Two things made Kelly unusual: She’s married to that better-paid sales rep and had been since before they worked for Novartis. Novartis, Kelly told Salon, had a policy on the books preventing employees from discussing their wages. “If it had been anyone but my husband,” she said, “I would have been in trouble, as would the person who shared it.”

According to a survey by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 19 percent of employees’ workplaces formally prohibit discussing wages and salaries, and another 31 percent said it’s discouraged. That survey’s analysis pointed out that the wage gap in the federal government, which has high levels of pay transparency, tends to be narrower than the private sector’s, though that figure is skewed by the fact that higher earners in the private sector – say, in finance – sit atop a much higher range and tend to be mostly men.

A New York jury eventually found that Kelly and eleven other former sales reps had been victims of gender discrimination related to pay, promotion, and pregnancy discrimination, and it awarded them $3.36 million plus a record $250 million for 5,600 other women in the class-action lawsuit. But, said Katherine Kimpel, a lead attorney on the case, “Out of the thousands of women we represented, Terry was the only one who was able to speak about direct knowledge of pay discrimination.”

Yesterday, Kelly testified before Congress in support of the Paycheck Fairness Act – set for a Senate vote next week – which has a provision making it illegal for companies to retaliate against employees who discuss their salaries. (It previously passed the House but failed by two votes to get a filibuster-proof Senate passage.) While the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act restored the length of time in which an employee could sue for discriminatory pay, it did nothing to change the fact that employees often are barred from learning they’re being discriminated against. (Discussing pay was against the rules at the Goodyear plant where Ledbetter worked — she found out from an anonymous note).

It’s a Catch 22: Often, you have to get to litigation to even find out about discriminatory pay. “Women will come to us articulating pregnancy or promotion discrimination claims, disparate treatment, hostile work environment – anything but pay discrimination,” Kimpel says. “More often than not, if we ask them about their pay, they always say it’s okay.”

That can change during the legal process. Kimpel says that in one pay discrimination case her firm was litigating, the company put up as a witness a female employee who said she’d always been fairly treated. Awkwardly, it emerged during discovery that not only had the company been systematically underpaying that witness compared to men in the same position, they had openly acknowledged it to each other.

Kelly, too, had her mind changed by what she learned from her colleagues in the case. “When I started working for Novartis, I was 25 years old, and at that age, you want to believe that everything is good and right in the universe,” she says. “You don’t want to believe that things like pay discrimination can happen.”

But there’s even more that makes Kelly’s case unusual, and none of it bodes well for redressing pay discrimination through the courts in the future. Last year’s Wal-Mart v. Dukes verdict in the Supreme Court raised the hurdle on qualifying as a class in a pay discrimination case. And the courts have never been more resistant to pay discrimination claims, when they’re filed at all. Data from the Equal Opportunity Commission shows that it only receives about 900 pay discrimination cases a year, a tiny fraction compared to other kinds of discrimination claims.

At the same time, a recent analysis by University of Maryland law professor Deborah Thompson Eisenberg found that courts of the past decade have been the most hostile to equal pay claims since the early days of being able to sue over it. “From 2000-2009, employees prevailed on their equal pay claims 35 percent of the time,” compared to 55 percent between 1990-99 and similar rates in earlier decades. And though “evaluation of equal pay claims is supposed to be fact-intensive,” meaning it would benefit from discovery, Eisenberg found that between 1999 and 2009, federal courts granted summary judgment to the employer 72 percent of the time. In other words, courts have generally been reluctant to intervene in a company’s decision to pay someone less, operating on the assumption that the market is working.

And yet the wage gap persists, even after adjusting for other variables, which narrows but doesn’t eliminate earnings disparity between men and women. A 2007 American Association of University Women study found that a year after graduating from college, women earned 80 percent of what men did, and over time the gap widened. Even after adjusting for “college major, occupation, industry, sector, hours worked, workplace flexibility, experience, educational attainment, enrollment status, GPA, institution selectivity, age, race/ethnicity, region, marital status and number of children,” there was an unexplained 5 percent gap. Another study was able to truly compare like for like: It followed 43 transgender people, finding that women who became men saw their earnings rise, while men who became women earned almost a third less.

The Paycheck Fairness Act wouldn’t just make it easier for employees to discuss salary — it would also raise the bar for the justifications that employers give for paying men and women differently, restore Labor Department reporting that was phased out for budgetary reasons, and provide funds for various programs to train EEOC employees about wage disputes and women in the workforce about negotiating skills. But as long as the Paycheck Fairness Act remains a liberal cudgel rather than a pending reality, and as long as the courts are increasingly skeptical, other remedies will have to be found. In her paper “Money, Sex, and Sunshine: A Market-Based Approach to Pay Discrimination,” Eisenberg thinks that better pay transparency can move the needle.

She proposes taking a page from the analyses of executive compensation – where it’s long been acknowledged that market-distorting forces, including “human dynamics, unconscious biases, and social factors” skew the market – and making wages more transparent to begin with. “Pay secrecy compounds and conceals the problem,” she writes – whether it’s because managers implicitly think work done by women (especially women of color, for whom the pay gap is far wider) is worth less, or because the female employee started out by asking for less or was reluctant to ask for a raise.

Even if the Paycheck Fairness Act fails to get past this Senate, says Deborah J. Vagins, senior legislative counsel at the ACLU, the president could sign an executive order forbidding any federal contractors from retaliating against employees who discuss wages. And Sarah Jane Glynn, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, says that the Paycheck Fairness Act at least can make wage secrecy “part of the national conversation. It encourages women to think about this – and maybe be more proactive in terms of negotiating their starting salary.”

Unfortunately, wage transparency can only take you so far – you also have to have leverage, no easy feat in this economy, as Linda Barrington, Managing Director of the Institute for Compensation Studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, points out.

“Transparency has allowed CEOs to keep raising their salaries, but at the bottom end we have such a surplus of labor that there’s no bargaining power,” she says. “It always comes down to, how much bargaining power do individuals have to raise their earning power? If you ask and you have no power, it’s not going to matter.”

But we’re talking about a man who blackmailed a scared au pair into having sex with him – rape, to my mind – and, when he showed up at Beth’s home with her husband after she rejected him, seemed to be trying for a repeat. In Pete’s turn this week as Joan Harris’s pimp, stacking the deck to make her choice all but inevitable, he is trying to restore a sexual order where women have very little decision at all. No wonder the selling point of the Jaguar is whether you can truly own something beautiful — this episode is all about men trying to own women.

This is entirely in character for Pete – and also for the morally weak men of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, prostitution-client and client-bedder Don Draper included. But I’m disturbed by the suggestion in many reactions – including in Salon’s excellent recap – that we should be disappointed in Joan as a character. Nelle Engoron argues that “seeing Joan allow her body to be used in this fashion is worse because of what it suggests about her character. We’re not long past the time when all women who gained a position of any power were accused of sleeping their way into it. To literalize that degrading accusation in Joan renders her less than we’ve always thought her to be.”

But in striking a deal that involves an ownership stake in the company that seems to matter more to her than her own family, Joan doubly takes possession of the means of production. It’s not “empowering,” and it’s a partly coerced decision – she’s not even given accurate or full information about the partners’ response, who were in turn misled about her position, and she believes they think she’s a whore anyway — but it’s a rational choice that will give her much more autonomy than anything else available to her.

As Amanda Marcotte put it in the comments of her excellent video recap, “this episode really exposes how people see sex work, especially the perplexing … belief that selling is worse than buying … or pimping. Which is pure, unadulterated misogyny.” It’s true that Joan has plenty to offer the firm beyond her gorgeous breasts, but after 13 years and one brilliant but unappreciated turn as a script reader, the men at the firm still see her as either the seductress or the tough mom figure. (Peggy managed to de-sexualize her image, but she has become professionally invisible at the company.) Meanwhile, after an on-again, off-again relationship with Roger that definitely was on the prostitution spectrum regardless of her feelings for him, Joan has clearly come to believe that she can’t rely on him either emotionally or financially.

Most relevant of all is the fact that finally taking the respectable route of marriage – itself traditionally transactional — has failed Joan. It has not protected her in any sense – not from sexual or emotional harm, or from her “honor” being besmirched, or from financial instability. The men at SCDP seem to feel like they vaguely need to put up a fight not because Joan is a human being who should be in charge of her own bodily autonomy, but because of a chivalric urge that either puts women on a pedestal or concedes them as the property of another man, as Don Draper tries to do by saying Joan is married. Of course, not only does he know full well that her marriage is over, he’s been an active perpetrator of the undermining of marriage as an institution of either protection or respect.

Yes, Don is trying to change with his marriage to Megan, in which he not only has been faithful (so far as we know) but also no longer holds all the cards. In this week’s episode, Michael Ginsberg’s awed declaration that Megan Draper comes and goes as she pleases echoes Pete’s bitterness about women calling the shots. For a brief minute there, Megan seemed to be pulling off a rare balance for the office – a conventionally beautiful and sexually confident woman whose ideas are actually taken seriously. But she only got there by marrying well, and while she may be wielding a lot of power in the relationship now, she still essentially serves at Don’s pleasure. Joan, on the other hand, owns something that will last as long as the firm does.

While there are many reasons for the resilience of this myth, the most powerful one is the simple fact that humans today can and do engage in extreme levels of violence and aggression. If you read the newspaper, visit online news sites or turn on the television, you are guaranteed to come across some evidence of humans behaving violently toward other humans. While many animals aggressively hunt, capture, and eat prey, it is relatively rare for most animals to engage in intense, lethal aggression with members of their own species.

Many social mammals display some intraspecific (within the same species) aggression and violence, sometimes resulting in death. A male lion might seriously injure another male lion in a fight over access to a pride of females, two rams might butt heads until one of them staggers away seriously hurt, or a male baboon might repeatedly attack a female in his group, wounding her and injuring her infant. However, these events, while aggressive and violent, are not the main ways in which the individuals in these species interact. For the most part, death of opponents in these cases is neither the premeditated goal nor the outcome of the behavior. So, while intraspecific violence occurs, most species do not exhibit extreme aggression regularly and methodically. Humans are the only species that practice premeditated homicide and full-out war. That humans can, and do, participate in aggression and violence in ways that most other animals do not (and cannot) has led many to theorize that this aggression, this inner beast or demon, our Mr. Hyde, is part of human evolutionary heritage.

The myth of human aggression holds that we are indeed evolved to be killers, or at least aggressors who use the threat of violence as a major evolutionary tool. The mark of this evolved tendency toward aggression can therefore be found in our bodies and minds, especially those of men:

When we look at humans’ bodies and brains, we find more direct signs of design for aggression. The larger size, strength, and upper-body mass of men is a zoological giveaway of an evolutionary history of violent male-male competition. . . . (Stephen Pinker, psychologist)

There is the notion that aggression, the capacity for immense violence, evolved specifically because of the benefits it gave males, including an edge in competition with one another and between groups of males. Some make the argument for indicators of aggressive cores in our closest primate relatives and suggest that aggression and violence result in evolutionary benefits:

Thus, both the patterns of deadly violence in nature and the ethnographic record of simple hunter-gatherers clearly suggest that intraspecific human violence and the threat of it, while obviously undergoing transformations and varying in form through human history, are on the whole as old as humanity itself, indeed as old as nature. . . . (Azar Gat, political scientist)

In short, the myth of human aggression is that humans (especially males) have a specific and distinct tendency toward aggression and violence and that this is patterned in our bodies and minds and arose due to evolutionary pressures of competition between men and between groups. If this were true, then aggression and violence must be a core part of who we are as humans because over evolutionary time those with the more aggressive behavioral patterns or traits must have defeated opponents and mated more successfully than those who were more pacific.

It is obvious that human aggression is an amazingly complicated thing. There is variation in conflict styles and aggression across individuals, sexes, genders, societies, and time frames. Aggression is an important part of being human, but it is not who we are at our core. We now know that aggression itself is not a uniform or consistent discrete trait, so aggression per se cannot be favored by evolutionary pressures to form the basis of the human experience.

The other primates show us that we do not have specific, evolved patterns of heightened aggression, especially in males. Looking at the chimpanzee species demonstrates the potential for variability in the expression of aggressive and nonaggressive behaviors in our shared ancestors. War is common in the human experience today, but it is not a central part of our evolutionary heritage. We know that males and females differ in some facets of aggression, but a lot of those differences have to do with physical size and the social and experiential contexts in which they find themselves. We know that more aggressive, more violent, or more warlike males do not necessarily do better, either in humans or in our closest relatives.

Human aggression, especially in males, is not an evolutionary adaptation: we are not aggressive, big-brained apes. We know the regions of the brain and body that influence normal aggression. While our genes do not control or determine the normative expression of aggression, abnormal biological function can influence particular patterns of aggressive behavior. The nature of human aggression is not found in our genes, but understanding the function and variation in our biology can help us better understand the pathways and patterns of aggressive behavior. As a species we do not rely on aggression and violence more than cooperation; there is no pattern of evidence to support a notion that humanity is aggressive and selfish by nature. The myth of a human nature characterized by an intrinsic aggressiveness is simply not true.

And yet the popular press and much of the public (and some academics) hold the belief that there is a specific biology or a genetic basis for aggression, especially in males. Identifying the genetic key to aggression is not possible, because it does not exist.

It is pretty clear that in humans two parts of the brain, called the prefrontal cortex and the dorsal anterior cingulated cortex, are centrally involved with the expression of behavior, especially aggression. The prefrontal cortex is linked to other behaviorally important brain structures called the amygdala and the hypothalamus. In general, these parts of the brain receive a variety of inputs from other areas of the brain (vision, smell, touch, pain, sound, memory, language, etc.) and then interact in a sort of feedback loop to stimulate other bodily systems (such as hormones, neurotransmitters, and muscles) into action.

The prefrontal cortex does a bunch of other things as well, including playing central roles in introspection, recognition of emotions, regulation of emotions, and detection of conflict situations, and it acts as a trigger to initiate a variety of other neurological systems in regard to social interactions. The dorsal anterior cingulated cortex seems to be involved in the regulation of responses to anger, pain, and social rejection. From brain imaging studies, we know that individuals who are particularly aggressive often show lowered neuronal activity, reduced glucose metabolism, or even reduced density of gray matter in the prefrontal cortex than those who are not as aggressive. Studies of individuals who have received brain damage to the prefrontal cortex and amygdala reveal that they demonstrate more impulsive and antisocial aggressive behavior or have lowered abilities to control the expression of aggression.

Additionally, shock therapy in the 1950s and 1960s directed at the amygdala and prefrontal cortex resulted in lowered overall arousal rates and severely reduced aggression. In short, there are multiple studies which all point to the action of the prefrontal cortex, the dorsal anterior cingulated cortex, and at least the amygdala, as important areas for understanding the biological infrastructure of aggression.

There are a suite of molecules (called neurotransmitters) produced by the body which directly interact with these regions of the brain and are involved in the expression of aggressive behavior (among other things). They are the 5-hydroxytryptamine receptors (5-HT for short and involved with the neurotransmitter serotonin), the neurotransmitter and neurohormone dopamine, the metabolic enzyme monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), and a variety of steroid hormones such as testosterone, other androgens, and estrogen. None of these are a smoking gun for the origin and expression of aggression in general, but some of these are implicated, to some extent, as playing a role in the emergence of particular types or patterns of aggression.

Genes are basically just stretches of DNA that contain the code for either the production of a protein molecule (or parts of a molecule) or the regulation of other genes or of themselves. Genes come in multiple forms (alleles). While genes contain codes for proteins and their regulation, the relationship between genes and complex molecules like neurotransmitters and hormones is very complicated.

Dubbed the “warrior gene” in the press, the gene that codes for monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) has recently been a central player in the study of genetic influences on aggressive behavior. This gene is found on the X chromosome (the one you get from your mother), so that males have only one copy of it and females have two (males are XY and females are XX). The gene product, the enzyme monoamine oxidase A, interacts with the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine, and norephedrine, regulating their release and breakdown so that once they do what they are supposed to do they don’t build up or interact with other receptors, causing problems for communication between parts of the brain.

It turns out that there are at least four different common alleles for this gene that have the effect of increasing or decreasing the amount of MAOA produced. Lowered amounts of MAOA in the brain in some mice, rhesus monkeys, and humans, under certain conditions, is associated with increased aggression and reduced ability to control impulsive behavior. A noticeable number of mice, monkeys, and human males who had the low-MAOA-production alleles and who experienced severe social and/or physical trauma or abuse during early childhood development were more likely to express heightened aggressive and antisocial behavior as adults. Some low-MAOA humans also score higher on self reports of aggressive and violent behavior. However, in some cases the high-producing alleles are correlated with aggressive behavior in male children. In a famous case of a Dutch family who have a very rare allele where no MAOA is produced at all, three males exhibited extreme aggressive and antisocial behavior. Now, not all individuals with the low-expression alleles exhibit this kind of aggression, not even all of those with the low-expression alleles who had traumatic or abusive childhoods. In addition some of the high-expression allele carriers exhibited high aggression.

All of these studies were conducted on males because it is much easier to discover which alleles are acting as the males only have one copy of the gene. In females it is more difficult to identify the actual action of the gene because they may have two copies but only one is actually active; determining which one that is can be very difficult. Thus, while this gene is often invoked as an example of a male biological basis of aggression, there have been no in-depth studies of this gene in females so we do not know if it functions the same way. We should note that the enzyme MAOA operates exactly the same in the females’ brains as it does in males.

This research focuses on the variation in allele frequencies for MAOA and the relationship that its expression has to early social and physiological experiences during development and its variation in functional outcomes in different social contexts. In other words, this is an underlying genetic element that plays an interesting role in affecting the brain structures that are associated with the expression of aggression. But the behavioral outcomes of gene variation are totally dependent on the patterns in early life experience and the social context in which some carriers of the low-production allele find themselves. The bottom line is that if you have a low-expression allele and you undergo severe childhood trauma or abuse, then the likelihood of your having problems in the neurological infrastructure of aggression that result in higher aggression is higher than if you had the regular-production allele.

Most people have heard of serotonin, but most do not know that it is tied to the neurotransmitter 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT for short). Of all the well-known neurotransmitters this is the one best recognized for affecting behavior, especially aggression. The main way in which 5-HT relates to aggression has been determined from studies of the variation in the receptors that interact with 5-HT. There are at least thirteen types of 5-HT receptors and multiple molecules that interact with, and regulate, 5-HT in the brain. In general, it appears that serotonin concentrations in the brain, and the way they interact with receptors, can modulate aggression and violent behavior in mammals, including humans (although the vast majority of the research has been done with rodents).

In general, low 5-HT levels are associated with higher levels of aggressive or impulsive behavior and high 5-HT levels and/or manipulation of the 5-HT receptors in different parts of the brain can act to reduce aggression. Genetic evidence for these impacts comes almost completely from studies of rodents: mice or rats missing specific genes that affect 5-HT concentrations or the production of 5-HT in certain brain regions are more aggressive. But this is not true for all 5-HT, as manipulation of certain receptors and of concentrations of 5-HT in different parts of the brain have different types of impacts on aggression, anxiety-related behavior, and impulsivity. In the few studies of humans that track 5-HT relating to aggression there is a negative relationship between the ability of 5-HT receptors to bind to neurotransmitters and aggression, which supports the notion that this molecule impacts the expression of aggressive behavior.

One of the most interesting findings from the 5-HT studies is that, in rodents, different types of 5-HT receptors have different impacts on expressed aggression, depending on whether the rodents were exhibiting “normal” territorial aggression or impulsive pathological aggression stimulated by drugs or electric shock. This suggests that the various genes that code for the different 5-HT types are involved in different systems in aggression and that they might in fact have multiple, even mutually negating, roles in the production and expression of aggressive behavior depending on the social context and the type of aggression expressed. So while 5-HT is definitely involved in the expression, and probably the modulation, of the level of aggression, there is no evidence that this is where aggression comes from.

There is ALSO a strong popular assumption that testosterone stimulates or enhances aggression, especially in males. First off, it is important to note that testosterone courses through both male and female bodies, but that on average, males have higher circulating levels than females. Testosterone is a steroid hormone closely related to estrogen and a suite of hormones called androgens. Little is known about the underlying genetic structures that influence testosterone, but there is no doubt that some genetic variation influences the production and regulation of testosterone in human bodies.

The concept that testosterone produced by males facilitates and increases aggression is an oversimplification and there are very weak or inconsistent correlations between testosterone levels and aggression in adult humans. Even when external sources of testosterone are administered to adults their aggression does not tend to increase, nor is there an increase in aggression at puberty when human males undergo a significant increase in the production of testosterone and the development of male secondary sexual characteristics.

There is evidence that in competitive or acute stress situations humans can respond by increasing the production of testosterone but there is no strong or consistent evidence that these increases result in increased aggressive behavior. The increase does appear to enhance muscle activity and efficiency and might also result in lower sensitivity to pain or punishment in both men and women. This might make individuals more likely to participate in aggressive competition, but it does not increase aggression per se. In some experiments the levels of circulating testosterone increase after dominance interactions and social competition, but again this is not necessarily tied to overly aggressive behavior. Exposure to sexual situations and to communal competitive events (like team sports) also appears to increase testosterone in males. Interestingly, males who are fathers and or long-term married partners show lower levels of testosterone than do nonfathers or unmarried males.

Overall, testosterone seems to be associated with the efficiency and activity of a variety of muscular and other physical systems, some of which are implicated in the expression of aggression. But contrary to popular misconceptions, testosterone itself is not associated in any causal way with increased aggressive behavior or in the patterns of the exhibition of aggression.

Despite popular notions that certain genes or genetic elements control or regulate the appearance and intensity of aggressive behaviors, there is no evidence for any one-to-one genetic controls, nor is there evidence for certain molecules or systems in the body that predetermine aggressive outcomes. There is no gene or system in the body that can be identified as “for aggression.” While it appears clear that genetic variation in neurotransmitters and hormones can be involved in the ways in which we express aggressive behavior, there is no direct or casual link. Our genes cannot make us aggressive.

As the anthropologist Ashley Montagu sagely cautioned, “It is essential that we not base our image of ourselves on false foundations. What is involved here is not simply the understanding of the nature of humanity, but also the image of humanity that grows out of that understanding.” Humans are not naturally aggressive, but they do have a great potential for aggression and violence. If we believe we are aggressive at our base, that males stripped of social constraints will resort to a brutish nature, then we will expect and accept certain types of violence as inevitable. This means that instead of really trying to understand and rectify the horrific and complex realities of rape, genocide, civil war, and torture, we will chalk at least a part of these events up to human nature. This is a dangerous state of mind that traps us in a vicious cycle of inaction and futility when it comes to moving forward as societies invested in understanding and managing violence.

Sure, certain things spur aggressive actions, but the common notions about our inner, natural aggressive tendencies (especially in males) ignores the complexity of human biology, psychology, history, and society. It downplays the myriad ways in which aggression is initiated and maintained, and oversimplifies what we can mean by, and understand about, human aggressive behavior. And, most dangerously, it enables a kind of inevitability in our communal sense of aggression and society, especially as it relates to males. This need not be the case.

That night Springsteen rambled, more than usual. Before the postindustrial triptych of “Independence Day,” “Factory” and “Jackson Cage” midway through the first set, he began a long monologue, although not about his father, whom he frequently talked about before “Factory.” Instead, Springsteen used this opportunity to talk about his love of pop music, about what it had meant to him growing up. Spontaneously, falteringly, he offered the most coherent argument he would ever make for the essential unity of the two distinct compositional strains that had flowed into “The River,” its idealistic and pessimistic “hearts”:

I never did good in school, never did good, and they always figured that if you’re not smart in school, it’s because you’re dumb. But I always felt that I never really learned anything, or learned anything that was important to me, till I started listening to the radio back in the early ’60s. And it seemed that the stuff that I was hearing off the radio in all those great songs was stuff that if they knew how, they’d be trying to teach you in school … but they just didn’t know how to. They always talked to your head, they could never figure out how to talk to your heart, you know. And it seems that, like all those singers and all those groups, there’s one thing that they just knew: what it was about. And when I started listening, I found out that the first time … that, instead of the fantasies that you have when you’re a little kid, I had dreams now and that they were different, it was different, and that if that was possible, that I didn’t have to live my life the way that I was, that things could be better. If you just go out, take a chance, find out what’s going on …

It was only toward the end of the first set in Tempe that Springsteen finally addressed the election. “I don’t know what you guys think about what happened last night,” he said as a transition between “The River” and “Badlands,” “but I think it’s pretty frightening. You guys are young, there’s gonna be a lot of people depending on you coming up, so this is for you.” When you listen to recordings of this concert, during this speech you hear scattered cheers from the crowd, but nowhere near as strong as when Springsteen actually started the next song.

Springsteen’s comments before “Badlands” in Tempe that night were virtually the first recorded statement he ever made about politics. At the MUSE concerts a year earlier, he was practically the most apolitical performer on the stage. He had played a small acoustic benefit for George McGovern’s campaign at the Red Bank Drive-In in 1972, but there is no other record of his ever endorsing a political candidate up to this point, or even expressing displeasure with one as he did in the wake of Reagan’s election. In subsequent interviews, he would admit that he had maybe voted once, but no more than that. Like the draft or Kent State, politics was something that happened outside of his life, to his life, while he was trying to make his dreams come true. And he was obviously not the only American who viewed politics that way, especially not in the fall of 1980. Ronald Reagan’s victory, much closer in the popular vote than in the Electoral College, reflected the will of about a quarter of the electorate; only a little more than half of those eligible to vote had done so that year. Like Bruce Springsteen, many other Americans at that point in our history were essentially apolitical.

But there’s a subtle difference between politics and ideology, between elected officials and the policies they enact on the one hand and the underlying principles that cause people to trust or distrust politicians on the other. You can live your life without ever having an opinion on any elected official or legislative body, but you cannot live your life as an adult without having some notion of what a better world would look like. In the late 1970s, as the two dominant political parties in the United States reacted to contemporary economic crises by dissolving into ever greater procedural disarray, such utopian visions of what might work better suddenly became far more important. In 1979, however, only the college professors called this “ideology.” The word that both First Lady Rosalynn Carter and the Reverend Jerry Falwell of the Thomas Road Baptist Church started using that year was “values.”

In 1979 and 1980, as Bruce Springsteen crafted “The River” and began touring to support it, his politics were virtually nonexistent, but his ideology — his “values,” if you must — was all over his songs. Springsteen believed in “freedom,” in as vague a sense as any American would define it, in the freedom to head out where you wanted when you wanted with whomever you wanted with no bossman or exaggerated patriarch telling you what to do. On Springsteen’s first four albums, his ideal world was the road, the way to the next great place but not necessarily the place itself, because all fixed places had the potential to trap you. In Springsteen’s songs, success was seldom material success (no matter how much the singer might want it in real life). In most cases, the success his characters dreamed of or attained was mere survival, making their stand in an environment that was constantly trying to grind them down.

Half of “The River” reinforced this view, not only such “Darkness” survivors as “Sherry Darling” and “Independence Day” but such newer songs as “Ramrod,” “Jackson Cage,” “Out in the Street” and “Cadillac Ranch” as well. There were also all the new songs about connection (“I Wanna Marry You,” “Fade Away,” “Stolen Car,” “The Price You Pay,” “Drive All Night,” and “Wreck on the Highway”), but they were about personal commitments rather than communal ones. Both these aspects of “The River” were undeniably ideological, but they were not political; they sought no help for their characters through governmental or collective action. Even in the album’s title track, the characters’ situation seems more mythic than political. In that song, Springsteen sings, “Lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy,” but there is no sense here that these characters’ problems could be fixed by a government stimulus package or a cut in the mortgage rates. Their problems are synchronic rather than historical and must simply be endured.

But during this same period, as the nation around him felt adrift in an uncertain and uncommitted age, Springsteen was crafting his first specifically topical songs in almost a decade, since the trendy, epic antiwar songs he had written during the Nixon era. The most obvious of these was “Roulette,” written in a white heat during the first week after the event at Three Mile Island but by all accounts never seriously considered for the album. Almost a year later, toward the end of the “River” sessions, Springsteen had also written the little gem “Held Up Without a Gun,” which managed to turn the most pressing political issue of the late 1970s — the exorbitantly rising price of gasoline — into a rocking good joke.

Indeed, with the gas crisis of the Carter years, history practically forced Springsteen to consider the political implications of his apolitical, personal ideology. In his pre-1979 songs, as in rock songs since at least Chuck Berry, cars and motorcycles were the vehicles of the individualized freedom that he craved. In the late 1970s, however, ration-starved cars and motorcycles became much more specific cultural symbols, emblems of how Americans saw their personal freedom limited by current events. Gas prices had been rising since the beginning of the decade, and in one day, June 28, 1979, OPEC raised the price of a barrel of crude oil by 24 percent. That summer, as Springsteen labored at the Record Plant, blocks-long lines at gas stations became a common, even violent occurrence.

Suddenly, Springsteen’s favorite form of mindless fun had taken on economic, political, and even international significance. The two roadhouse numbers he and the band cut that fall, “Ramrod” and “Cadillac Ranch,” spoke about the sheer fun of driving, in purely sensual terms that were a world away from the desperate tales of escape he had trafficked in on his last two albums. Simultaneously, though, in songs like “Stolen Car” and “The River,” it was also becoming clear that cars could take you nowhere as well, that they could signify escape in the sense of avoidance rather than freedom. In many ways, the great lost album that Springsteen could have released but didn’t in 1980 was a single disc of songs about cars, taking in the freedoms and restrictions that they made possible for his fellow citizens. It would have been a perfect project to release during a year in which driving was an implicitly ideological act.

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Like many other Americans of his era, Springsteen was caught up in the “crisis of the American spirit” about which President Carter had spoken during that same brutal summer of 1979. This was another part of Springsteen’s dissatisfaction during the late 1970s, a more abiding need than could be solved by a simple Top 10 single. He knew that something was missing in his life, that just driving off into the night wouldn’t fill the absence he increasingly felt in his soul, but he was still nowhere near embracing Carter’s solution to this crisis: increased civic involvement. “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God,” Carter had declared, “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” Springsteen obviously believed in hard work, but the only community he had ever been a part of was the Upstage. Ever the proud individualist, he was innately suspicious of virtually all systems, structures, clubs, and experts, even if they claimed they were trying to help him.

In other words, Springsteen’s criticism of Ronald Reagan from the stage in Tempe was in no way a too-late endorsement of Jimmy Carter. It was simply a voiced suspicion of Reagan, who had been clearly labeled a public enemy of rock ’n’ roll since Jeffrey Shurtleff’s mockery of him at Woodstock at the absolute latest. Given his later admissions of political apathy during the 1970s, it is doubtful that Springsteen was acquainted with too many of the specifics of Reagan’s political platform. He just seemed like the kind of person who wouldn’t be too comfortable with “freaks.”

Nevertheless, there was more truth than Springsteen realized to his knee-jerk statement that he didn’t know what his fans thought about what had happened the previous night. What Springsteen probably didn’t know at that time, but would become clear once the 1980 election results were more closely analyzed, was that the youth vote broke slightly for Reagan, with many of the youngest baby boomers casting their first presidential votes that year for the former California governor. Moreover, Reagan received 49 percent of the Catholic vote, 40 percent of the union vote, and 24 percent of the votes cast by registered Democrats, all groups to which Springsteen had strong personal ties.

We will never know for sure, but statistically there is an excellent chance that many of the young women and men in Springsteen’s audience in Tempe who had voted the previous day had voted for Ronald Reagan. This may have seemed inconceivable to Springsteen, but if you weren’t listening carefully, it was surprisingly easy to be a fan of both men that fall. Like Springsteen (not to mention the pop singers of the 1960s whom he so admired), Reagan spoke to the heart, not the head; he “made sense of the world narratively”; and he thought that structures and institutions tended to get in the way of individual effort — all attitudes surprisingly consonant with the ethos of a song like “Out in the Street,” for example. The night before the election, Governor Reagan had even declared that he would be honored to lead what he called “the freest society the world has ever known.” Until Bruce Springsteen started telling audiences what he thought about the Soviet Union or the size of the federal budget — until he told them specifically what he found frightening about the president-elect, which he did not do that night in Tempe — it was perfectly understandable for his more casual fans to think that he might be a “Reagan Democrat” too.

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In 1980, Ronald Reagan ran for president mostly on what he considered the most important issues: lowering taxes, shrinking the federal government, rebuilding U.S. defense in the face of what he deemed a détente-emboldened Soviet Union. That year, his campaign aired cheap-looking TV spots in which the candidate spoke directly to the camera about soaring energy costs in front of a fake-looking shelf of books, as if he were a personal-injury lawyer looking for new clients. Four years later, however, after closely reading the poll data, in-house pragmatists like James Baker counseled the president that his long-standing supporters would vote for him no matter what. For the reelection campaign, Reagan’s team focused on images rather than issues, particularly in its advertising, which featured suburban homes, rural churches, forests, and gardens, all of them signifying a bucolic America that the ad copy suggested the president had restored. In 1980, the campaign had sold Reagan. Four years later, it was selling a putatively reborn America, in order to pull in voters who didn’t agree with the president already on specific political policies.

So, just as Bruce Springsteen and his advisers were plotting in the spring of 1984 to snag the broadest possible segment of the record-buying public, Ronald Reagan and his advisers were planning that same season in strategically similar ways to pull in the largest possible portion of the electorate. Reagan might be proceeding from the House Un-American Activities Committee-based right and Springsteen from the Monterey Pop-based left, but in 1984 each man was seeking to go beyond the loyal base that he had painstakingly built during the 1970s in order to capture the hearts and minds of the much wider American center. Viewed side by side, their relaunches look strikingly similar at points, particularly in terms of the visuals they presented. Like Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” video, “Morning in America,” Reagan’s most famous 1984 reelection ad, was filled with pastels and variations on the American tricolor: pretty red roses, a true-blue sky over the District of Columbia, and dazzlingly bright white picket fences and wedding gowns. A casual observer might think that Springsteen was trying to cynically cash in on the contemporary rise in patriotism, but the reverse was actually true: Reagan and his team were, like Springsteen, trying to put on a good show. Walter Mondale might have sought to be the rock ’n’ roll candidate of 1984 by using a Crosby, Stills and Nash song in one of his advertisements, but the sad truth of that year’s presidential campaign is that Reagan knew how to throw a better arena-style concert than Mondale did. Skydivers, hot-air balloons, and forty thousand people chanting “U.S.A.!” may not have been how Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have kicked off a reelection campaign, but it did sound like one hell of a finale for a Van Halen concert.

Politically, Springsteen’s sympathies may have been more with the Democratic camp, but when Democratic politicians spoke about America, none of them seemed to describe the country found in Springsteen songs. At the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco in mid-July — a month after Bruce’s stand at Alpine Valley — Governor Mario Cuomo challenged Reagan’s invocation of John Winthrop’s “shining city on a hill” by speaking about “the other part of the city [where] there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, more and more people who need help but can’t find it.” Two nights later the Reverend Jesse Jackson famously spoke to the convention of “our Nation [as] a rainbow.” What both Reagan and Springsteen understood in 1984, however, was that, after the last 15 or 20 years of battering national history, most Americans didn’t want their nation to be two or many. They wanted it to be one. As one Reagan aide remarked in a memo written on March 8 (while Arthur Baker was adding aerobic-friendly rhythms to the already synth-heavy “Dancing in the Dark”), “If we allow any Democrat to claim optimism or idealism as his issue, we will lose the election.”

Ronald Reagan’s most deeply held ideological tenet, far more important than any specific policy that might have grown out of it, was his belief that the United States was a nation of individuals. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Reagan contended that the core change that his administration had made during the last few years was to shift the government from a philosophy of “statism” that only viewed “people in groups” to one that advanced “the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with an orderly society.” For the casual listener, how different was that from Springsteen’s current variation on the Elvis Presley freedom speech from four years before, now used to introduce “Born to Run” (in this case, in Largo, Maryland, two nights after Reagan accepted the Republican nomination)?

When I was a kid growing up, and I first heard the music of Elvis Presley, the main thing it did for me was it set my mind free a little bit. I could dream a little bit bigger than I had been. His music and the best of rock ’n’ roll always said to me “Just let freedom ring,” and that’s what we’re here for tonight. But remember you gotta fight for it every day.

For the most part, this was as political as Springsteen got in the summer of 1984. Despite the presence of two or three “Nebraska” songs every night, Springsteen’s most notable response to contemporary politics on this tour so far was his decision to cover the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fightin’ Man” during his encores many nights, as significant an addition on this tour as “Who’ll Stop the Rain” had been four years earlier.

That night at the Capital Centre in Largo, “Street Fightin’ Man” directly followed “Born to Run” during the encores, its first appearance after a two-week absence. In the audience that night was syndicated columnist George Will, who had been invited to the show by Max Weinberg’s wife, Rebecca, who was a fan of his tag-team punditry with Sam Donaldson on Sunday morning TV. For his first and only Springsteen concert, Will wore a bow tie, double-breasted blazer, and dress slacks rather than the increasingly de rigueur denim. At Rebecca’s suggestion, the columnist also stuffed cotton in his ears. In general, Will found Springsteen androgynous, noisy and surrounded by pot smokers, yet in the end he concluded that the singer was “a wholesome cultural portent.” As a political commentator, Will may not have cared about rock ’n’ roll’s future, but he did see Springsteen’s abundant success as an emblem of a robust American present.

Although his columns that year never made this clear, George Will was in fact an off-the-books adviser to the president’s reelection campaign. He seems to have come up with the idea of linking Springsteen with Reagan, but his genuine reaction to Springsteen’s concert was very much in keeping with the Reagan camp’s wider reelection strategy — don’t divide, co-opt. In attempting to seize many formerly liberal strains (even ones associated with the 1960s) and claim them for their own, Reagan’s advisers were piggybacking on a larger, hegemonic shift that had been building in U.S. society for the last year or two. In retrospect, historian Gil Troy has dubbed this shift “the Great Reconciliation,” which evidenced itself, in his words, “in the rise of the corporate activist, the consumer with a conscience, a society filled with people yearning to earn like Rockefellers, but occasionally live and sometimes even vote like Beatniks.”

Very much in this spirit, Will essentially announced in his column that rock was not rebellion. It was hard work. “Backstage,” he noted, “there hovers the odor of Ben-Gay: Springsteen is an athlete draining himself for every audience.” Moreover, he classified Springsteen’s brand of rock as a well-made American product, one that produced large profits and need not be shipped overseas (except on well-managed tours). “If all Americans,” Will continued, “—in labor and management, who make steel or cars or shoes or textiles — made their products with as much energy and confidence as Springsteen and his merry band make music, there would be no need for Congress to be thinking about protectionism.”

Whether it was just a lucky accident due to Will’s vacation schedule or a more purposeful delay to help out the president’s cause, Will’s column on Springsteen finally appeared in print on September 13: Over a month after the concert he had attended; a week or so into the official presidential campaign; as “Dancing in the Dark” sank down to no. 50 on the Hot 100, “Cover Me” rose to no. 15, and John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band’s ersatz E Street track “On the Dark Side” sat between the two genuine articles at no. 37. Less than a week later, Ronald Reagan made a scheduled stump appearance in Hammonton, N.J., a fairly rural community about an hour’s drive southwest of Freehold and half an hour northwest of Atlantic City. At this appearance, Reagan’s standard stump speech was altered as usual to include a local reference or two. In this case, the president noted, “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in [the] songs of a man so many young Americans admire  —New Jersey’s own, Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”

Over the weekend, between shows, Springsteen tried to make light of Reagan’s comments, but the impression persisted that Reaganism and Springsteenism were one and the same. When you heard Springsteen extol unrestricted individualism as he did in the Let freedom ring rap before “Born to Run,” or speak about the Revolutionary War monument in Freehold as he frequently did before “My Hometown,” you could easily understand why. Generationally specific as Springsteen’s remarks before “My Hometown” might be, they were still stylistically in tune with the similarly honorific remarks that the president had made in France in early June on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, not to mention the tribute to the Statue of Liberty with which he had concluded his speech in Dallas.

By the night of Springsteen’s next performance, at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh on September 21, it was clear that the singer’s Reagan problem was not going away. That night, almost the first thing Springsteen mentioned to the audience was Reagan’s appropriation of his music. “Well, the President was mentioning my name in his speech the other day, and I kind of got to wondering what his favorite album of mine must’ve been, you know? I don’t think it was the ‘Nebraska’ album,” Bruce concluded, “I don’t think he’s been listening to this one,” and he led the band into their customary rave-up on “Johnny 99.”

Throughout the concert that night, Springsteen made his displeasure at the current administration known, as he had done briefly after Reagan’s election and during the VVA benefit. It’s important to note, though, that in the ensuing three or four years the specific fight that Springsteen had hinted at back then had never really come. In 1980 and 1981, Springsteen implicitly feared another culture war, like the one the nation had experienced during the early Nixon years. But in its rhetoric, the Reagan administration stressed unity rather than division, especially during this election year. Rock ’n’ roll was not a designated enemy for Ronald Reagan (as it might have been for a previous Republican like Spiro Agnew); pessimism was. Springsteen seems to have prepared himself for a fight that wasn’t even an open disagreement.

That night in Pittsburgh, in trying to definitively distinguish himself from Reagan, Springsteen went somewhere he had rarely gone before: Into the politics of class — not the division of the world into conformists and free spirits, but rather its division into haves and have-nots. Pushed to articulate his political convictions, Springsteen finally moved beyond his 1960s rock ’n’ roll individualism, back to the New Deal communalism he had instinctively absorbed from his parents. Now, as he once again reformulated the monuments story before “My Hometown,” he made his most directly anti-Reagan comment yet:

It’s a long walk from the government that’s supposed to represent all the people to where we [are now. It] seems like something’s happening out there where there’s a lot of stuff being taken away from a lot of people that shouldn’t have it taken away from them. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that this place belongs to us, that this is our hometown.

This was a start. If actively articulating his political concern for those less fortunate, those who might benefit from a larger federal government, was all it took for Springsteen to distinguish himself from the president, then a statement like this should have solved his problems of misperception.

But despite Springsteen’s increasingly explicit political statements as the tour rolled on, the ideological similarities between the two men remained. Springsteen could tell you better than anyone else that music speaks louder than words, and arrangements and setlists often speak louder than both. Every night, Springsteen took his audience on the same phased journey from the bad times of late 1981 to the good times of 1983-84, precisely the same historical journey on which President Reagan took his audiences during his stump speeches; from the “Nebraska”-esque days of “drift” and “torpor” to the promise of “you young people.” “[M]y generation,” Reagan declared near the end of his standard stump speech that fall (almost setting his audience up for a rendition of “Born to Run,” his allegedly favorite Springsteen song), “and a few generations between mine and yours . . . grew up in an America where we took it for granted that you could fly as high and as far as your own strength and ability would take you.” In the end, when you compared Springsteen’s fall 1984 tour with Reagan’s, no matter how different their political visions were supposed to be, their rhetoric seemed a lot alike.

Bruce put in more appearances that fall than the president, whose campaign had restricted his stumping to two or three well-chosen photo ops a week. Springsteen was still introducing “Born to Run” by saying “Let freedom ring” but now added “but it’s no good if it’s just for one. It’s gotta be for everyone.” More effectively, he started making room at his concerts for representatives of local food banks and political organizations, giving a shout-out from the stage of the Tacoma Dome to Washington Fair Share, a local coalition dealing with the results of toxic-waste dumping in the Northwest. By that point in the tour, the rock critical establishment (in the person of Jersey Shore-born soon-to-be MTV employee Kurt Loder) had stepped in to try and reburnish Bruce’s liberal reputation. As the tour made its way down the coast to Los Angeles, Loder conducted Springsteen’s first extended interview with Rolling Stone, giving him a widely distributed, rock-friendly forum in which to make his differences from the president clear.

None of it, though, made any difference, at least not in terms of the presidential race. On Sunday, November 4, two days before the election, Bruce and the band finished up a seven-night stand in Los Angeles, pulling out a rarely performed “Shut Out the Light” as a dedication for audience member Ron Kovic. Four days later, they were right back where they had been almost exactly four years earlier: onstage at Arizona State University in Tempe, looking ahead to four years of Ronald Reagan in the White House, this time elected by a wider margin than any nominee since Franklin Delano Roosevelt nearly half a century before. This time, Bruce didn’t say anything from the stage about the election.

Reprinted from “Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock ‘n’ Roll” by Marc Dolan. Copyright © 2012 by Marc Dolan. With the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.