If politics runs downstream from culture per the “Breitbart Doctrine”, then do far-right politics run downstream from country music?
Sometimes referred to as the Breitbart Doctrine, far-right commentator Andrew Breitbart argues that politics flows downstream from culture. He has acolytes, including Steve Bannon, who recognize and advocate for cultural change as a prerequisite for political transformation. Considering that country music has functioned as a political bellwether in the US for over 100 years, could we add to the doctrine that far-right politics often flows downstream from country culture?
The shift to the right in the 1920s that brought us the second and largest iteration of the Ku Klux Klan was foreshadowed by changes that took place in the music industry. Initially a genre derived from African as well as European sources, so-called “hillbilly music” was segregated from “race music” during the 1910s, separated into a silo marketed to white working-class rural America. Promoted as old-time music and catering to a demographic feeling displaced and disgruntled by modern life, country music took on the character of its audience by producing songs that spoke to suffering and resilience, but also to traditional values and prejudicial scapegoating exploited by far-right populists.
During the 1920s, it was not uncommon for country singers to be hired to perform at campaign events for politicians advocating segregationist policies; in doing so, those candidates embraced and celebrated the incipient genre as their own. Seeing the financial benefits of this music reaching these audiences, record companies encouraged their artists to create cultural versions of the anger, fear, and resentment being sold in such politics. Those unwilling departed the country camp, finding a more liberal home in folk and blues cultures.
Of course, early country music singers did not just start writing the kind of strident hard-right anthems we hear today from the likes of Jason Aldean and John Rich. However, a pre-political consciousness formed within the music that found expression through emotions and narrative stories that spoke to issues of social class, gender, and (sometimes) race in ways ideologues found malleable to their purposes.
Whenever the US has lurched to the right—in the 1920s, late ‘60s, early ‘00s, and today—one can find political undercurrents in the preceding years that were already flowing through country music culture. Many have spent a great deal of time and energy trying to understand where Trumpism came from; few, though, have examined the indicators that had been emanating from country music. Those signs suggest that the politics were already in the culture, and that the music was a bellwether attuned to the pulse of the nation.
Redrawing the Political Map
Early country music was as aligned to liberal populism as to its conservative counterpart, but that balance changed in the 1960s when the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam War divided the nation, in the process redrawing the electoral map into a red and blue pattern that has remained largely the same to this day. Once dominated by blue Dixiecrats, the Deep South went Republican red during this decade, its core country audience both precipitating and reflecting the shifting party politics.
Years before Richard Nixon came to the presidential office in 1968, songs like Johnny Wright’s “Hello Vietnam” (1965) and Dave Dudley’s “Tell Them What We’re Fighting For” (1966) established a hawkish position for country music culture, one opposed to rock’s mostly anti-war stance. It represented a demographic both Nixon and far-right independent candidate George Wallace had to win over to have a chance in the 1968 election, so both scurried to court and co-opt country music’s establishment, artists, and fans.
A son of the South, Wallace had the inside track, as well as years of experience in using country artists on the campaign trail. “Southern politics provided good work for country entertainers,” quips J. Lester Feder in his 2006 dissertation, “Song of the South: Country Music, Race, Region, and the Politics of Culture 1920-1974″, and Wallace found that their music traveled, too, the songs of hardship and struggle as relatable to frustrated voters in the North as the South.
Grand Ole Opry stars Minnie Pearl, Grandpa Jones, Hank Snow, Webb Pierce, and Roy Clark were all in the Wallace camp; as were George Jones and Tammy Wynette, the couple hosting a benefit for the candidate on their Florida property in the 1972 campaign, over 7,000 fans showing up for “Wallace’s Woodstock”. So confident was the segregationist governor of riding country culture to the White House that he blitzed its radio stations with campaign ads, telling aids, “The good people that like country and western are gonna elect me president!” (Feder)
His forecast proved overly optimistic, but Wallace only lost to Nixon in 1968 by three points across 11 southern states.
A classical music lover from California, Nixon had to learn how to successfully co-opt country culture, and Wallace proved a useful tutor. Borrowing his strategies, Nixon shifted rightwards, using code-words like “law and order” and “the silent majority” to communicate to a demographic angry about desegregation policies and anti-war protests. He targeted country music stations, too, offering a Wallace-lite agenda that promised more likelihood of being implemented. When Roy Acuff, the veteran country singer who ran as a Republican candidate for governor of Tennessee in 1948, hosted Nixon at the Opry, it was clear that the campaign’s co-option outreach was paying dividends.
Throughout his terms in office, Nixon had no greater support beyond this culture, the Country Music Association (CMA) openly championing the administration. In 1970, the President recognized this support by declaring October Country Music Month. In 1972, in gratitude, the industry created a custom-made 15-song compilation entitled Thank You, Mr. President. Each song was selected to represent the values espoused by Nixon, with CMA President Tex Ritter contributing this introductory comment: “Our country music…in reality is the voice of your ‘silent majority’.” (Feder)
During the final days of his presidency, when the walls of the Watergate scandal were closing in on him, Nixon found sanctuary at the Opry, where his appearance was met with standing ovations from his still loyal supporters.
No song encapsulates more the mores exploited by Nixon and Wallace than Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” (1969). A nationwide hit, “Okie” displays the geography of values that fosters identity politics. The song’s broad reach and appeal showed that there was a marketplace beyond the Deep South for far-right talking points, its plain-speaking rhetoric alerting politicians to the persuasive power of a country song.
“We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee,” sings Haggard in the opening line, initiating a motif of activities good rural folk “don’t” indulge in (dodging the draft, dressing like a hippy). These don’ts are balanced by activities the silent majority “still” hold on to (respecting one’s elders, waving “old glory”). In simple, relatable images, Haggard wrote from the far-right playbook, fostering fear and anger around groups he resented, while bemoaning the loss of the values that “made America great”.
Few had ever said you could be “proud to be an Okie” before, the songwriter elevating associated traits as virtuous in contrast to the unpatriotic immorality of the counter-culture. A revolutionary song in the country catalog, “Okie” created a picture that Nixon’s “forgotten Americans”—now Trump’s MAGA retributionists—could see themselves in. This was culture laying the foundations for political building blocks.
The 9/11 Country Road
Politics continued to attach itself more deliberately to country music—and vice versa—in the wake of Haggard’s anthem, devotees like Hank Williams Jr. and Charlie Daniels picking up his baton and carrying it through subsequent decades. They added vigilante justice to Haggard’s list of “do’s”, reinforcing enduring associations of country with frontier mythology prior to Ronald Reagan’s self-imaging as the “cowboy president” in 1980.
As governor of California, Reagan had witnessed the pre-political influence of Haggard, so in 1972 put himself in the singer’s fans’ graces by pardoning the former outlaw for his prior crimes. As president, he continued to woo country culture, in 1983 hosting a reception for various stars in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the founding of the CMA. There, Reagan praised the genre as “purely American”—a sentiment some interpreted as code for “white” —adding, “The best thing about country music is its people…a God-fearing patriotic bunch from the mainstream of America.” (“Remarks to Members of the Country Music Association During a Television Performance” Regan Library Archives, 16 March 1983)
The event was déjà vu all over again for attendees Grandpa Jones and Minnie Pearl, both of whom had provided cultural comfort and validation for Nixon at similar events a decade earlier. All presidents since Nixon have followed the same strategy of co-option of country music, periodically checking in at CMA events to emphasize shared values and cozy up to the stars of the day. Politics may be downstream from culture, but both still share the same body of water.
Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, was an establishment Republican with little in common with country music’s largely working-class rural demographic; moreover, he had few of the acting skills that had enabled his predecessor to pretend otherwise. Nevertheless, like Jimmy Carter, Bush Sr. was a real fan of the genre, with a good friend in Randy Travis from within its ranks. Though less exploitative than Reagan of its political rebels, Bush Sr. still showed up to the American Country Music Awards, if only to associate himself with what he called—as Nixon and Reagan had—“America’s music” and its “proud” fans.
His son, George W. Bush, was also a reputed country fan, and the community’s feelings towards him were made clear from its reaction to the Dixie Chicks criticizing his military actions in the Middle East. Cast from the fold by fans, radio, and industry, the band has had to play the rest of their career from the more marginal enclaves of the Americana genre. Bush Jr.’s wars against Afghanistan and Iraq had started in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, an event that jolted country music culture and conservative politicians swiftly to the right.
Signs of such a shift had been seen earlier, too, when Christian nationalist Pat Robertson and Catholic culture warrior Pat Buchanan had run (unsuccessfully) in Republican presidential primaries. Their speeches shocked many, though few saw much future for their fiery rhetoric at the time.
With 9/11, though, country musicians and their fans led the way in marching the base back towards their brand of extremism. Those who perceive Trump as an aberration in US history might revisit some of the songs released at this time. There you will find similar outbursts of Islamophobia and “America first” nationalism that we hear ad nauseam today.
Leading the charge was Oklahoma’s Toby Keith, who offered up large undiluted doses of fury in his anthem of retribution, jingoism, and war mongering, “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” (2002), with its promise to all enemies: “You’ll be sorry you messed with the U-S-of-A / ‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way.” Darryl Worley followed with “Have You Forgotten?” (2003), in which he added fuel to the fire of misinformation that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
Even the most mainstream country singers jumped on the performative patriot bandwagon, Alan Jackson releasing “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” (2001) and Clint Black releasing “Iraq and Roll” (2003). The latter previewed the kind of clampdown the Trump administration is currently applying to those opposing Israeli actions in Gaza, Black threatening the dissenting protesters of the time with a “smart bomb”.
Common to all these post-9/11 country songs was an uncompromising attitude to perceived enemies (within and beyond), and a macho bravado we have become all too familiar with from Trump’s MAGA forces. “The remnants of the 9/11 genre remain,” opines columnist Kofi Mframa in a recent USA Today article entitled “America’s shift right should be no surprise. Country music resurgence warned us.” (22 November 2024)
In the early 2010s, country music appeared to be taking a turn towards liberalism when Brad Paisley teamed with LL Cool J in an effort at starting a cross-racial dialogue in “Accidental Racist” (2013). That proved an outlier, though, Paisley’s peers realized that nuanced conversations about social topics do not play as well to the conservative base as declarations of war against the “other” side do.
Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Brothers sent an early Trumpian shot across the bow with “Stand Up and Say So (Hillary’s America)” (2016). This was followed by Neal McCoy’s “Take a Knee, My Ass” (2017), which makes the far-right talking point that kneeling for racial justice is actually an insult to the US military. Then Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” and Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond”, both topped the national charts in 2023, previewing, encapsulating, and elevating the emotional temperature of MAGA America just in time for the 2024 presidential election.