Ken Casey, the founder and entrance man of the Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys, is the bodily, attitudinal, and linguistic personification of Boston. Proof of this may be present in the way in which he pronounces MAGA. To wit: “Magger,” as in, “This Magger man within the viewers was waving his fucking Trump hat in folks’s faces, and I might simply inform he wished to enter into discourse with me.” A second proof is that “enter into discourse” is a factor Ben Affleck would say in a film about South Boston proper earlier than punching somebody within the face. The third is Casey’s articulation of what I took to be a private code: “I’m not going to close up, simply out of spite.”
The aforementioned discourse occurred at a present in Florida in March. Video of the incident has moved throughout the web, and it has provoked at the least some Dropkick Murphy followers—white, male, and never notably predisposed to the Democratic Get together in its present kind—to desert the band. Casey accepts this as the worth for preserving his soul. “I believe all the things we’ve been doing for the previous 30 years was a type of warm-up for the second we’re in,” he informed me. The band is most well-known for its livid, frenzied anthem “I’m Transport As much as Boston,” however additionally it is recognized, amongst sure high-information voters and union activists, as a final repository of working-class values. As white males have lurched to the best, the band is on a mission to persuade them that they’re being performed by a grifter. “Thirty years in the past, the Reagan period, everybody was in lockstep with what we had been saying,” he mentioned. “Now folks say our message is outdated or elite or we’re a part of some machine.”
Casey and I had been speaking on a sunny day this spring at Fenway Park (inevitably), the place he was filming a promotional video for the Crimson Sox’s Dropkick Murphy Bobblehead Night time (July 11, in case you had been questioning). Casey, who’s tattooed as much as the neck and carries himself like a bartender, is amused by the concept anybody would contemplate him an elitist. He’s, in spite of everything, a author of each “Kiss Me, I’m Shitfaced” and “Smash Shit Up.”
“They take the truth that we don’t assist Trump as us being shills for the Democrats,” he mentioned. “They like to name us cucks, which I discover ironic as a result of there’s a superb portion of MAGA that may most likely step apart and let Donald Trump have their approach with their important different if he requested.”
There’s additionally a little bit of grace to be discovered within the tradition conflict, as Casey found on the now-famous Florida present.
“These two guys had their MAGA shirts and hats and a cardboard blowup of Trump’s head, and so they’re within the entrance row, so that they’re positively trolling,” Casey mentioned. “We’ve had this earlier than, guys with MAGA hats simply shoving it in folks’s faces.”
Casey addressed the viewers, first with an accusation: “The place the fuck are all the opposite punk bands?”
The reply is that the bands are scared, similar to so many others. Punk bands are not any exception, which is a small irony, given the oppositional iconoclasm of a lot of punk, and the motion’s anti-authoritarian roots.
It’s placing that few singers, bands, and film stars—so lots of them reliably progressive when the stakes are trivial—appear keen to handle the nation’s perilous political second. (Casey’s good friend Bruce Springsteen is a noteworthy exception.) Intimidation works, and complicity is the norm, not the exception. “You’ve bought the largest bands working scared,” Casey mentioned.
The newest Dropkick Murphys album, For the Individualsis compensation for the silence of different quarters. Solely a minority of the songs on the album deal with the political second immediately, however those who do had been written in anger. The primary single, “Who’ll Stand for Us,” addresses the betrayal of working People: “By crime and campaign / Our labor, it’s been stolen / We’ve been robbed of our freedom / We’ve been held down and beholden.” Fury runs like a crimson streak by For the Individuals.
“The explanation we communicate out is we don’t care if we lose followers,” Casey mentioned from the stage in Florida. “When historical past is claimed and accomplished, we wish it recognized that Dropkick Murphys stood with the folks and stood with the employees. And it’s all a fucking rip-off, guys.”
He then addressed the Trumpists within the entrance row. “I wish to suggest, within the title of decency and equity—I’d wish to suggest a pleasant wager. Do you assist American employees? After all you do. Do you assist American enterprise? Clearly. I don’t know in case you are conscious, as a result of we don’t go round bragging about it, however Dropkick Murphys solely sells American-made merchandise.”
The wager was easy: He’d give the person within the Trump shirt $100 and a Dropkick Murphys T-shirt if his Trump shirt had been made in America. If the fan misplaced, he’d nonetheless get the Dropkick Murphy shirt.
Casey is aware of a secure wager. The shirt, in fact, had been made in Nicaragua. However Casey felt no must humiliate the Trumpist. “He’s a superb sport!” Casey informed the cheering crowd. “He’s taking the shirt off! We’re taking crime off the road! God bless your fucking coronary heart!”
After the present, Casey, as is his follow, left the stage by the viewers, and talked to the Trump supporters. “There was him and his son, and so they had been the nicest two guys. It made me suppose, I’ve to get previous the shirt and the hatas a result of they had been virtually doing it for amusing, prefer it was their type of silent protest. This man mentioned, ‘I’ve been coming to see you for 20 years. I contemplate you household, and I don’t let politics come between household.’ And I used to be like, Wow. It was a superb lesson. However what number of households on the market in America have politics come between them, you realize?”
Casey says that id politics—and particularly the exploitation of id politics by Trump-aligned Republicans—alienate from the Democrats the type of folks he grew up with. Just lately, the band carried out at an anti-Trump protest at Boston’s Metropolis Corridor Plaza. Afterward, Casey informed me, “even folks I do know mentioned, ‘Oh, you had been at that rally? I all the time knew you had been homosexual.’”
He continued, “This is the reason folks in labor and the left need us to be concerned in a few of this protest. MAGA, they use this male-masculinity difficulty the way in which they use trans and woke to divide. They’re instructing the younger males that that is the tender social gathering.”
Though Casey personally leans Bernie philosophically, he’s practical concerning the left and concerning the Democratic Get together’s dysfunction. “If I take into consideration all of the folks I do know in my life which have shifted over to Trump voters—AOC ain’t bringing them again. I truly like her, nevertheless it ain’t occurring.”
Who else does he like? Somebody who can communicate to folks exterior the progressive bubble. He likes Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, a profitable Democratic governor of a crimson state. “I’m not in opposition to going full-on progressive,” he mentioned, “but when it’s not going to be that, you bought to discover a centrist. It may’t be mush. It’s bought to be somebody who can communicate the language of that working-class-male group that they appear to have misplaced. That’s why I like the thought of a veteran, whether or not it’s Wes Moore or Ruben Gallego, and even Adam Kinzinger, who’s speaking about working as a Democrat.”
He’d relatively not have to consider electoral politics this a lot, he mentioned at Fenway. However he’s nonetheless shocked that so many individuals in his life fell for Trumpism. “My father died after I was younger, and I used to be raised by my grandfather, who was principally like, ‘If I ever see you bullying somebody, I’ll kick the shit out of you. And if I ever see you again down from a bully, I’ll kick the shit out of you.’”
“I’ve simply by no means preferred bullies,” he continued, “and I don’t perceive individuals who do. It’s actually not that arduous. I want extra folks would see that it’s not exhausting to face up.”