A Swiftian interpretation of American cultural rights

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I struggle to think of one global celebrity who better reflects small-scale conservative values ​​than Taylor Swift. I don’t think so, but the punchline of the joke about the definition of a cultural conservative is “a liberal with a daughter in high school.”

Like most teenagers, my daughter is a huge fan of Taylor Swift. Her only misgivings have to do with the fact that I also enjoy her music. The fact that I like Swift and can launch into Swift-esque catcalling and provoke bouts of embarrassment from her at will suggests that there must be some kind of flaw in her music. However, I gained some credit as her parent by taking her daughter to a Swift concert a few years ago. She’s as commanding on stage as she is in the recording studio. One of Swift’s rare qualities is that she doesn’t teach girls to obsess over their sexuality. She’s the ultimate role model for girls: perverse, irreverent, intelligent and lyrical, in a culture long embedded in the semiotics of the porn industry. Swift is Ann Kardashian. I can’t think of a better compliment. This explains why she has a fan base in all demographics, regardless of her age, race, gender, or political affiliation. This makes the conservative right’s decision to target her as a tool of her “deep state” wildly misguided even by its standards.

I doubt there is a reader of Swamp Notes who is not at least vaguely aware of what has inevitably come to be called “Swiftgate” that has been sweeping social media over the past few days. It’s long past time to replace that suffix with “Xa-Lago.” Watergate happened about 20 years before Swift was born. Mar-a-Lago remains the site of an investigation into alleged presidential crimes. Regardless, Swift-a-Lago offers a window into the troubled psyche, the mental space of the cultural right. This is a world where deep state cabals are socially engineering Americans to become Europeans. As everyone knows, the people living on the other side of the Atlantic are an androgynous, snobbish, promiscuous, state-employed race whose expenses are paid entirely by the United States. There is. Swift is a dangerous tool of Europeanization. The same goes for her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, a hulking American football star who plays for the Kansas City Chiefs. He also happens to be a coronavirus vaccine advocate. The deep state’s plan is to set up Kelce to play a heroic role in the Chiefs’ victory over the San Francisco 49ers in the 2024 Super Bowl. In the midst of Kelsey’s glory, the camera shows the adorable Swift jumping up and down like an All-American cheerleader. After the celebration, Swift and Kelsey will jointly endorse Joe Biden for president. The match will take place on February 11th, and once again Donald Trump will be the victim.

This feverish hallucination has been indulged in conservative media everywhere from Fox News to Breitbart. Besides the fact that it’s crazy as hell, there are two flaws. First, as Swift would say, it’s a blank space. The latest iteration of Swift’s conspiratorialism was during the Chiefs’ game against the Baltimore Ravens last week, when she was photographed giving her lover a lingering blessing kiss. It was clear to anyone in their heads that this was the first act of an elaborate scheme that would culminate in Trump being cheated out of another presidential victory. that’s it. Another drawback is the Trekkie nerdiness of the cultural right. They surpass even the most ardent graduate Marxist autodidacts in their belief that everything can be politicized. It’s almost charming that they ignore the mindset of the median, relatively apolitical and poorly informed American electorate.

Examples of peaks are: Tuesday’s talk by Jack Posobiec, a pioneer of the alt-right who popularized the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that the deep state was harvesting the blood of children in the basement of Comet Pizza in Washington, D.C. Posobiec is openly anti-Semitic. He frequently used the so-called fourteen word code “1488”. The two 8’s correspond to his two H’s in the alphabet of “Heil Hitler”. 14 words: “We must secure the existence of our people and the future of white children.” The only thing that outweighs the horror of Posobiec’s view is its unconscious hilarity. He has an answer for Swift. “We have Kid Rock. We have Ted Nugent. We have influencers. We have people like Jon Voight,” Posobiec says. For Swampians born after Watergate, Locke and Nugent are old rock stars. Voight, an 85-year-old actor, believes Trump is “the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln.”I agree that Voight was good. midnight cowboy, it was released in 1969, the year after I was born. I can’t imagine my daughter being swayed by his preferences.

Swift-a-Lago is driven by right-wing concerns about further loss of women’s votes. The gender gap between Trump and Biden in 2020 was deep and has only widened since then. Mr. Biden won 57% of female voters in the last election, and two-thirds of women between the ages of 18 and 29, according to data from Edison Research. Swift-a-Lago seems to me to be a very quirky way to solve that. In the cultural right’s wildest dreams, ordinary Americans would resist corporate mind control and burn Swift’s merchandise. In fact, I think the right is going to regret this latest viral confection. Lauren, you are much younger than me and your ears are closer to the ground.Am I wrong to think Swift-a-Lago is deeply deranged? Or is it one of the funniest moments since Charlie Chaplin? great dictator?

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Lauren Fedor answers

Ed, I don’t know if it’s fair to say that I am. many Although I’m younger than you, I’m about the same age as Taylor Swift and have been following her career since the beginning. At the time, her friends and I were belting out her wholesome country songs about teenage love. Almost two decades later, there’s a lot of admiration for Swift as an artist, embarrassment over Swiftgate, and some on the right who think it’s a good idea to pick a fight while the world’s most popular pop star is growing up. I share their obvious beliefs. Ready for the next leg of the highest-grossing concert tour of all time.

In September, President Trump was asked by a reporter for the Daily Caller what he thought about Swift and Kelsey’s budding romance, and he responded rather politely, saying: I hope they are enjoying life. Maybe it’s the same, maybe it’s not. . . Probably not. According to Rolling Stone, President Trump was furious at the idea that Swift might support Biden in this year’s presidential election, claiming that he is “more popular” than the pop star and that his fans are “more devoted.” ‘. I’ve been to both Trump rallies and Swift concerts, and I’m not persuaded.

But one thing President Trump may be right about is that Swift and other celebrity endorsements won’t save Biden’s campaign, which has seen the president’s approval ratings slump, especially among younger voters. . According to the New York Times, the Biden team is actively courting Swift, and is even considering the possibility of her appearing on stage when Ella’s tour returns to the United States this fall.

Swift’s star power may be unparalleled — in the past, her Instagram posts alone have driven a surge in voter registration — but other Democrats have said that celebrity endorsement alone is not enough. I learned the hard way that there are limits. We all remember what happened in the final stages of the 2016 campaign, when Hillary Clinton was joined by Jennifer Lopez, Jay-Z, Stevie Wonder, and Katy Perry.