In the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election, parallels are being drawn to George W Bush’s victories. Bush won his first presidential election in 2000 narrowly, losing the popular vote but winning just enough of the electoral college to scrape into the White House. In 2004, he won the popular vote too. Remind you of anyone?
As the New York Times’s Ezra Klein wrote on Thursday, “In my lifetime, until today, that was the most total rejection liberals experienced… What made that loss hurt so much for liberals was that by 2004, Americans knew who Bush was and what he had done. They chose him anyway.”
The American left is now confronting a similar re-evaluation of their fellow countrymen. Trump’s 2016 victory was marginal—he, like Bush in 2000, had lost the popular vote. But 2024 cannot be dismissed, nor equivocated. A majority of the voting public want him back.
The left’s feeling of dejection and bewilderment at the public’s choice has now curdled into heated online debates over complicity. To what extent can one blame Trump supporters for their choice? Should we conceive of them as knowing fascists, or uninformed dupes? Or even objects of sympathy and understanding?
This debate couldn’t be hashed out on Twitter/X in 2004, since the platform didn’t exist then. Instead, the most declarative verdict was made in the cultural sphere, from an entirely unlikely source—a pop-punk band.
Green Day’s magnum opus American Idiot was a truly unique album and a stark departure from the band’s—and the genre’s—previous themes of getting stoned and feeling alienated. A punkish opera inspired by David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, by turns searingly earnest and playfully camp, featuring sprawling multi-part songs and eclectic musical influences, the record aimed squarely at George Bush and his administration—as well as his supporters.
The titular opening track paints middle-American suburbanites as complicit in their president’s crimes. Frontman Billie Joe Armstrong memorably opines:
Don’t wanna be an American idiot
One nation controlled by the media
Information age of hysteria
It’s calling out to idiot America
Armstrong not only indicts the media, particularly cable news channels such as Fox News, for fomenting the fear and paranoia that provided cover for Bush’s military adventurism. He also condemns the “idiot Americans” who fell for it. He imbues them with agency and rebukes them harshly, in a manner that would feel almost taboo in polite company 20 years on.
On “Holiday”, the album’s other explicitly political track, the incendiary spoken-word bridge, accompanied by military drumbeats, compares the “rally around the flag” effect of Bush’s nationalism to the Nazis saluting their führer. The holiday itself symbolises Americans taking a mental vacation from their moral responsibility for the Iraq War, averting their eyes and luxuriating in their own privilege while soldiers and civilians died.
Green Day’s political awakening was hardly subtle, and they didn’t have much of a vision beyond dissent (though, to be fair, does a pop-punk band need to have a five-point plan?). But, for many, their album was the “fuck you” to the status quo that was needed. Alongside other members of the unofficial opposition, influencers such as documentarian Michael Moore and comedian Jon Stewart, Green Day had an indelible impact on teenage millennials’ early political outlooks.
While American Idiot was released prior to polling day in 2004, anticipating disappointment at the result, its success accelerated in the wake of Bush’s second victory. Many liberals took solace in the posture of the righteous minority. As Armstrong had sung on Green Day’s previous album, “down with the moral majority”.
Of course, there are obvious limitations to such a posture in terms of political organising: one doesn’t build coalitions by calling persuadable voters “idiots”. This reticence has only heightened since the 2016 election, when many Trump voters were, often incorrectly, depicted as downtrodden workers finding an outlet for legitimate economic grievances. Calling an Appalachian hillbilly an idiot—or, worse, a “redneck”—comes off as more snobbish than edgy and, even when not coming directly from Democratic politicians, liberals may tarnish their brand by association. Do it on Twitter/X and you’re sure to be shouted down from all directions.
But the merit of mincing words is now being called into question; Armstrong’s abrasiveness is being re-evaluated. The New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, for instance, made a case on BlueSky for moral clarity:
“As long as journalists and pundits act as if they are amateur political strategists and not people trying to understand and tell the truth about the world, they are going to take the implicit view that voters can never be wrong, which then demands endless explanation of their morally blameless choice. It is not my job to say what a political party should or should not be doing. It is my job to tell the truth, and the truth is that a lot of people willingly abandoned their faculties to make a bad, destructive choice. This is not a popular opinion these days but people have agency.”
Such forthrightness has been bolstered by a more nuanced picture of Maga’s demographics, which has undermined the simple 2016 narrative of the “forgotten and left behind”. Data is still emerging, but the 2024 Trump coalition appears to be a motley crew—Trump gained in some economically distressed areas, but also in some booming ones; he beat Harris among those on middle incomes, but not among those with the lowest and highest incomes. You can now safely punch up; not necessarily just down.
Green Day themselves certainly seem to think the message of American Idiot is transferable to the current moment. The band marked the album’s recent 20th anniversary by re-releasing a deluxe version and have taken to changing the lyrics of the title track to reference Trump when performing live, attracting the ire of Elon Musk. During their most recent tour, they broke the record for musicians encouraging voters to register.
Capital-P politics aside, the broad sense of societal malaise evoked by American Idiot could barely be more prescient. The specifics—cable TV, US military mobilisation, evangelical conservatism—might have been replaced by right-wing populism, the manosphere and TikTok. But the general imagery—of a younger generation “born and raised by hypocrites”, of a public numbed to the news, of bombs raining—has undeniable purchase.
As the New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich wrote, Green Day feels of-the-moment again “not because Green Day has capitulated to the whims of the Zeitgeist but because, somehow, the Zeitgeist has bent around Green Day”.
Few people are irredeemably idiots, and breaching sociopolitical divides remains imperative. But as Trump ascends to the most powerful office in the world once more, can we seriously deny that idiocy remains a powerful force in public life?
