My First Blog Post About Taylor Swift
I don’t have particularly strong opinions about Taylor Swift. I think her music is fine. She’s got some really good songs, but, on the whole not worthy of the insane levels of adulation. But, whatever. De gustibus non est disputandam. And, yeah, its interesting that she’s got such an amazing global brand, but that’s not exactly a new thing for a pop start.
What is fascinating and hilarious is just how crazy this all drives overly-online conservative types. Some recent headlines:
“Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce and a MAGA Meltdown: The fulminations surrounding the world’s biggest pop icon — and girlfriend of Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce — reached the stratosphere after Kansas City made it to the Super Bowl.”
And this was fun, “Fox News Suddenly Wants Celebrities Out of Politics. Well, One Celebrity. The news network that wants Taylor Swift to stick to singing has had no problem handing conservative celebrities the microphone.”
I don’t actually have a lot to say on this, but, damn, Republicans can be stupid. I’ll turn it over to Ross Douthat, “Taylor Swift, Donald Trump and the Right’s Abnormality Problem”
There are two key reasons for this self-defeating weirdness, both of them downstream from Trump’s 2016 victory. The first is the realignment that I’ve discussed a few times before, where the ideological shifts of the Trump era made the right more welcoming to all manner of outsider narratives and fringe beliefs (including previously left-coded ones like vaccine skepticism) while the left became much more dutifully establishmentarian. This realignment made the right more interesting in certain ways, more inclined to see through certain bogus narratives and official pieties — but also more inclined to try to see through absolutely everything, which as C.S. Lewis observed is the same thing as not really seeing anything at all.
The second reason for the right’s abnormality problem is that even normal people in the Republican coalition overlearned the lesson of Trump’s election. Having made the safe and moderate choices in 2008 and 2012 and watched both John McCain and Mitt Romney go down in defeat, Republicans made a wild-seeming choice with Trump and saw him win the most improbable of victories. And there was a reasonable political lesson in that experience, which is that sometimes a dose of destabilization can open a path to new constituencies, new maps, new paths to victory.
But the dose is everything, and trying to be abnormal forever because it worked for you once is self-defeating in the extreme.
But, mostly, I wanted an excuse to share this photo from class this week upon discussing all this: