With a couple of exceptions, most notably from the NFL itself, the ads for Super Bowl LIX tried their best to charm viewers with feel-good schmaltz. A “Country Roads” singalong, Harrison Ford driving a Jeep, Glen Powell driving a Ram truck — even Bud Light went all in on white guys with Shane Gillis and his grass-cutting smoker.
The most “woke” of the bunch was the NFL’s unsubtle dig at football-playing high school men, which is undeniably a weird demographic for the league to target with disgust. The message was that men are keeping girlbosses everywhere from playing flag football, which is not the greatest threat women’s sports have faced in recent years, to say the least. (Nike’s ad about oppression in women’s sports was similarly tone-deaf.)
There was also Coffee-Mate’s gross flying tongue montage, which I won’t attempt to categorize but which was met with universal gags from the living room I was watching from. Sure, we’re all talking about it, but now I want RFK Jr. to ban all coffee creamers that have a longer shelf life than a week.
Overall, though, the ads were far less preachy and far more aware of the fact that their consumers just put Donald Trump back in the White House. The usual clickbait accounts proclaimed America to be “BACK.” Slate’s analysis of the commercial lineup was the “MAGA-dom” might now be “culturally dominant.” Even the Clydesdales had returned.
The vibe shift is obvious, sure. But it reeks of the plea for “amnesty” after corporate America and the Biden administration forced people out of their jobs, schools, and communities in the name of Covid. Mistakes were made, they admitted, but now that we’ve decided not to round up the unvaccinated and put them in camps, can’t we let bygones be bygones?
Four years before this year’s rah-rah USA commercial, Jeep collaborated with lefty Bruce Springsteen to lecture Americans about their political division. Springsteen, who had called the first Trump presidency a “f—ing nightmare,” suggested that, with Biden recently in charge, we could suddenly all become the “ReUnited States of America.” The connection to Jeep sales wasn’t clear, but the political message was: If you don’t like the Biden regime’s radical overreach or the suspicious circumstances by which it came to power, you’re the problem.
Watching Harrison Ford talk about freedom, while a touch cheesy, is certainly an improvement. But corporate America doesn’t suddenly love conservatives — they’re just looking out for their bottom line.
For the same reason Target deserves no credit for renaming its DEI programs, give corporations little credit for keeping woke sermons and men in ladyface out of their commercials this time. It’s not a bad start, but it’s just a start in reverse from what was a very long road of contempt for normal Americans.
Rehabilitating our national culture is going to take serious self-reflection and a willingness to reject cultural poisons, not just whitewash them. No amount of feel-good Americana will rescue our national cultural character if we operate more like a global office-park-slash-slush-fund than a country.
True patriotism requires a sense of shared identity. What connects a liberal Manhattan girlboss to a conservative Midwestern factory worker? Or a protester tearing down statues of American heroes to a mom reading stories of American heroes to her child? A belief in free markets or global military adventurism isn’t going to cut it. You have to believe in a shared heritage and a shared responsibility to steward that heritage and leave it as an inheritance to your children. Unfortunately, a long war of attrition on that shared identity has greatly impoverished our national understanding of it, and corporations have played a damning role in that assault.
Sure, it’s nice to see an aesthetic nod to America in the Super Bowl ad lineup. But the ads are cheesy and shallow because they’re celebrating the last cultural relics of an identity for which they’ve largely lost the vocabulary.
The vocabulary still exists. But corporate boardrooms, even those storyboarding sugary montages of American flags to sell cars and mortgages, aren’t where you’ll find it.
Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.
Jesus Christ is King
