“Jingle Bells is racist” - The Tintinnabulations of an Unwinnable Culture War

I was at the store this morning, engaging in light-hearted chit-chat with the clerk about the holidays, “Ready for Christmas?”, “Don’t even get me started, I haven’t bought a single present yet!” – laughter abounds – You know, the Uzhe. Then she leaned over and, in a conspiratorial whisper, said, “Did you hear that Jingle Bells is racist?” She pulled back and shook her head, physically endeavoring to dislodge this unholy thought.

I recognized it immediately. She thinks we’re on the same team. An instinct I’ve become accustomed to as a middle-aged white guy who’s seen the inside of many a dive bar, drinking and carousing with the proletariat, as I so enjoy doing. I often receive unsolicited, offhand political commentary intended to solidify a bond between fast friends. It’s pointless to swim upstream; there is no time or appetite for nuanced conversation. If I push back at all, it’s in the form of a question, pressing them to expand on their thoughts. So, I asked her if they said why? Her response, “I don’t know. I didn’t click on it.” I mulled over the lyrics in my mind and assumed it was probably some AI video of Rachel Maddow, clickbait for undiscerning conservatives. She wasn’t wrong, though, and unlike the clerk, I did click on it; in fact, I read the research paper it’s based on. Without going into it, because it’s beside the point, it’s not so much that the song is racist, it’s that its roots are in racism. But this is America, baby, everything's roots are in racism.

Conservatives argue that pointing out racism is actually racist, and liberals stoke division by calling racism out. It’s the double revere uno card. I get it; that’s why I don’t check my bank account after a weekend in Vegas. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. If one Googles, Jingle Bells is racist; the top results are all conservative websites though, interesting. It’s the perfect story to push their war on Christmas narrative. A comforting strawman argument that the Christian right will always win, even if it’s only in their mind, All Hail Saint Nick. Because there is no changing anyone’s mind, not the clerk at the store or the old guy at the bar. The culture war is real, and the only thing that matters is winning.

After the 2024 election, I attempted to write a piece about the cultural moment we were living through, but defining cultures and subcultures and quantifying their hold on society in any given moment is tricky. It’s a feeling. Culture shifts, bends, and winds its way through time and place, pushed and pulled by emerging and receding subcultures through social behaviors, art, customs, language, philosophies, and sometimes, laws. But throughlines remain, the brosef of 2025 was the guy in 1999 who had a bumper sticker of Calvin (from Calvin and Hobbes) pissing on a rival car company and the same guy who had a Bad Boy Club sticker on his truck in 1989. That kind of classy acumen isn’t new. But bro-culture is contrarian, libertarian; it’s meant to challenge, but it's not inherently political in the same way the LGBTQ+ subculture is forced to be, for example. It’s why I think this is a fleeting cultural moment. It’s a backlash to the Obama era, superhero cape nerd culture, when religion and overt patriotism were reduced to a punchline.

For context, that recognition in the clerk's face was not without merit. My father served in the Navy, loved westerns, and war movies. Growing up, we watched shows like Little House on the Prairie and Highway to Heaven. For a time, we went to church and said the Lord's prayer before supper. During the first Iraqi war, we joined a gathering to show support for the troops.

Side note - My younger brother, unaware that the V hand means both peace and victory, was chastised by my father when he ignorantly called for peace as he mimicked the V hand sign to passing cars. Peace? Fuck that, this is ‘Merica.

After 9/11 my father put a bumper sticker on his car declaring, “These Colors Don’t Run,” and on his neatly organized toolbox in the garage was an American flag decal with the phrase, “Try burning this flag”. On the weekends, he wore a cowboy hat and went line dancing with my mom. We were submerged in the same cultural threads that run through the MAGA movement today. It did not define my father's political leanings, though, the way it might now. He had been a Union shop steward and was a Reagan Democrat. I have often wondered what he would make of the world today. Perhaps, like me, he would be a man without a party. All of that to say, I think I can speak on the feeling that popular culture wasn’t for us. Urban and hipster counter culture felt cool, and as we progressed through the 90s, increasingly nerd culture felt unironically cool as well. White suburban culture was not something to proudly lay claim to, or at least I never felt that way.

We are living through the response to that, the Christmas Adventurers Club reclaiming societal values. It’s the battle for hearts and minds. Nudging, shoving, and punching popular culture into submission. In normal times, I would feel confident saying, you can’t force culture onto society; society forces culture onto you. But these are not normal times; there are social engineering technologies that would make Hitler cream in his lederhosen. God only knows what’s to come.

But I have faith in the thousands of years of Liberal philosophers, from Aristotle, to Locke, to Hobbs (not the guy who pisses on stuff, a different guy), to James Baldwin, to Ta-Nehisi Coates. I have faith in a collective American spirit that believes in equality and democracy. The clerk at the store and the old guy at the bar believe in those things, too, if you really talk to them. But culture wars are not meant to be won; they’re meant to be fought, in One Battle After Another.