BUDAPEST—I was on a plane to Europe Sunday night as the Seahawks defeated the Patriots in what apparently was a very boring Super Bowl. Upon landing, I scrolled X and discovered that the halftime show, performed in Spanish by a Puerto Rican rapper named “Bad Bunny,” had drawn more attention than the game itself, and much outrage on the right.
That was not an altogether surprising discovery. This September, Bad Bunny’s selection as halftime star had irked many conservatives because of his tendency to wear dresses and complain about America’s enforcement of immigration law. Springing into action, the conservative Turning Point USA whipped up some counterprogramming: a halftime-show alternative starring the country-rock-rap artist Kid Rock.
Which way, Western man? A Latino gyrating through a stage of sugar cane, liquor stands, and bodegas that advertise they accept food stamps—the Bad Bunny option. Or a washed-up vulgarian in a baseball cap whose vocal styles alternate between gravelly ’90s post-grunge and cringy spoken word—that would be Kid Rock.
Points in favor of the former option: production value and cultural prestige. The right may now claim the White House, but the left still controls the culture, its ideology still guides the masses, and it’s damn good at culture (however depraved) and ideology (however stupid). As Bad Bunny bounced around, a Jumbotron behind him proclaimed, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” Who can argue with that? Most Western men will take the blue pill of Bad Bunny, if only because nearly all Western women will.
But there was a small problem with Bad Bunny’s song-and-dance routine: It wasn’t so much a musical performance as a celebration, and enactment, of America’s erasure. Near the end of the big show, he yelled “God bless America” and then proceeded to list all the countries that, in his view, constitute America, which included all the countries of Latin America. (Mr. Bunny yells and mumbles more than he sings, and a good thing too, as his crooning inexplicably sounds like the grunting Velociraptor in the kitchen scene of Jurassic Park.)
From a conservative perspective, or at least from the perspective of this conservative columnist, you should go the way of Kid Rock, not Bad Bunny. But the choice should be made without illusions: Siding with Kid Rock means joining the losers in America’s culture war, and not just because the Hispanic population will continue to grow in coming decades. Bad Bunny and others like him offer a kind of idealism, and I’ve read enough Nietzsche to sniff out the nihilism and ressentiment in Kid Rock’s empty negation of the left. In a battle between idealism and nihilism, the former will always, eventually, win.
Judging by my timeline on X, many conservatives were pleased with Bad Bunny or at least didn’t understand all the fuss. They somehow still haven’t grasped that “inclusion” is the wrong frame for understanding the mass influx of Hispanics across our southern border and the intensifying, negative cultural effects of that influx on our country. After all, there weren’t any non-Hispanic whites “included” in the choreographed gyrations this Sunday. (The hip hop legend Jay-Z, who has produced each Super Bowl halftime show since 2020, hasn’t once selected a white musician to headline the event, except for the racially confused rapper Eminem, who performed alongside four black Americans in 2022.)
The correct frame for understanding Bad Bunny’s performance is “Reconquista,” an ongoing, decadeslong cultural and linguistic submersion of America by Hispanics, their revenge for our victory in the Mexican–American War and domination of the Western Hemisphere. The Hispanics are taking back the southwestern United States, and more than that if they can get it. And you better not object—that would be hateful, not loving.
“Reconquista” originally denoted the reconquest by European Christians of the Iberian Peninsula, which Muslims had seized in the 700s. That hard-won recapture of old territory concluded in 1492, the same year Christopher Columbus, an Italian explorer funded by Spanish monarchs, sailed the ocean blue. The New World he discovered swiftly became an object of conquest and exploitation by Europeans, who back then still had blood flowing through their veins. In North America, Europeans replaced the natives, rather than lording over them as in Central and South America, and the seeds of a magnificent republic were sown.
Like the U.S., Europe today is seeing its territorial conquests reversed through mass migration from the Global South. In some ways, their situation is more dire than ours. Hispanic immigrants, by and large, are Christians and hard workers, and after arriving in America they tend to be socialized in some of our reddest states. (Some downsides: playing loud Mariachi music, undercutting Americans’ wages, and slowly turning our red states blue.) Europe’s most energetic newcomers, by contrast, flock to liberal cities and do things like chop off heads, gang-rape schoolgirls, and drive SUVs into crowds at Christmas markets. It’s pretty bad. And the Europeans don’t even have a Kid Rock, much less a Donald Trump.
They do have a Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, and other nationalist politicians in the “postliberal” style. Here in Hungary, where I am attending the annual Budapest Global Dialogue, I’ve gotten to hear from some of them, including Hungary’s foreign minister. They point out that Orban’s rejection of mass migration is plainly working, as Budapest remains a rare specimen of a dying breed: a European capital where women can walk alone at night.
Still, my experience at the two-day conference hasn’t filled me with newfound optimism. In years past, this well-organized and surprisingly glamorous event provided a platform to critics of the liberal world order. But what’s the point of such critics now? In the second year of Trump’s second term, the liberal world order, everyone agrees, is gone, and now’s the time to build something new. But the nationalist internationale so far seems about as promising a substitute for global liberalism as Kid Rock was for Bad Bunny.
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Some speakers at the Budapest forum referred to the present crisis as an “interregnum,” but that implies a regnum to follow, which seems presumptuous. I see little reason to believe that a “new mode and order,” to use Machiavelli’s phrase, is being born. And if we do get a global system comprising petits nationalismes competing one against another, there’s a fair chance it’ll feature great-power wars, a resurgence of suppressed ethnic hatreds, and the demise of both dollar hegemony and stable trade regimes. In other words, our children could be less safe and much poorer than we were under liberal hegemony.
One European political scientist suggested to me that Trump himself has the spirit of a Machiavellian founder, as his White House renovations and plans to build an Arc de Triomphe reveal. And he displays an almost preternatural ability to find the weaknesses of liberalism and exploit them for political gain. But Trump increasingly appears sui generis, and one begins to ask how much of the death of liberalism has resulted from his uniquely combative and charismatic persona rather than structural factors. The White House will be bigger and golder after he leaves it, but will America be great again?
If post-liberalism fails, or fails to arise, one obvious possibility is reversion to liberalism, perhaps of a more formidable, albeit subtler, kind. Just as Bad Bunny jettisoned explicit wokeness and instead subliminally insinuated anti-white, anti-American ideas, liberal technocrats have learned that overt hostility to white majorities and to basic common sense plays poorly in the political realm. Over time, the liberals will find chances to resume their frontal assault. If you want a picture of the future, imagine Bad Bunny in a dress waving some Latin American flag in your face—forever.
