This is the song that Brad Paisley wrote in response to Barack Obama's election. It's a good song, but in case you don't want to listen, the key verse:
I had a friend in school
Running back on the football team
They burned a cross in his front yard
For asking out the homecoming queen
I thought about him today
And everybody who'd seen what he'd seen
From a woman on a bus
To a man with a dreamHey, wake up Martin Luther
Welcome to the future
He's still extraordinarily popular.
And this is how Merle Haggard feels about the Iraq war, U.S. domestic infrastructure, and the situation of returning veterans.
Our highways an' bridges are fallin' apart:
Who's blessed an' who has been cursed?
There's things to be done all over the world,
But let's rebuild America first.Yeah, men in position are backin' away:
Freedom is stuck in reverse.
Let's get out of Iraq an' get back on the track,
And let's rebuild America first.
The man's a national treasure in the minds of country fans (and some non-fans).
And those are just a couple of recent examples. Classic country is just chock full of liberal messaging, from Loretta Lynn's unabashed celebration of birth control to Mary Chapin Carpenter' defiant feminism to Johnny Cash's stand for poor people and prisoners and drug addicts and dead soldiers to Alabama's labor anthem to yet another anti-war anthem by Merle Haggard. And of course there's the recent phenomena of women in country getting all meta about how women are portrayed in country lyrics, gay men openly claiming a place in the genre, and straight allies just casually tossing out gay-inclusive messaging.
The Dixie Chicks were an anomaly. I can't think of another instance of country fans turning on an artist for a political statement. It was the way the conservative media latched on to the story. It was also the timing; this was post-Clear-Channel-monopoly but before the explosion in streaming music, so Clear Channel's marketing department basically controlled what new music people were exposed to. If they stopped playing you, you were dead.