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Those longing for an aspirational vision of America should look no further than Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny’s halftime performance at the Super Bowl earlier this month. It was joyful, multicultural and international, and provided an infectiously danceable soundtrack for the growing anti-ICE sentiment in the US. I would go even further and say that it provided a decent political roadmap for what a post-Maga America should aspire to embrace: pro-growth humanism inside and outside our own borders.
Whether or not Maga anger finds a new figurehead when Donald Trump leaves the White House, the Super Bowl show provided another signal that we are turning some kind of corner on the topic of race in America. The country’s highest-profile entertainment programming of the year was performed almost entirely in Spanish. That’s a big deal. What’s more, it happened at a time when ICE raids on immigrants in Democrat-run cities are being rejected by liberals and conservatives alike, and as several high-profile Republicans loudly denounced Trump’s posting of an appalling video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as primates.
The business community is subtly pushing back against this administration, too. Even the US Chamber of Commerce has stressed the need to remain “fearless” in defence of free markets and “open to the world”. While the impetus may be more commercial than moral, who cares? Companies, which spend more on Super Bowl advertising than on any other single event per year in the US, know that the market for white supremacy and Christian rock is smaller than that for Bad Bunny, J Lo and Shakira, as evidenced by recent NFL halftime show choices.
There is a larger point here. Neither America nor American companies can go it alone. Global markets are where the growth opportunities reside, which is why NFL commissioner Roger Goodell emphasised during Super Bowl week that the league would be increasing the number of games held outside the US, in places that include Madrid, Munich, Mexico City, Melbourne and Rio de Janeiro. As Goodell put it last autumn during a match in Dublin: “Our job is to share our game with the world.”
Trump has made it harder for business to do most things internationally. That, along with the broader American public’s increasing rejection of the most extreme Maga politics, presents an opportunity for Democrats as well as thoughtful Republicans. While the old order is gone — China does present economic and political challenges for the world, Europe does need to take care of its own security, the deepening divide between capital and labour should be addressed — America has yet to articulate its own non-nationalistic version of the new one.
The Biden administration tried but couldn’t quite get there. Here, I come back to Bad Bunny. His set design included mock sugar cane fields, a reference to the long history of slavery in the Caribbean, with dancers dressed as electrical workers, a nod to the failing power grid in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria.
This put me in mind of the “postcolonial” trade and foreign policy strategy that was beginning to be articulated by the Biden administration before inflation and the former president’s age tanked his campaign (and Kamala Harris failed to provide a new and convincing alternative to Trump’s tariff strategy).
Biden may have been the wrong leader for this particular job, but there’s still a big opportunity here for a new Congress, and for the next administration, to work with allies to set a floor under labour and environmental standards across borders. This would go a long way towards addressing globalisation’s discontents. Trumpian nationalism isn’t the way forward, but the Bretton Woods system must still be reformed.
On that score, I was struck by a recent Harvard Business School debate on the postwar trading order in which Biden’s former US trade representative, Katherine Tai, and conservative Oren Cass, bested free traders Lawrence Summers and Robert Lawrence. Tai articulated the key point that still needs resolution: “The productivity of American workers has gone up, but their wages have not kept pace. In the context of [the North American Free Trade Agreement], we see that even more with Mexican workers.”
This gets to the heart of the matter. An aspirational America is one that would foster racial unity across class lines, both within and outside its own borders. The problems of wage inequality, AI-based job disruption and global warming pose a challenge for the US and the world as a whole. An insular, xenophobic America, closed to immigrant labour and growth markets, will quickly collapse in on itself.
There is low-hanging fruit here for liberals, and I see signs that some are starting to grasp it. Witness Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to attend the Munich Security Conference, a surprising move for a young progressive lawmaker who isn’t a foreign policy official or a head of state.
Still, it makes sense that she is thinking beyond New York, and not just because she is considering a Senate or presidential run. Someone like Ocasio-Cortez arguably has more in common with, say, a German Green party member or a Mexican democratic socialist than with a Maga supporter in the US. Immigrants in her mould, as well as those who built half of the Fortune 500, are the real America. Thanks to Bad Bunny for reminding us of that.