There was a brief period late in the COVID-19 pandemic, from the moment Glenn Youngkin was sworn in as governor of Virginia to Donald Trump’s full political return, when I realized that American liberalism was truly I was convinced that we were headed for a monumental defeat. In 2024.
At the time, it appeared that the liberal establishment was being pulled away from American normalcy to politically suicidal levels, influenced by progressive radicalism, organized groupthink, and fears of the coronavirus. . Blue cities and regions were re-implementing aspects of left-wing social planning from the 1970s, causing a surge in crime and disorder. The Democratic Party’s economic policies have created inflation similar to his 1970s. Joe Biden was elected as a moderate, but he is too old and too weak to actually impose moderation on the party. And elite liberalism has become increasingly associated with a mixture of coronavirus overreaction and ideological hysteria. Imagine a double-masked bureaucrat running a white privilege workshop forever.
Liberalism in 2024 still faces all kinds of difficulties, but the chances of a truly epochal defeat seem less likely than they did then. This is partly due to adaptations within the centre-left. Coronavirus restrictions in blue states were lifted a little sooner than I expected, in part because they posed a political risk to Democratic politicians. Many of these politicians are finding ways to distance themselves from their own party’s activists, especially in battleground states like Pennsylvania. And the left’s ideological fervor appears to have peaked, creating a more contentious environment within elite institutions and a modest left-wing retreat in the culture as a whole.
But another reason liberalism has survived being divorced from American normalcy is that conservatism cannot be normal even for a moment.
Trump himself is a great freak. However, the same goes for the various obsessions and follies that took shape after him. Like the internet right’s bizarre reaction to the romance between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, this love story brings together two remaining pillars of our shared culture: national football. The league, and Swift herself.
While conservative hostility toward Swift has smoldered since she stepped into partisan politics in 2018 and 2020, it’s important to emphasize that this antipathy is not necessarily universal: An Echelon Insights poll Since last summer, while those the paper calls “Trump-first Republicans” are more likely to be hostile to Swift, more “party-first Republicans” have been hostile toward Swift. It was found that the country as a whole had widely favorable reviews.
But within that hostile faction, the relationship with Kelce has turned a merely unfavorable impression into outright paranoia, with various online influencers portraying the romance as some kind of carefully crafted political propaganda. Its true purpose is to support Swift or Swift-Kells. Biden’s re-election will be as meaningful as possible for Swifties and soccer fans alike.
To give this theory its full weight, the Biden campaign is certainly counting on Swift’s support, at least as reported by my colleagues, and I imagine it will give the president some electoral boost. It seems so. So there is some degree of partisan interest in both the celebrity romance itself and, presumably, the outcome of the Super Bowl, an expectation that Democrats will have an advantage.
But there are two levels on which the internet right’s reaction to this makes no sense. The first is that celebrity support for liberal politicians is not a particularly decisive part of politics. Swift supported Phil Bredesen in the Tennessee Senate race, but lost to Marsha Blackburn by 11 points. She supported Biden in 2020, and Biden won, but in retrospect no one would imagine that the Swift factor was so important.
If you want to stretch your legs a little to imagine the true Swift effect in 2024, Biden’s particular problems with youth turnout and Gen Z disillusionment could mean that a superstar’s support could bring about meaningful change. It can be said that this has created a rare situation. But the idea that a great performance by a fake lover and some sort of match-fixing by the NFL would be important enough to inspire and justify an influence operation on the media establishment is the stupidest thing imaginable. It’s a conspiracy theory. .
But the deeper issue is that regardless of the electoral impact of Swift’s support, the cultural value of Swift and Kelce’s romance is not just normal, healthy, mainstream stuff that conservatives don’t want to define. That means no.it’s normal and healthy and mainstream in an explicitly conservatively coded wayoffers the kind of romantic iconography that many on the online right probably want to encourage and uphold.
Typically, if you scroll through right-wing social media for more than a few minutes, you’ll come across some kind of meme glorifying athletes and beautiful women, big bearded men and the women who love them, and a kind of heteronormative American romance. I can’t help it. A throwback form.
The quest to understand the right’s anti-Swiftism has encouraged weak attempts to suggest that the Swift-Kels romance somehow subverts these traditionalist archetypes and models a more progressive concept of romance. I’ve been doing it. It’s because she’s richer and more famous than he is, and she’s more famous than he is.I respect her career, but they’re basically from polycultures in the Bay Area and open marriages in Brooklyn. It’s one step away.
but come. A famous pop star abandons his country roots and spends years dating Hollywood weirdos and infuriating musicians without success, only to find himself in a bearded heartland who runs an equally bearded goofy podcast. A story about finding true love in the arms of a football star. A happy marriage, an easily drunken brother…in other words, this is a classic Christmas movie! This is an allegory for conservative Americana! This is a right-wing meme in itself!
But meme creators don’t want that. They reject for secondary and superficial reasons, such as Swift’s run-of-the-mill liberal politics or Kelce’s vaccine PSA, what should be affirmed for primary and fundamental reasons. They reject deep stories and underlying archetypes because the celebrities involved are completely disengaged from the political side.
But celebrities are not on their side precisely because the right continues to make itself so bizarre that even conservatives of temperament (Swift and Kelce seem to be the same) are alienated from its demands. This is because I feel that I am.
There are two main reasons for this self-defeating weirdness, both of which are downstream from Trump’s 2016 victory. The first is a realignment that I’ve discussed several times before, in which the ideological shift of the Trump era has meant that the right has embraced all sorts of outsider narratives and fringe beliefs (such as vaccine skepticism, previously The right is a realignment, while the right has become more welcoming of things (including those previously coded by the left). The left has become even more orthodox. This realignment has made the right in some ways more interesting, more inclined to see through certain false narratives and official beliefs, but also more inclined to see through them entirely. allAs CS Lewis observed, this is the same as not actually seeing anything.
The second reason for the right-wing abnormality problem is that even normal members of the Republican coalition have overlearned the lessons of President Trump’s election. The Republican Party, which had made safe, moderate choices in 2008 and 2012 and witnessed defeats for John McCain and Mitt Romney, has made choices that appear rough on Trump, with Trump being the most likely. I watched him achieve an unbelievable victory. And there was a rational political lesson in that experience. That is, sometimes destabilization can open up new constituencies, new maps, and paths to victory.
However, dosage is everything, and trying to remain abnormal forever just because it works once is self-defeating in extreme cases. After all, the goal of destabilization is ultimately to create new stability. In it, your party, your vision, and your coalition are understood by most Americans to be a safe and normal place to be. That’s something the Trump-era right has clearly failed to accomplish. And we won’t get there as long as we look at cultural developments to be welcomed or romances to be cheered for, shake our heads, and say, “This must be liberal policy.”