This is Not Polarization
The worlds of Bad Bunny and Kid Rock are not "two Americas." The first is a large, diverse majority, and the second is an angry, nativist minority.
“I, too, sing America” —Langston Hughes
1.
This post begins with a meta-take, but morphs into a meditation.
This week’s dueling halftime shows — Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl, Kid Rock at a Turning Point USA event in North Dakota — have yielded many, many takes. My original idea for this post was to contrast the affirmations of the Bad Bunny appreciations — the only thing more powerful than hate is love, read the jumbotron — with the rage of the haters. I’ll still do that a bit, below.
But as I thought about it, I realized that this meta-take was misleading. Because America is not actually polarized, if polarization implies a split into two even sides. Numerically, according to polls and record sales alike, Bad Bunny’s exuberant, basically pluralistic ideal of America is overwhelmingly more popular than Kid Rock’s resentful, jingoistic, nationalist version.
That extends well beyond Super Bowl Sunday. It includes ICE’s actions in Minneapolis, Trump’s insane swashbuckling about Greenland and Venezuela, and the GOP’s Big Beautiful Billionaire tax cuts. These policies are wildly unpopular, polling in the 60/40, even 70/30 range, which, in American politics, is a landslide.
In a way, this makes sense: MAGA populism has never been that popular. Republican presidents like Reagan and Bush were obviously not liberal, but their policies — some culture war issues, smaller government, bigger military — coexisted with a basic consensus reality about American democracy and values. (Here’s Reagan on welcoming immigrants, for example.) That is American conservatism — not Kid Rock and JD Vance. Not MAGA.
The metaphor of “two Americas” is an illusion. One is the overwhelming majority; the other is not. They only look symmetrical because of billionaire-funded, right-wing media; opportunists pumping out pseudo-populist rhetoric and incendiary distortions; and politicians and corporatists willing to go along with it. These tactics sometimes work, but there are not two equal sides here, numerically or morally.
This isn’t polarization; it’s an attempt at a takeover.
2.
The two halftime events did present two very different versions of America. But they are in no way symmetrical to one another.
There have been many profound and insightful responses to Bad Bunny’s halftime show; here’s Jannese Torres unpacking some of the specific Puerto Rican culture, symbolism and history in the show and how it moved her, as a Latina woman watching it. As a non-Latina and non-woman, I loved and learned a lot from her post (and others like it).
Here, though, I want to focus on the way the performance reflected a certain vision of America united not by blood and soil, but by ideals of freedom, family, and opportunity — words which are often conservative-coded but can also have joyous, pluralistic, liberal meanings as well. Of the many such responses I could choose from, I’ll quote from a viral post by North Carolina State Senator Michael Garrett. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but here are some highlights:
I watched Bad Bunny deliver the most American halftime show I have ever seen…
That is the American story, not the sanitized, gated, English-only version that small and frightened people try to sell us. The REAL one. The messy, beautiful, multilingual, multicolored, courageous one. The one that has always been built by hands that speak every language and pray in every tongue and come from every corner of this hemisphere.
That is the America I want Jack and Charlotte [Garrett’s kids] to know. That when the moment came, when the whole world was watching, a Puerto Rican kid who grew up to become the most-streamed artist on Earth stood in front of 100 million people, sang in his mother’s language, blessed every nation in the Americas, and spiked a football that read “Together, we are America” into the ground. Not with anger. With joy. With love so big it made hate look exactly as small as it is.
And what did the President do? He called it “absolutely terrible.” He said “nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” He called it “a slap in the face to our Country.” The leader of the free world watched a celebration of love, culture, and everything this hemisphere has given to the world, and all he could see was something foreign. Something threatening. Something disgusting…
Bad Bunny didn’t say “ICE out” tonight. He didn’t need to. He just showed the whole world what America looks like when we are not afraid of each other. When culture is shared, not policed. When language is music, not a threat. When a flag from every nation in this hemisphere can walk across a football field together and the only words you need are the ones he gave us: “THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE.”
This is my patriotism too, as I’ve written about before. Like other progressives, I know America has always fallen far short of its ideals, from slavery and the genocide of Native Americans to the profound economic inequalities and other depredations of the present day. We can only move forward toward greatness. But unlike some further to my left, I also still believe in those ideals, which inspired my immigrant grandparents to come here and inspire the immigrants of today as well. And the Bad Bunny show epitomized that, with its diverse presentations of America, faith, family, and freedom – including some of my queer community’s favorite icons (and hunky same-sex dancers). The final image of the show was iconic:
But, as I’ve also written about, there are also other versions of American patriotism. Kid Rock may be an incoherent and idiotic exponent of them, but JD Vance and other ‘post-liberals’ have stated the case clearly: American greatness is about the traditions of the European-descended, Christian, male-dominated majority. It is not about shared values but is principally about the greatness of that ethno-nationalist culture, from Manifest Destiny to this administration’s white-supremacist-derived social media posts.
And in that culture, specific versions of faith, family, and freedom are more American than others. The English language is more American than Spanish. And while many American populists have grudgingly adopted a kind of color-blindness, Vice President Vance has stated that even his own wife, an Indian-American woman, is less American than he is.
Here’s Megyn Kelly, who I’m choosing for a specific reason, epitomizing this vision of majoritarian nationalist America (and making the center-right Piers Morgan look like a multiculturalist):
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So the contrast is clear. But is it really polarization? No.
3.
These two “sides” are neither numerically equal nor morally equal.
On the numbers alone, 142.3 million people watched Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl. Four million watched Kid Rock fail to lip-sync properly. And as my friend Noah Shachtman wrote in the Times, Bad Bunny is gigantic: Spotify’s most streamed artist, Grammy winner for album of the year, he is at the heart of the global music scene in 2026. More importantly, around two thirds of America disapproves of Trump’s handling of immigration, and most of the remaining third gets their news from propagandistic sources and online echo chambers.
So why the “divided” reaction to the Bad Bunny show? As Ilhan Omar said, it’s all about the benjamins.
Kelly, after all, is mostly a charlatan and clout-chaser. When presenting herself as a moderate advanced her career, that’s what she did. When that failed, she realized she could get more clicks as a rabble-rouser, so that’s what she’s doing now. She’s an opportunist and a grifter. Who knows what she believes.
Is this really “polarization”? Or is this a takeover by the Far Right, abetted by a media ecosystem that it is rapidly taking over?
And, we learned in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, the same is true of Fox News as a whole. For years, I believed the left-wing myth that Fox News was a giant psy-op by the Murdoch family, inventing crises about Ebola or immigrant caravans to move American politics to the right socially and economically. And, to be sure, that is part of it; Roger Ailes has said as much. But in the internal documents from the Dominion suit, we learned that by 2020 anyway, Fox News was mostly just chasing the bag. Having enraged and incited their audience, now they were slaves of “audience capture,” having to tack right in order to keep ratings up in the face of further-right outlets like One America News and Newsmax. Fox executives and hosts knew the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, but they also knew that if they didn’t jump on the Big Lie bandwagon, their audience would desert them — as indeed, much of it did. The real MAGA Right now sees them as corporate media sellouts.
That “real MAGA Right” is around twenty percent of the population, and always has been. Indeed, depending on how one understands ethno-nationalism, populism, and authoritarianism, it has long been the case that in nearly every Western country (and increasingly, non-Western ones, most importantly India), between fifteen and twenty-five percent of the population holds far right, ethno-nationalist views. This figure has been remarkably stable across time. It was true in 1930s Germany, in Mussolini’s Italy, in Fascist Spain and Portugal. And it was true in 1950s America, where around a quarter of the country supported Joe McCarthy, the John Birch Society, and Jim Crow.
The trouble is that, in electoral politics as in advanced mathematics, twenty five percent is half of fifty percent. Mainstream conservatives (Reagan, Nixon, Bush) usually find ways to accommodate the ‘patriots’ on the far right. They bring the Christian Right into their coalitions, they peddle soft racism about welfare queens and inner cities, and they talk of God, family, and country. This is not pure cynicism; they believe in these things, just not to the extremes of right-wing ethno-nationalism.
But at other times, the nationalists win, and the lunatics take over the asylum, so to speak. Now, the former mainstream — big business and media, in particular — must curry favor with the far right in order to thrive. And that is where we are now. As it always does, Capital capitulates, kowtowing to the authoritarian, giving him what he wants in exchange for what it wants. Politicians who had only recently lambasted the authoritarian as a danger to the republic — in our case, people like Vance (“America’s Hitler”), Lindsey Graham (“race-bating, xenophobic”), and Marco Rubio (“con artist”) — suddenly jump on board. And as long as they remain subservient to the autocrat, bygones are bygones and the nationalist takes over.
And then, rapidly, the authoritarian consolidates power: making it harder for free elections to take place, as Trump is doing; diminishing the authority of courts and the legislature, as Trump has done; creating armed forces accountable only to him, as Trump has done.
All this happens without the will of the majority. Remember, contrary to everything Stephen Miller or Mike Johnson says, Trump didn’t even win on ethno-nationalism; he won on the economy and on the sense of dread and betrayal that many Americans felt. Yes, somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of America believes in Kid Rock patriotism. But most really don’t. They may be more traditionally patriotic than I am, they may Back the Blue and Support our Troops in ways that I don’t — but they don’t think Bad Bunny is an anti-American terrorist, for God’s sake.
Let’s be clear, too, that in addition to its demographic minority, no amount of both-sidesing can equate these two visions of America. Even aside from Kelly’s anger and rage, and even aside from the historical or philosophical merits of her claims, there’s the simple imbalance of harm. Liberal pluralism, while it may make some cultural values less hegemonic than they used to be, isn’t putting kids in cages and deporting them. Liberal America does not oppress MAGA America the way that MAGA America seeks to oppress immigrants, people of color, queer people, and others. Bad Bunny is celebrating the many ways in which people live their lives and find joy. Kid Rock and Megyn Kelly are spitting on them.
This asymmetry reaches into nearly every aspect of our contemporary politics. Trump’s posting of a video with obviously racist depictions of Barack and Michelle Obama, together with the White House’s admonishment that we should all relax and learn to take a joke. Abject lies about Minneapolis ICE protestors, who are not Antifa (which, reminder, does not exist), not terrorists, and were not out to kill anyone. (Unlike, say, Kyle Rittenhouse.) More lies — as Vance himself admitted — about Haitian immigrants eating pets, which may now lead to the mass deportation of hundreds of people living lawfully in America. And so on.
Is this really “polarization”? Or is this a takeover by the Far Right, abetted by a media ecosystem that it is rapidly taking over?
4.
As promised, I want to turn from the political to the personal. And, as I sometimes do, I’m putting this last part behind the paywall since, well, it’s a little more personal.
