Who is the “WE”?
When Europe fractured during the Reformation, the conflict was not only theological. It was liturgical. Communities did not merely disagree about doctrine in the abstract; they disagreed about what shared rituals were permitted to signify, what languages could be spoken in sacred space, and what bodies could stand at the symbolic center. The crisis was not simply over belief. It was a crisis over the breakdown of a common ceremonial order.
That historical distinction matters because civic life is rarely sustained by argument alone. Societies are held together through rituals that make collective belonging visible. When ritual coherence collapses, a public loses not merely a performance but a shared grammar of recognition.
Modern America is not sixteenth-century Europe. Yet it possesses surprisingly few shared civic rituals capable of producing synchronous attention across difference. One of the most prominent is the Super Bowl halftime show: a mass-mediated spectacle in which the nation gathers, briefly, around a common symbolic stage.
What makes this moment philosophically significant is not merely the performance itself, but the reception it generates—and what that reception reveals about the possibility of a shared civic “we.”
I. The Halftime Show as Civic Ritual
The Super Bowl halftime show has not always occupied its current cultural role. What was once closer to intermission pageantry has evolved into one of the most watched ceremonial events in American life. It functions less as entertainment appended to sport than as a ritual of national visibility: a moment when the public encounters itself through spectacle.
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas describes the public sphere as the symbolic space in which citizens form public consciousness through shared reference points and communicative life.¹ While Habermas’s original model emphasized rational-critical discourse, contemporary mass rituals operate as parallel mechanisms of public formation. They do not deliberate, but they gather. They do not argue, but they stage collective attention.
The halftime show, in this sense, becomes one of the last remaining civic sites where the nation still attempts to see itself together.
II. Bad Bunny and Civic Recognition
Bad Bunny’s official Super Bowl LX halftime performance was widely noted for foregrounding Puerto Rican cultural imagery and Spanish-language music on the most canonical broadcast stage in the United States.² The significance of this was not that America suddenly became plural. America already was.
Rather, the performance functioned as civic recognition: a reflection of the multilingual, hybrid reality that has long constituted the American public body. The ritual did not invent diversity. It revealed it.
The controversy that followed was therefore not primarily about music, but about legibility: about what kinds of cultural presence can occupy the national stage without being treated as external or disruptive.
III. Counterprogramming and the Fragmentation of the Public Sphere
The reception of the halftime ritual this year cannot be separated from the emergence of an explicitly organized counter-spectacle. Turning Point USA produced an alternative broadcast titled the “All-American Halftime Show,” featuring Kid Rock and other performers, positioned as an ideological response to the official halftime event.³
Such counterprogramming is significant not simply as aesthetic divergence but as a symptom of a fragmented public sphere. Habermas’s account depends upon the possibility of shared symbolic reference points. When parallel publics refuse to recognize the same ritual space, the public sphere splinters into interpretive enclaves rather than a common audience.
The alternative show did not merely offer another performance. It signaled a withdrawal from the shared ritual itself.
Most notably, the Turning Point broadcast concluded with a memorial tribute to Charlie Kirk, anchoring the spectacle explicitly to a particular ideological lineage.⁴ This gesture transformed the counter-show from entertainment into political commemoration. It was not simply an alternative concert; it was an attempt to install a religious-political lynchpin within contested civic space.
Rather than participating in the secular ritual of national recognition, the alternative event sought to recode that ritual around narrower symbolic authority.
IV. Kid Rock and Symbolic Misalignment
The deployment of Kid Rock in this counter-ritual is itself culturally revealing. Kid Rock’s early musical persona was defined by transgressive exuberance: a stylized celebration of disorder, outsider belonging, and anti-respectability affect. The symbolic terrain of this work is not civic ceremonialism but subcultural spectacle—an aesthetic of provocation and distance from institutional legitimacy.
What is striking, then, is the recoding of that persona into a role of symbolic boundary enforcement. The outlaw figure is repurposed as guardian of national coherence. The rebel becomes the defender of ritual purity.
This contradiction is not merely ironic. It illustrates how unstable cultural signs become in moments of civic fracture: figures and symbols once associated with disorder can be mobilized in defense of constricted belonging.
V. Ritual, Denial, and the Crisis of “We”
The philosophical stakes of this halftime moment are therefore not reducible to competing musical preferences. The deeper conflict concerns whether civic ritual can still function as shared recognition.
The official halftime performance reflected the plural civic body that already exists. The counterprogramming event, ideologically anchored and memorialized through partisan commemoration, suggested not a competing myth of equal civic depth but an attempt to undermine the shared ritual conditions themselves.
This is not a battle over entertainment. It is a struggle over whether the nation can still tolerate rituals that reflect its actual plurality.
Conclusion: The Public Sphere Under Pressure
The 2026 Super Bowl halftime controversy reveals a central tension in modern civic life: the ceremonial stage is no longer an uncontested space of collective visibility. Bad Bunny’s performance did not transform the American myth; it reflected the America that already exists. The backlash and counterprogramming did not offer an alternative civic ritual so much as a refusal of ritual recognition itself—an attempt to withdraw from the shared symbolic conditions through which “we the people” is made publicly legible.
What is ultimately at stake is not musical taste, but whether civic ritual can still function as a shared public horizon rather than a sectarian instrument. The halftime show remains, improbably, one of the last national ceremonies capable of producing a common symbolic reference point. The question exposed this year is whether that horizon can still hold—or whether it will fracture into parallel spectacles designed less to gather a civic “we” than to deny that such a “we” can be held in common.
The final gesture of Bad Bunny’s performance makes this tension explicit. At the conclusion of the show, he held up a football inscribed with the words “Together, We Are America,” while dancers carried flags from across the Americas with — not to be taken lightly — the United States flag first, transforming the ritual’s closing moment into an affirmation of collective belonging that transcends narrow ethno-national definitions.⁵ In this sense, the performance did not argue for inclusion as novelty; it staged inclusion as civic reality.
Even within the ideological tradition invoked by the counter-show, the logic of exclusion sits uneasily with its own professed commitments. Charlie Kirk himself once insisted that “ethno-nationalism is un-American.” The irony is that the attempt to anchor the alternative ritual around partisan memorialization risks subordinating civic ceremony to precisely the narrowed symbolic boundaries that such rhetoric disavows. Bad Bunny’s closing message—together, we are America—thus stands not as a competing mythology, but as the honest ritual recognition of what the civic body already is.
Sources:
- Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
- “Super Bowl LX Halftime Show,” Wikipedia, accessed February 9, 2026.
- “All-American Halftime Show,” Wikipedia, accessed February 9, 2026.
- KOMO News, coverage confirming the Charlie Kirk memorial tribute within the Turning Point USA alternative halftime broadcast, February 2026.
- Associated Press report describing Bad Bunny’s closing football message “Together, We Are America” and the flags carried by dancers, February 2026.
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