Opinion

This was not always the case. In the 1970s, when Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed set out from Texarkana to Atlanta to deliver a truckload of Coors Banquet in the movie “Smokey and the Bandit” and the country singer Johnny Paycheck was composing dithyrambs in praise of “Colorado Kool-Aid” (“Well, it’s a can of Coors brewed from a mountain stream / It’ll set you head on fire an’ make your kidneys scream”), there was a real sense in which Coors was a right-wing beer.

The Coors family, which generally considered Richard Nixon an embarrassing squish, opposed unionization of its breweries, supported Ronald Reagan and donated large sums to the nascent Heritage Foundation. Unpasteurized, lacking preservatives and unavailable in Eastern states, Coors was alternately regarded as raffish and déclassé, promoted by cowboy stars and denounced by the gay rights leader Harvey Milk. In the words of a television spot from 1979: “It’s not city beer. It’s Coors.”

My maternal grandfather, a toolmaker at Buick, would no more have allowed someone to drink Coors in his presence in defiance of a union boycott than he would have tolerated a foreign car parked in his driveway. For some of my other older male relations in Michigan, Coors was embraced as an exotic symbol of Western manliness, a welcome alternative not only to Pabst Blue Ribbon and other staid Midwestern brands but also to the United Auto Workers and what they saw as its feckless paternalism. A friend who grew up in Washington confirms my impression that during the 1980s, serving Coors was unthinkable in respectable middle-class liberal social circles.

Nowadays there are few widely available consumer products that can plausibly be identified as right wing. Even Chick-fil-A, whose charitable foundation has funded groups in favor of conversion therapy and criminalizing homosexuality, announced in 2019 that it would stop such funding.

Rather than acknowledge Bud Light’s place in a faceless globalized chain of ownership, advertisements for the beer attempt to underscore its supposedly distinctive American and working-class character. Some years ago a series of advertisements featured the Bud Knight, a character who figured in faux-medieval settings alongside a royal personage known as the Dilly Dilly King. In one spot, the king enters a tavern and orders “Bud Lights for everyone,” eliciting cries of approval from the assembled crowd. A lone man informs his majesty that he would prefer a “nice mead,” an order that is amended, with ascending fussiness, to an “autumnal mead” that must be “malty and full-bodied.” Instead of being served his preferred beverage, the man is placed in a pillory by the Bud Knight. The implication is that Bud Light is for ordinary decent people who just want to have a good time with their friends, not smug effete connoisseurs.