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Goodbye Joe Scarborough . . . Hello, Kid Rock

Joe Scarborough is out and Kid Rock is in.

Joe made official his departure from the Republican Party this week, following in the footsteps of other pundits such as George Will and Bret Stephens. Good riddance. Meanwhile in Michigan, Kid Rock announced he would seek the Republican nomination to challenge incumbent do-nothing Democrat Debbie Stabenow.

Scarborough’s departure from the GOP the same week Kid Rock threw his trucker cap into the ring nicely illustrates the current political fault lines.

The 2016 election was about who rules in America. Will it be an aloof, self-interested class of patrician mandarins who attend the same schools, have the same accents, and repeat the same noxious pieties? Or will the American people rule themselves? Those were the stakes. Those continue to be the stakes.

Scarborough is a fitting avatar for the striving, elite careerist eager to demonstrate his moral and cultural superiority over average Americans while Kid Rock revels in redneck cool.  

The contrast between the two is striking.

Scarborough is at home in Washington. Kid Rock lives in Detroit.

Joe curries favor with coastal elites. Kid Rock is at home in the middle of the country. And it’s no wonder: He’s travelled the country by bus and minivan on more than 25 tours with legends like Lynyrd Skynyrd and David Allen Coe.

Kid Rock has the long, stringy hair of ’70s rock gods while Scarborough wears a Ken doll bouffant—a requirement for male TV anchors so hackneyed that it has become a stock punchline.

Perhaps most striking is the music. Kid Rock plays straightforward American rock and roll. Scarborough sings Britpop retreads steeped in the sort of hipster self-regard that is unbecoming in a 20-year-old student at a small liberal arts college let alone in a middle-aged man.

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