Bart and Blue Jeans as Revolutionary Counter-Culture
Bart Simpson Mania of the 1990s (part one of two)
Please note
I originally wrote this as an analytical reading synthesis for a rhetoric and communications class. I have edited it and broken it into two parts to make it easier to read. This is part one of two. I hope you enjoy!
J.C. Penney — doing it wrong?
“You’re killing kids!” an angry grandmother accused Nancy Overfield.
In 2019, Willa Paskin interviewed Nancy Overfield regarding Bart Mania of the 1990s on her podcast, Decoder Ring. In the early 90s, Overfield was head of marketing for the children’s division of J.C. Penney. When the department store began selling T-shirts featuring Bart Simpson with the slogan “Underachiever, and proud of it”, moral panic ensued. One particularly enraged customer told Overfield that following Bart Simpson as a role-model would lead to youth dropping out of school, turning to drugs, and inevitably overdosing.
During his second — and unsuccessful — campaign, former president George W.H. Bush accused The Simpsons of degrading the American family, stating he wanted to “make American families a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons”. School principals all over the country banned Bart Simpson shirts for containing the word “hell”, and for apparently making the idea of being an underachiever aspirational.
Near the end of that decade, political theorist John Street wrote Political Theories of Culture, a chapter in which he outlined four dimensions of political positions as regards popular culture: conservative elitism, radical elitism, conservative populism, and radical populism.
I will briefly describe these perspectives, drawing parallels between Street’s political quadrants and how they are embodied in particular Simpsons characters. I touched upon conservative elitism in the introduction, so I will begin with that profile.
“Won’t somebody please think of the children?!”
I would describe conservative elitists as paternalistic and old-fashioned. They generally believe they know what’s best for everybody else, attempt to inflict their personally-held values and beliefs upon society, and stubbornly cling to and glorify the past as though it were the epitome of the “good life”. John Street would agree — granted, he phrased it more tactfully and less judgementally, stating conservative elitists believe “tastes are a short-hand account of character”.
In her podcast episode, Bart Simpson Mania, Paskin refers to “prescriptivist ideas” about how culture works, which I posit would fall under conservative elitism, believing culture “can make the world over in its image”. Conservative elitists want to “protect” society from the negative influences of popular culture, which is apparently “reflexively perverting unless it [is] actively uplifting”. Of course, what’s “uplifting” is also defined by the conservative elites.
The Simpsons character who best represents this political stance would be Helen Lovejoy. Helen’s famous catch phrase is, “won’t somebody please think of the children”, which she often decries while clutching her (usually proverbial) pearls over some (usually benign) new atrocity she believes will poison the youth of Springfield. The Lovejoys (both the Reverend and Helen) are supposedly devout Christians who wish to instill their religions values in their community, and Helen in particular is frequently worried that some new element of popular culture will lead to the undermining or disintegration of their “respectable” (aristocratic) values.
The “other”-other fifty-first state
Street explains that under conservative populism, “what’s good is what’s popular”, and ’the people’ are believed to be “simply the product of their choices [and to] represent an objective social fact which the market reveals”. While conservative populists claim to speak for the Will of ‘the people’, what goes unspoken is that this Will is representative of a particular subset of that people — namely, the elite, or bourgeoise.
Similar to their elite counterparts, conservative populists fight to uphold the status quo, but rather than believing a particular faction of society should paternalistically “guide” or “protect” the lower classes, populists believe the market is a neutral and democratic arbiter of what all people want. Successful sales or campaigns are considered representative of the preferences and desires of the general population, rather than — as Street warns — the “product of a particular ideology and interest”.
A lesser-known Simpsons character named Birch Barlow is an excellent example of a conservative populist. Barlow makes occasional appearances as a right-wing conservative talk-show host who panders to his audience’s biases, appealing to their emotions by making controversial and inflammatory statements intended to rile his listeners so they will call in to argue or rant.
Of particular relevance is the fact that Barlow refers to himself as the “fifth branch of the government”. As German historian Jan-Werner Müller explained in his article entitled Parsing Populism, “populists claim that they — and only they — properly represent the authentic, proper, and morally pure people”. Meanwhile, the true task of right-wing populism is to “harness the energy of the mass” to “reinforce the power of elites”.
“If anyone wants me, I’ll be in my room”
Radical elitists believe popular culture reproduces and reinforces elite values and status. As Street explains, to these elitists, popular culture is an expression of “forces which seek to prevent change, or to promote changes that do not benefit the majority of people”.
Before I introduce my third Simpsons character, I wish to incorporate the works of a real-life radical elitist — who also happens to be a brilliant Marxist art critic — namely, John Berger. In his book Ways of Seeing, Berger does not mince words when he confidently asserts, “The art of any period tends to serve the ideological interests of the ruling class”. Like Berger, radical elites believe radicalism and populism are mutually exclusive.
I’ll introduce the second pair of Simpsons characters in part two of two, so stay tuned!
© Jillian Enright, Neurodiversity MB
Related articles
“Look Over There!”: The Politics of Distraction
Populism, Panic, and the Politics of Fear
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References
Berger, John. (1972). Ways of Seeing. Penguin Books.
Evans, Greg. (2021, February 21). A deep dive into Birch Barlow, the ‘Rush Limbaugh’ of The Simpsons. Indy100.
Fiske, John. (2010). Understanding Popular Culture (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Groening, Matt. (1997, November 9). Bart Star (S9, E6). The Simpsons. Fox Television.
Groening, Matt. (1995, May 7). The Springfield Connection (S6, E23). The Simpsons. Fox Television.
Groening, Matt. (1987, April 19). Good Night (S1, E1). The Simpsons. The Tracey Ullman Show. Fox Television.
Kenneth. [Inside Ken’s Mind]. (2015, August 13). Presidents in Parody: Two Bad Neighbours. [Potus Geeks Blog].
Malinowski, E. (2012, February 20). The Making Of “Homer At The Bat,” The Episode That Conquered Prime Time 20 Years Ago Tonight. DeadSpin.
Müller, J.-W. (2015). Parsing Populism: Who is and who is not a populist these days? Juncture, 22(2), 80–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2050-5876.2015.00842.x
O’Brien, S., & Szeman, I. (2018). Popular Culture : A user’s guide (4th ed.). Nelson.
Paskin, Willa. (2019, October 7). Bart Simpson Mania: Who’s afraid of Bart Simpson? Slate : Decoder Ring. https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2019/10/decoder-ring-bart-simpson-culture-wars-george-h-w-bush. Slate.
Robin, Corey. (2018). The Reactionary Mind (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Street, John. (1997). Political Theories of Culture. In Politics and popular culture (pp. 147–167). Temple University Press.
Stoddard, Catherine. (2025, January 31). How ‘The Simpsons’ survived these early controversies. Live Fox Now News.
"A lesser-known Simpsons character named Birch Barlow is an excellent example of a conservative populist."
He was very obviously a parody of American broadcaster and author Rush Limbaugh, who regularly spoke those sentiments.