Here are some of the people who’ll probably be paying $146 for a ticket to Friday’s Bruce Springsteen concert at Wrigley Field:

  • Politicians
  • Non-profit executives
  • Journalists
  • Academics
  • Attorneys

Here are some of the people who probably won’t be buying those tickets:

  • Single moms who split up with their husbands two years ago
  • Laid-off steelworkers sinkin’ down in Youngstown
  • Guys who couldn’t get jobs at the textile mill in their hometown because it closed up and didn’t come back
  • Vietnam vets turned down by the hiring manager at the refinery
  • Tramps

I don’t want to cast doubt on Bruce Springsteen’s social conscience, or his concern for the downtrodden in our society. I’m sure both are sincere. I just want to note that the people Springsteen sings about are very different from the people who attend his shows, and that the gap between his subjects and his audience says a lot about the social and political changes in this country since Springsteen began making music 50 years ago. Springsteen is an upper-class musician (he lives on a 300-acre horse farm and his daughter is an Olympic equestrian) who sings about the lower class for the entertainment of the middle class. The white working-class characters who populate his lyrics voted for Donald Trump, but the white professionals who know all the words to his songs voted for Joe Biden.

It wasn’t like that when Bruce was growing up in Freehold, New Jersey, in the ’50s and ’60s. The Dads who worked at the refinery, the steel mill, and the textile mill were all Democrats, because they belonged to labor unions. In the early ’80s, blue-collar workers started taking it on the chin. In Chicago, Wisconsin Steel shut down. In Flint, it was Fisher One. In Pittsburgh, the Homestead Works. Those factory layoffs inspired a uniquely ’80s musical genre: Heartland Rock, the soundtrack to deindustrialization. Billy Joel sang about livin’ here in Allentown, Bob Seger sang about makin’ Thunderbirds, Johnny Cougar gave us two American kids growin’ up in the heartland. No one rode that wave higher than Springsteen. Born in the U.S.A., which was released in 1984, transformed him from overachieving East Coast bar rocker to a sort of musical John Steinbeck, his fanfares for the common man doing for the recession what The Grapes of Wrath had done for the Depression. (Indeed, Springsteen later released an album called The Ghost of Tom Joad, which includes his ode to Youngstown.)

Even then, some of Springsteen’s subjects were skeptical. In his book Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line, Flint autoworker Ben Hamper revealed that he and one of his linemates were writing a rock opera about life in the shop, because they were tired of hearing “these flimflam rock ‘n’ roll mongers pluggin’ up the airwaves with their detached meanderings of ‘da average man, man.’ When? Where? How? They should have all been forced to write songs about cocaine orgies and tax shelters and beluga caviar. Leave us alone.”

Hamper singled out Joel, Seger, Cougar, and Springsteen as “goddamn millionaires mewin’ all over the dial about how bad the grind was.”

Springsteen, wrote Hamper, “has made untold zillions hoppin’ to and fro in his house of hallucinations, always emerging on release date as either a construction worker (The River), a garage mechanic (I’m on Fire), a minor league batting instructor (Glory Days), the kindred spirit of Charlie Starkweather (Nebraska) or some other pockmarked casualty of Crud Corners. No wonder this guy’s concerts run on to half-past never. It takes a heap of time to sing from A (aviator) to Z (zincographer).”

Springsteen has never been shy about sharing his liberal politics. He probably assumed that all those out-of-work jamokes would gravitate to the party of FDR and JFK, just like his parents and grandparents. In fact, the opposite happened. A week after “Born in the U.S.A.” was released as a single, Ronald Reagan was re-elected in a landslide. (Reagan tried to co-opt Springsteen on the campaign trail, praising his “message of hope” to a New Jersey audience; Springsteen responded, “I kind of got to wondering what his favorite album of mine must’ve been, you know? I don’t think it was the Nebraska album.”) In every presidential election since, whites without college educations — the folks who were born to run — have voted Republican. In 2016, they favored Trump over Clinton, 64 percent to 28 percent. Even Youngstown voted for Trump in 2020. White college-educated voters share Springsteen’s politics: They voted for Clinton, 55-38. In our polarized, tribalized era, in which fans gravitate to entertainers who share their politics, it’s only natural that most Springsteen fans are Democrats.

There is no bigger Bruce fan than Chris Christie, who served two terms as governor of Springsteen’s home state. Christie has attended more than 100 Springsteen concerts, but Springsteen refused to meet with him, because he was a Republican. (Bruce even went on TV to perform a rewritten version of “Born to Run,” mocking Christie for closing lanes on the George Washington Bridge.) As Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in an Atlantic article on Christie’s love for the Boss, “Christie takes comfort in something that, I imagine, leaves his idol unhappy and confused: the people who grew up with Springsteen in Freehold, the people who first came to listen to Springsteen, the people whose lives Springsteen explores in his songs — they voted for Christie. Sixty-three percent of white voters with only high-school diplomas went for Christie in his 2009 race against the incumbent Democrat, Jon Corzine.”

Springsteen would rather hang out with Barack Obama, Harvard Law class of ’88. They wrote a coffee table book together: Renegades: Born in the U.S.A. Well, music is all about taking us to an imaginary world that’s better than the one we inhabit. Springsteen’s music takes Democrats to an imaginary world where working class Americans vote based on their economic interests, rather than on guns, the Bible, the flag, abortion, etc. What are Wendy, Rosalita, Bobby Jean, and Mary, Queen of Arkansas actually listening to? “Try That In a Small Town” was the No. 1 song in America last week.