20 years ago, Will Ferrell's 'Talladega Nights' predicted America's Sunbelt shift. The film, a part of Ferrell's man-child trilogy with Adam McKay, follows a blowhard racecar driver as he works his way back to the winner's circle following a dramatic and embarrassing wreck. The movie was a reaction to its immediate surroundings, rubbing and racing against America's political currents only three years after Bush's invasion of Iraq. The film saw that the future was in the sprawling boomtowns of the Sunbelt, that making a movie about America in 2006 required taking a hard-left into Southern culture — and that there was no better avatar for the country’s anti-intellectual and anti-coastal skid than Bush-via-Ferrell. Now, 20 years on, it has a lot to teach us about life in Donald Trump's America. The film introduces us to Ricky Bobby’s family with a gross-out splat, implying the soon-to-be stock car racer was born in the back of a speeding Chevelle driven by his reprobate father. We jump ahead in time and see a grade-school-aged Ricky Bobby on Career Day, let down again by his dad’s absence. His father appears for the first time in over a decade and is quickly tossed out of Ricky Bobby’s school for inappropriate behavior, leaving his son with a bit of parting wisdom that may or may not have been the ramblings of an inebriated fool. The film is littered with nods to the new normal. Ricky Bobby lives in a McMansion in some isolated North Carolina community. His sons are given tough names, lifted from a cut-rate Chuck Norris television show, in the same way conservatives today tend to name their sons after firearms manufacturers. Fast-food branding and half-hearted evangelicalism are a constant presence. The film feels spooky in its prescience, but Ferrell and McKay were far from alone in noticing the culture was heading out of the cities. The reality operates on zero-sum logic. Following his father’s maxim that “if you ain’t first, you’re last,” Ricky Bobby can’t imagine a win for anyone else as anything less than something stolen from him. If you’re at all up on the paranoid and protective stance of major right-wing media, this sounds awfully familiar. That pitch – they’re stealing from you – helped the nation elect Donald Trump in 2016, himself a late-in-life Sunbelter, and following his election loss four years later, it drove him to accuse Democrats of rigging the outcome in Joe Biden’s favor. While we’ve been racing on a closed loop for the last two decades, the cyclical nature of politics and culture will bring us back to the starting line faster than you might expect. For one, Donald Trump bringing the Sunbelt into the White House has been a disaster. A Democratic wave is expected in the coming midterms, one that may well carry on into 2028. For another, Formula 1 and soccer, sports frequently coded as elite and coastal, are experiencing booms of popularity across the country. Gen Z is pushing back against influencers, delighting in Obama-era signifiers like frozen yogurt and fighting off the “tradwife” trend.
