoming another starving totalitarian wasteland like North Korea.  

Also recall Phil Collins and Genesis with “Land of Confusion,” accompanied by its silly claymation video portraying Ronald Reagan as a senile incompetent liable to trigger nuclear Armageddon by accidentally pushing the wrong button.  

Within two years of that video, however, the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Soviet empire soon disintegrated before the world’s eyes.  

Oops.  

Accordingly, the most edifying aspect of revisiting 1980s celebrity activism is digesting how spectacularly wrong it proved.  Those sanctimonious singers and others sneered at American strength, mocked anti-communism, caricatured Reagan as a warmonger and treated conservative voters as ignorant rubes manipulated by cowboy nationalism.  

Reagan’s success in rebuilding a depressed America and winning the Cold War constitutes the greatest profile in political leadership since World War II.  

Meanwhile, those who spent the 1980s lecturing ordinary Americans from multimillion-dollar mansions persist in regurgitating the same slogans today.  

It all raises an obvious question:  Why haven’t they been laughed offstage and out of public discourse long ago?  

The ability to sing, play guitar or perform before a camera no more qualifies someone to analyze economics, foreign policy or constitutional government than a college humanities professor’s ability to teach art history qualifies him to conduct heart surgery.  

The 1980s and that decade’s aftermath gifted us an invaluable reminder of that truth.  The rock stars mocked Reagan, but history vindicated Reagan and humiliated the rock stars.  

Hopefully public discourse soon does a better job of reflecting that simple lesson.

Timothy H. Lee is Senior Vice President of legal and public affairs at the Center for Individual Freedom.

Reprinted with Permission from CFIF.org – By Timothy H. Lee

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.