In recent years, many have noted the way the Democratic left has moved in short order from its previous focus on class-based, populist politics to the airy stupidities of multiculturalist identity politics. This includes most ludicrously their pathetic recent displays on behalf of illegal alien murderers and psychopathological men who believe they are women.

Anyone who has been an adult since the last decades of the 20^th century knows there has been a fundamental transformation of the Democratic Party. But those too young to remember, who have only ever known the woke left, remain skeptical, and they often deliberately refuse claims to the contrary.

In answer to them, here is a piece of evidence from American popular culture that is impossible to dispute. It’s an album of songs from one of the country’s most storied musical figures, Bruce Springsteen, a man of the left who is vividly on record as an opponent of MAGA populism. Yet as these songs demonstrate, the Boss made his name and his money sounding an awful lot like the Donald.

The album The Ghost of Tom Joad is only 30 years old, but it is light years distant from today’s left-wing politics. I’ll cite just a few songs as examples, though the entire album could serve as a MAGA soundtrack.

“Youngstown,” the album’s fourth cut, is about steel mill workers in that eponymous Ohio city and other places like it, who  produced America’s international economic dominance in the 20^th century, and how they were mercilessly betrayed by internationalist American capitalists. Springsteen  beautifully and lovingly describes working-class life: “Taconite, coke and limestone fed my children, made my pay, them smokestacks reaching like the arms of God into a beautiful sky of soot and clay.” This is very far indeed from the contemporary climate change-obsessed ecologist who thinks every industry that uses natural resources is a blight on humanity and the universe itself. And it resonates deeply with the MAGA pledge to return dignity and security to the abandoned working-class.

These working-class men were proud to do the work they did, and the country became what it was because of them. It was they who “built the cannonballs that helped the Union win the war” and it was “these mills [that] built the tanks and bombs that won this country’s wars.” More, this class sent their sons to wars in Korea and Vietnam (and, later, in Iraq and Afghanistan), only to be dispossessed by capitalist deindustrialization and subjected to constant ridicule and derision by the ruling classes. Elite transformation of the American economy into an internationalist conspiracy against the interests of the common laborer swept away all that Youngstown represented, in its traditional hardhat American blue-collar glory.

The industrial labor base of this country is recognized in “Youngstown” as something much more than the nostalgia today’s left insists it is. These are real American lives, an entire class of our countrymen, who gave everything to this country and were left destitute by the bosses they served. We should stand with them, as “Youngstown” and our current president strongly assert.

The second track, “Straight Time,” is a meticulously honest account of the origins of crime in the idle and irreligious human mind. Today’s Democrats talk endlessly of the “structural” reasons for crime. But Springsteen here describes the inner life of a criminal in a way that does not resemble the contemporary leftist account. The narrator of the song is sent away for a stint in prison, then comes out and is given a fair chance to rebuild his life by American society. But not even a wife, children, and a decent job are enough to keep him from “trippin’ across that thin line” back into crime.

His family loves him, and the rest of us have given him a second chance, and nonetheless he follows the temptation of easy money and the assertion of raw power over others. He saws off the barrel of a hunting rifle and plunges again into the depraved world of criminality. At the song’s conclusion, we do not know precisely what will become of him, but we know it will not be good. In the song’s depiction, he is shown to be thoroughly incapable of self-reflection and without a moral compass. After he commits his crimes, he sleeps soundly and in his untroubled dreams “goes drifting off into foreign lands.”

This is the sad truth of crime, not the crude sociology of “the system made me do it.” As Springsteen’s song shows, there was a time when even on the left this truth was widely known.

There are several songs on the album that reflect on Mexican immigration into the United States. Two, “Sinaloa Cowboys” and “The Line,” paint a picture the contemporary left cannot run from fast enough, but they also represent a stark reality about our border.

In “The Line,” the narrator is a member of the Border Patrol who falls in love with a Mexican woman attempting to illegally enter the U.S. He crosses the line by helping the woman and her brother to cross, only to find that her brother is a drug smuggler. An honest work colleague and friend of the narrator catches them and sends them back, but the narrator ends the song hopelessly searching for the woman, still determined to allow his romantic interest to trump his duty to the law and his country.

To his credit, Springsteen does not paint the border patrol agent as anything more than the obviously morally confused individual he is. His warped morality is not entirely unlike that displayed by American elites who pretend to operate from compassion when they advocate for open borders but who, in reality, are only looking out after their own narrow interests. If anything, the romantic interests of Springsteen’s character are more relatable than the greedy material interests of today’s elites.

In “Sinaloa Cowboys,” two Mexican brothers cross the border and work in the agricultural market as laborers, but they are recruited into the illegal drug trade by criminal gangs. They find they can make much more money much more quickly while engaged in criminal turpitude, but in the end they reap the whirlwind. A meth house in which they are working explodes, killing one of the brothers. His sibling buries him and then retreats to Mexico with their illicit gain, which now is reduced by this unexpected tax.

Again, Springsteen does not present these men as heroic or even as morally attractive. They have participated in evil, and evil has come to them. There are many, many like them along the real border, as our president has been honest enough to insist, almost alone among our current national political leadership.

The story of these two songs resonates strongly with the MAGA narrative about illegal immigration. Many of these people are doing very bad things here. The part of the narrative untold in Springsteen’s songs is the destruction of the American citizens who become addicted to the illegal drugs that cross the southern border. It is not difficult to add that into the stories Springsteen tells.

I strongly recommend a listen to the rest of The Ghost of Tom Joad. As I noted at the outset, almost every cut is consonant with at least some central elements of the MAGA message on work, class exploitation, crime, and immigration. The Springsteen of today, of course, can be relied upon to deny the connection, but the art speaks for itself and exists apart from the contortions of the artist’s attempts to make it consistent with contemporary politics.

I cannot be the only modern-day populist who would greatly enjoy seeing the Trump administration throw the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” on the scrap heap where it belongs to adopt “Youngstown” or “Sinaloa Cowboys” as the MAGA theme song.