The Sunday Times: Beyoncé’s NFL half-time show embraced Trump’s new America

A denim pick-up truck. Stetsons galore. And it all played out on a Texan football field. The star’s 12-minute, $20 million set arguably heralds a new cultural era

The Sunday Times

December 28, 2024

Post Malone and Beyoncé performing at the halftime show of a Baltimore Ravens vs. Houston Texans game.

Beyoncé was joined by another US artist, Post Malone, and a jeans-clad jalopy ALEX SLITZ/GETTY IMAGES

The United States during the Reagan years in the 1980s was proud, loud, and unabashed. Americans wore diamantes to bed and ten-gallon stetsons to dinner. They drove gas-guzzling sedans, watched MTV on cable, and boasted a president who owned a white Arabian stallion called El Alamein. It was America resurgent with brass knobs on.

Last week, for her NFL half-time Christmas Day concert, Beyoncé gave this long-discarded America its first public airing in nearly forty years. All the familiar elements were there: the bedazzling, the strutting, the clunky Yank Tanks — even the gleaming white horse which she rode into the stadium.

Beyoncé performing at the Netflix NFL Christmas Gameday halftime show.

NETFLIX/BEYONCÉ

Beyoncé began her set with an off-stage rendition of 16 Carriages, a defiant ode to a hardscrabble childhood, quite possibly her own. The contrast between the grim lyrics and the blindingly white country and western aesthetic was the first of several striking dissonances during the performance. The 32-time Grammy winner has an almost unique ability to channel the zeitgeist into politically charged songs that still have mainstream appeal.

American audiences know that when Beyoncé sings, she isn’t simply putting stories to music, she is communicating a series of messages that collectively form a meta-commentary about what it means to be a person of colour in white America today.

Viewers got an eyeful of the extra-white teeth, the extra-big cars, the extra-wide shoulder pads, and saw the return of 1980s Dallas chic when everybody wanted to own a pair of cowboy boots and the whole world was obsessed with who shot JR. The Guardian waxed lyrical about the joy and playfulness of Beyoncé’s routines rather than the charged racial undertones.

The world’s reaction to the Christmas Day concert was similarly context-free. They took in the unbridled exuberance of Beyoncé’s version of Pop Americana, and saw only, as British viewers did, the 1980s-style flashiness that accompanied America’s resurgence under Ronald Reagan.

But there is more going on. There’s been a seismic shift in how America views itself. In recent years the country’s self-confidence has been dented. The combination of Black Lives Matter, Maga, #MeToo, QAnon, Stop the Steal, the Anti-Vax Movement and cancel culture in general has achieved what Vietnam, the oil crisis, 9/11, the Great Recession, and Covid-19 could not: turn America from an overly positive country into a hyper-negative one.

Americans are feeling bad about themselves, their country, and their history. Those who are not angry are anxious.

Donald Trump’s recent victory was his way of overturning that. A promise of what life could be like in the 80s, America’s boom time. Whereas Reagan projected an open-handed, “what’s-not-to-like?” image, a movie star straight from a Western, now we have a loud, close-fisted, angry, defensive kind of brashness.

Trump’s election promises to enact foreign tariffs, stay out of foreign conflicts, and deport more than a million illegal immigrants are a flat-out contradiction of Reagan’s pro-immigration, pro-trade, pro-American interventionism. Almost by sheer luck, the 40th president proved that the occasional arms race can be good for capitalism. But history offers multiple examples of what price controls coupled with isolationist policies does to a country.

In Beyoncé’s America, both sides can co-exist.

Donald Trump at a campaign rally, surrounded by Secret Service agents.

An image of Trump in the moments after an assassination attempt in July could define the era /EVAN VUCCI

To my mind, Beyoncé was telling Americans to move on and embrace the now. It isn’t about slick LA or the liberal seaboard, but heartland Americana. Her performance was a carefully curated smorgasbord of nods and references to local and national symbols. She sang Dolly Parton’s Jolene, but her backing singers were country music singers who are also black women; she used a 200-strong marching band, but an all-black one recruited from one of the country’s historically black universities.

Beyoncé and backup singers in white cowboy hats and gowns at a halftime performance.

NETFLIX/BEYONCÉ

Texas, and Houston specifically, received a royal wave with line dancing, rodeo stars, and the traditional homecoming parade, complete with car cavalcade and not one but two homecoming queens, both former Texas beauty pageant winners.

Hispanic culture was also a beneficiary of Beyoncé’s cultural largesse with her mariachi-inspired costume decorations, and the deployment of Lowrider Impala Chevrolets, a ban on which was recently lifted by the governor of California, Gavin Newsom. A civilian truck was was clad in denim in an homage to Beyoncé’s song, LEVII’S JEANS.

Beyoncé and Blue Ivy performing together at a halftime show.

Beyoncé was joined during the performance by her 12-year-old daughter Blue Ivy DAVID J PHILLIP

That said, the appearance of an American flag shrouded in sheet plastic was one of the biggest controversies of the performance. One half of the angry sides of America objected to its presence at all, another complained it was insufficient. The rest were anxious about its ambiguity — was it an embrace or rejection of American values? Was Beyoncé ruining country music, a sacred American institution, with her non-white themes, rhythms and tropes, or reinventing it?

Beyoncé's 2024 NFL Halftime Show performance.

YOUTUBE

2025 may show that neither interpretation of Beyoncé’s half-time concert was grounded in any sort of reality. I fear that Beyoncé’s “playful” references to a time when the Dukes of Hazzard could be watched without cringing were not meant to be taken literally. That America is not coming back. However, it will take a great deal more than twelve minutes of foot-stamping glory to usher in the other America, the one where self-hatred gives way to self-reinvention.

The Sunday Times: I don’t want to fight about it but this talk of US civil war is overblown

Experts on conflict predict unrest, but America has a long way to go before it is as divided as it was in 1861

The Sunday Times

January 9, 2022

Violence is in the air. No one who saw the shocking scenes during the Capitol riot in Washington on January 6, 2021, can pretend that it was just a big misunderstanding. Donald Trump and his allies attempted to retain power at all costs. Terrible things happened that day. A year later the wounds are still raw and the country is still polarised. Only Democratic leaders participated in last week’s anniversary commemoration; Republicans stayed away. The one-year mark has produced a blizzard of warnings that the US is spiralling into a second civil war.

Only an idiot would ignore the obvious signs of a country turning against itself. Happy, contented electorates don’t storm their parliament (although terrified and oppressed peoples don’t either). America has reached the point where the mid-term elections are no longer a yawn but a test case for future civil unrest.

Predictably, the left and right are equally loud in their denunciations of each other. “Liberals” look at “conservatives” and see the alt-right: white supremacists and religious fanatics working together to suppress voting rights, women’s rights and democratic rights. Conservatives stare back and see antifa: essentially, progressive totalitarians making common cause with socialists and anarchists to undermine the pillars of American freedom and democracy. Put the two sides together and you have an electorate that has become angry, suspicious and volatile.

The looming threat of a civil war is almost the only thing that unites pundits and politicians across the political spectrum. Two new books, one by the Canadian journalist Stephen Marche and the other by the conflict analyst Barbara Walter, argue that the conditions for civil war are already in place. Walter believes that America is embracing “anocracy” (outwardly democratic, inwardly autocratic), joining a dismal list of countries that includes Turkey, Hungary and Poland. The two authors’ arguments have been boosted by the warnings of respected historians, including Timothy Snyder, who wrote in The New York Times that the US is teetering over the “abyss” of civil war.

If you accept the premise that America is facing, at the very least, a severe test of its democracy, then it is all the more important to subject the claims of incipient civil war to rigorous analysis. The fears aren’t baseless; the problem is that predictions are slippery things. How to prove a negative against something that hasn’t happened yet? There’s also the danger of the self-fulfilling prophecy: wishing and predicting don’t make things so, although they certainly help to fix the idea in people’s minds. The more Americans say that the past is repeating itself and the country has reached the point of no return, the more likely it will be believed.

Predictions based on comparisons to Weimar Germany, Nazi Germany, the Russian Revolution and the fall of Rome are simplistic and easy to dismiss. But, just as there is absolutely no basis for the jailed Capitol rioters to compare themselves to “Jews in Germany”, as one woman recently did, arguments that equate today’s fractured politics with the extreme violence that plagued the country just before the Civil War are equally overblown — not to mention trivialising of its 1.5 million casualties.

There simply isn’t a correlation between the factors dividing America then and now. In the run-up to the war in 1861, the North and South were already distinct entities in terms of ethnicity, customs and law. Crucially, the North’s economy was based on free labour and was prone to slumps and financial panics, whereas the South’s depended on slavery and was richer and more stable. The 13 Southern states seceded because they had local government, the military and judicial institutions on side.

Today there is a far greater plurality of voters spread out geographically. President Biden won Virginia and Georgia and almost picked up Texas in 2020; in 1860 there were ten Southern states where Abraham Lincoln didn’t even appear on the ballot.

When it comes to assessing the validity of generally accepted conditions for civil breakdown, the picture becomes more complicated. A 2006 study by the political scientists Havard Hegre and Nicholas Sambanis found that at least 88 circumstances are used to explain civil war. The generally accepted ones include: a fragile economy, deep ethnic and religious divides, weak government, long-standing grievances and factionalised elites. But models and circumstances are like railway tracks: they take us down one path and blind us to the others.

In 2015 the European think tank VoxEU conducted a historical analysis of over 100 financial crises between 1870 and 2014. Researchers found a pattern of street violence, greater distrust of government, increased polarisation and a rise in popular and right-wing parties in the five years after a crisis. This would perfectly describe the situation in the US except for one thing: the polarisation and populism have coincided with falling unemployment and economic growth. The Capitol riot took place despite, not because of, the strength of the financial system.

A country can meet a whole checklist of conditions and not erupt into outright civil war (for example, Northern Ireland in the 1970s) or meet only a few of the conditions and become a total disaster. It’s not only possible for the US, a rich, developed nation, to share certain similarities with an impoverished, conflict-ridden country and yet not become one; it’s also quite likely, given that for much of its history it has held together while being a violent, populist-driven society seething with racial and religious antagonisms behind a veneer of civil discourse. This is not an argument for complacency; it is simply a reminder that theory is not destiny.

A more worrying aspect of the torrent of civil war predictions by experts and ordinary Americans alike is the readiness to demonise and assume the absolute worst of the other side. It’s a problem when millions of voters believe that the American polity is irredeemably tainted, whether by corruption, communism, elitism, racism or what have you. The social cost of this divide is enormous. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project: “In this hyper-polarised environment, state forces are taking a more heavy-handed approach to dissent, non-state actors are becoming more active and assertive and counter-demonstrators are looking to resolve their political disputes in the street.”

Dissecting the roots of America’s lurch towards rebarbative populism requires a particular kind of micro human analysis involving real-life interviews with perpetrators and protesters as well as trawls through huge sets of data. The results have shown that, more often than not, the attribution of white supremacist motives to the Capitol rioters, or anti-Americanism to Black Lives Matter protesters, says more about the politics of the accuser than the accused.

Social media is an amplifier for hire — polarisation lies at the heart of its business models and algorithms. Researchers looking at the “how” rather than just the “why” of America’s political Balkanisation have also found evidence of large-scale foreign manipulation of social media. A recent investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post revealed that after November 3, 2020, there were more than 10,000 posts a day on Facebook attacking the legitimacy of the election.

In 2018 a Rasmussen poll asked American voters whether the US would experience a second civil war within the next five years. Almost a third said it would. In a similar poll conducted last year the proportion had risen to 46 per cent. Is it concerning? Yes. Does it make the prediction true? Well, polls also showed a win for Hillary Clinton and a landslide for Joe Biden. So, no.

WSJ Historically Speaking: ‘A Brief History of Brinkmanship’

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

In 1956, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, explaining how America could use the threat of nuclear war in diplomacy, told Life Magazine, “The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art…. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.” President Donald Trump recently seemed to embrace this idea with his warning that if North Korea made any more threats to the U.S., it “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Continue reading…

WSJ Historically Speaking: A Brief History of Leaking

Spies easily deciphered letters by Mary, Queen of Scots ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

Spies easily deciphered letters by Mary, Queen of Scots ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

Is a private email merely a leak that hasn’t happened yet? It is starting to seem that way after the number of hacking scandals in recent years. We still don’t know the culprit behind the recent hack of the Democratic National Committee’s computers, although President Barack Obama has tied Russia to the operation. The theft seems too sophisticated to blame on a pimply teenager in a bedroom.

But the fact that the reason remains a mystery (was it to help Donald Trump, embarrass the U.S. or settle some private score?) highlights a longstanding difficulty in plugging leaks: People divulge secrets for all sorts of reasons—from the vindictive to the virtuous, and everything in between. Continue reading…