Greetings,
Toby Keith has died, but don’t worry, this essay isn’t about him. At least not directly. Just like the recent spate of essays on T*ylor Sw*ft, perhaps the best or even the only way to comprehend such figures of pop consciousness is via their mediation, that is, their representation and reception in a specific place and time. My guides for this kind of endeavor are as always Adorno and Debord, who with all of their manifest imperfections never failed to contextualize the contemporary/late modern pop spectacle by inserting it into concentrations of capital. Indeed, Debord’s “Spectacle” is nothing more than the visual (in this case complemented by the auditory) manifestation of that concentration. With this in mind, and for better or worse, Keith in particular is identified with a place and time very different from our own, and yet which also feels like a practice run for the current moment.
I have written before on the parallels between 2003 and 2023, and I am not ashamed to say that I may have been wrong on some matters: I thought for example that the American public would grow universally disgusted and mobilized by the ongoing genocide in Gaza, once Abu Ghraib-level events came to light. But of course we see those events every day, and those in power haven’t budged. I still think these events will be generational in importance, which is to say that they won’t go down the memory hole like Abu Ghraib mostly did, but their significance (moral, political, even spiritual) remains contentious and open to contest. If matters stay consistent through the summer, the first moment of truth will occur, I predict, in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention.
It might be tempting to think of Toby Keith’s awful paean to American imperialism as a forerunner or foundation of MAGA consciousness, but I would suggest that the opposite is true. The r/w imaginary is radically different in 2023; it barely resembles its ‘03 counterpart. Back when the song “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue” came out, I would hear it every time I would go out to sing karaoke with friends. Lines like “we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way” were always striking to me, especially when they were delivered by earnest, performatively patriotic singers. It’s like they couldn’t envision or imagine the actual ironic truth of those words when it came to the working-class young people who served in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Since that time, it’s impossible not to think of those lines in that way, in part because of the role or function that Trump played in disenchanting military service. As kids say these days, Trump simply said the quiet part out loud: the open secret of American right-wingers, especially the wealthy and powerful, is that military service is fine, but not for me or my class. It serves as something of a safety valve. It remains mostly an option for the working-class marginalized whose best ticket out of their communities is a military uniform. Even better, that rite of passage constituted (and still constitutes, perhaps even more so) a form of socialization that is profoundly conservative, even reactionary. It forms a kind of integration function, provides a buy-in for men and women who otherwise don’t benefit much from the neoliberal (destruction of the) social contract. While it is different and more “positive” than the school-to-prison pipeline, it is merely another manifestation of that same socioeconomic reality.
Trump of course went even further. The MAGAs successfully disseminated what Left activists had attempted for three or four generations: they questioned military service. They discussed imperialism! They even made service unappealing! Trump famously called veterans of foreign wars “losers,” and no one on the right pushed back. We must assume now that his rabid followers share that assessment. Just as we all somehow magically became anti-war after 2004, so the MAGAs on this one issue somehow gained insight into the phenomenon of class in America. They implicitly rejected the old bargain as a bad deal. Thanks to Trump, the old country-club paleoconservative view of American soldiers and Marines as cannon-fodder filtered down into popular consciousness. The resulting r/w perspective is as a result more cynical than the hawkish (and typically mawkish) worldview of Keith’s awful song.
In short, for mainstream MAGAs, the American boot is going in your loser ass, not mine. Nobody on the contemporary right believes these lyrics in the sense they were intended; into that conceptual and rhetorical space we now have liberal hawks like Andrew Bacevich and of course the whole Democratic foreign affairs/State Department apparatus associated with the likes of HRC, Albright, Nuland, and Samantha Power (hooray for liberal feminism!). There is a dark side to all of this (already pretty dark picture) however: for some MAGAs, cynicism morphed and metastasized into something truly virulent. For them, military service looks like a means to a white nationalist end. This is a whole additional problem worthy of another essay I will probably not write, but suffice it to say that this trend is not only consistent with the rise of MAGA but perhaps views itself as the street-level violent vanguard of that movement.
Great read, ty Dr.
I find contemporary r/w pop-conciousness a lot less mystifying since I heard another describe DJT as an "opportunist." Like a big blind squirrel and his unlucky nuts.
It will be interesting to see how someone like Sw*ft will influence the memory of this time 20 years from now.