There has long been, in the words of Richard Hofstader, a “paranoid style” of politics on the American Right. When William F. Buckley was reorganizing the Right back in the 1950s and 60s, he adamantly refused to let the John Birch Society (a group that believed that the government was mind-controlling the populace by putting fluoride in water, that many politicians were secret Marxists, etc.) be part of his movement. The Right has often had to dispel its more conspiracy-prone elements, but Trump changed all that. Now we have “Taylor Swift is a leftist psyop” talk.
Just a side note that, as a conservative, I've always appreciated that Taylor Swift's self-presentation is reasonably decent, and dare I say, modest, by the standards of Current Year America. When young women celebrities trade on their sex appeal, it's been increasingly common for them to do so in a crudely blatant and even trashy way that would be unrecognizable to Brooke Shields, let alone to Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe. Taylor Swift certainly enjoys being attractive and sexy, but she does it in a decent way that doesn't make me embarrassed to watch her show in the presence of my kids or my parents.
Also, has there ever been a single "tabloid-style" story of her being excessively drunk/drugged/misbehaving/acting out? I'd say her standard of public decorum is well above that of the music-industry mainstream. She seems like the kind of highly conscientious, hard-working, type-A striver who is commonly found in the precincts of the professional-managerial class, except that her metier is music rather than the nonprofit/tech/financial/NGO blob.
Also, prominent far-right extremist Scott Greer broadly lines up with this take on Ms. Swift, although as a far-right extremist he is obviously more critical in the end:
A lot of people in the comments missing the point - being right isn't really what's important here. If you want to draw a big conspiracy theory pinboard with the NFL and Swift and Pfizer on it you probably will make some directionally correct point about media influence and the interconnectedness of American elites. What you will also do is look really fucking weird and humorless and anti-life. Taylor may well be a "puppet" in some fake and gay sense of being a tool of Big Music and having strictly defined parameters of public interaction, but she's also the idol of millions, a very talented artist, hard-working, with not just a faultless public image but by most accounts a really good private personality, too. You don't beat that with rants about Big Pharma. You let it be.
I dimly recall frogs ironically, and self-consciously so, memeing Taylor Swift into a right-wing figurehead in 2016.
Today's MAGA appears to have decided she's supposed to be /ourgal/ unironically, and can't understand why a celeb smart enough to have rejected an FTX partnership actually has... loosely normie lib views?
Far right frog posters eight years ago seem to have had a better grasp on reality than today's Republican mainstream.
Taylor Swift's reasons for supporting Biden last time were explicitly tied to wanting to support the 'LGBT community' and being against 'structural racism'.
Sure, some of the things the MAGA crowd would hate her for, like being overly promiscuous or 'vaxed', are stupid. But she is a propaganda outlet for the Woke cultural left. In fairness she's also a puppet and her views aren't really her own, she is just compelled to parrot out the line of the establishment media. If she had chosen to identify as conservative, her career would be immediately over.
The capturing of the 'high status' is exactly the insidious Woke plan. Far from being more forgivable, it is people like Swift that are the most dangerous for a healthy culture, because she looks and acts normal. But it's all a psych-op. a sinister manipulation of social dynamics to humiliate social conservatives.
Trump is absolutely justified in calling for 'retribution'.
Yeah, the Taylor Swift thing is bizarre and nice wish people would shut up about it. It's stupid. I quit watching the NFL after trying to like it for a couple of years just to see what the fuss was about all the time. Some of the very rightist right is too much, even for me. And, I tend to be pretty forgiving and understanding of their (some of my) issues.
Naturally disagree with Richard on abortion as a Christian (though I acknowledge Republicans are somewhat stupid on the issue and you actually do need to compromise), but otherwise not much to disagree with. White girls from good homes younger than about 45 all like Taylor Swift. If they're listening to current-year pop, it's basically the best you can hope for, by a wide margin.
I tire of the insanity. I feel like conservatives used to be able to watch and enjoy Jaws or E.T. and not make it about the fact that Spielberg is a large Democrat donor. Hollywood is now unambiguously worse than those days in terms of both quality and messaging, but pop music isn't, really. Taylor is a better influence than a lot of pop singers of yesteryear: Madonna, Cindy Lauper, Britney Spears, etc. etc.
I remember having an exchange with Richard not so long ago and he was more optimistic than me on the Republicans' prospects, which he thought of as 50/50ish. He seems to be coming around more now. The outlook is grim for this party, and I don't really know how it improves. We've been calling it the Stupid Party for most of my life now, but it just keeps getting dumber. I'm inclined to think the Republicans' only hope is for the Democrats to catch up to them in self-destructive insanity and stupidity, because they don't seem able to pull themselves out of the tailspin.
But I mostly think we're living in a many-decade era of Democrat dominance that started in 2008, akin to the era of Republican dominance from 1860-1928, and Trump is our Grover Cleveland. He might even get his non-consecutive terms. Probably not, but maybe.
"We can understand Taylor Swift Democrats as men and women comfortable with their birth sex, eager to play the roles traditionally assigned to it, not racist but not feeling particularly guilty about the sins of their country, and who will naturally gravitate towards whichever political coalition comes across as the most normal, willing to let them go about their lives watching football or buying makeup from Sephora."
Here's the disconnect. There are two archetypes of anti-woke:
- The closet social conservative in the math department. Subjected to infuriating displays of wokery on the daily, and is even made to publicly display fealty to it. Will actually endanger his job/promotion if he voices a minor criticism of Trans. Sees the common folk as allies against a mind-virus spreading amongst his own class. Thinks tattoos are gauche.
- The F-150 driving light beer drinker. Only thinks about woke when the political news is on. Tells gay jokes on the job to riotous laughter from his ethnically heterogeneous coworkers. Sees himself as one of the common folk. Thinks tattoos are SICK, BRAH and doesn't know what gauche means.
The second guy is like "hah, stupid liberals" and goes back to worrying about the Lions versus the Niners. The first guy is the one who daydreams of putting the political enforcers in the blue institutions that he lives in against the wall while he sits through another PowerPoint training.
Notably, the first guy doesn't understand that the second guy doesn't like him.
To let the border smugglers determine the demography of your country is no less crazy than the Republicans' obsession with abortions. Both parties have let the lunatics and extremists dictate the agenda.
Richard this a very insightful analysis. I must admit to having totally missed Republican carping about Taylor Swift, but I don’t watch cable news. I must though admit that Republicans and conservatives in general have gone all in on an oppositional conspiracy focused politics.
Richard I agree with you that Dobbs marked some sort of turning point though not because I believe it was a bad or wrong decision. The problem is that after Dobbs Republicans were like the dog that chased the car and caught it--now that I got what I wanted what do I do now? Republicans never thought about how to play the game after Dobbs. The key was to endorse the decision but not use it to press the most restrictive anti abortion measures--measures without an electoral majority.
Surprisingly, Republicans and conservatives generally forgot that even if abortion is a state’s right you still need to build a governing majority around the issue. Forcing women to give birth to infants who will die or live briefly with terrible health defects and that may limit the mother’s ability to have future healthy children is not how to build electoral majorities.
Unfortunately, the Republican blinders seem to be broad. As a center-right voter I am appalled that the Republican party is going to renominate Trump. Even if he managed to beat Biden, maybe the most unpopular president in my lifetime, it will not be good news for the party or the nation. I believe if Trump wins, the voters will balance the scales by voting in Democrat majorities in the House and Senate.
While I agree with you that the majority of Americans are not in sync with the full craziness of the Woke Left remember this group continues to be in significant policy making and leadership positions in education and media. Moreover, through DEI they have gained a significant foothold in the private and public sectors in America. So they are indoctrinating our kids; inundating us with Woke Leftist propaganda; and misdirecting our economic and governmental institutions. Given the damage these folks can and have caused opposing them seems to be the correct thing to do.
However, I do agree that conservatives and the Republicans have lost their way.
You say Trump is 'crude, dishonest, and corrupt'. That may be true, but he is more of a Bullshitter than a Liar (technical definition). But he is hardly alone in that, very many politicians are dishonest and corrupt. However, the cultural elite will NEVER accept his crudeness. It offends their sensibilities. Its drives them insane. Its the crudeness that really causes TDS.
Support for LGBT, abortion, soft on crime policies and not normal stances for apolitical 'normies'. They're so irrational and outside of most people's interests that the question is 'How they became normalized?' not 'Why isn't the other party adopting them and instead committed itself to lunacy?' Swifty Dems are the results of this process of normalization. Why is abortion such a totem for them despite the fact that most of them will never have one? My best guess is that it is symbolic of their cohort: childless, single women. As an increasing proportion of women fall into this category so increases the importance of abortion. The Republicans never had these women to begin with and they've only ever drifted further apart.
Great piece. Truly pointless and objectively stupid to make TS out as anything other than the Center of mainstream….she’s even written lyrics about Gyllenhaal dissing her stuff as not being indie cool enough. It’s picking a fight with the most successful and recognizable entertainer of the present era, who happens to have a huge and rabid fan base, on something without substance and not based on any principles.
Notably, while Taylor Swift isn't a traditionally loud left-wing activist, she has taken a pretty clear left-wing position on the relevant culture war issues.
There has long been, in the words of Richard Hofstader, a “paranoid style” of politics on the American Right. When William F. Buckley was reorganizing the Right back in the 1950s and 60s, he adamantly refused to let the John Birch Society (a group that believed that the government was mind-controlling the populace by putting fluoride in water, that many politicians were secret Marxists, etc.) be part of his movement. The Right has often had to dispel its more conspiracy-prone elements, but Trump changed all that. Now we have “Taylor Swift is a leftist psyop” talk.
Just a side note that, as a conservative, I've always appreciated that Taylor Swift's self-presentation is reasonably decent, and dare I say, modest, by the standards of Current Year America. When young women celebrities trade on their sex appeal, it's been increasingly common for them to do so in a crudely blatant and even trashy way that would be unrecognizable to Brooke Shields, let alone to Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe. Taylor Swift certainly enjoys being attractive and sexy, but she does it in a decent way that doesn't make me embarrassed to watch her show in the presence of my kids or my parents.
Also, has there ever been a single "tabloid-style" story of her being excessively drunk/drugged/misbehaving/acting out? I'd say her standard of public decorum is well above that of the music-industry mainstream. She seems like the kind of highly conscientious, hard-working, type-A striver who is commonly found in the precincts of the professional-managerial class, except that her metier is music rather than the nonprofit/tech/financial/NGO blob.
Also, prominent far-right extremist Scott Greer broadly lines up with this take on Ms. Swift, although as a far-right extremist he is obviously more critical in the end:
https://www.highly-respected.com/p/taylor-swifts-white-america
Edit Jan. 31: Mary Harrington's interpretation of Right-wing psychology is interesting here:
https://unherd.com/2024/01/why-the-right-fears-taylor-swift/
A lot of people in the comments missing the point - being right isn't really what's important here. If you want to draw a big conspiracy theory pinboard with the NFL and Swift and Pfizer on it you probably will make some directionally correct point about media influence and the interconnectedness of American elites. What you will also do is look really fucking weird and humorless and anti-life. Taylor may well be a "puppet" in some fake and gay sense of being a tool of Big Music and having strictly defined parameters of public interaction, but she's also the idol of millions, a very talented artist, hard-working, with not just a faultless public image but by most accounts a really good private personality, too. You don't beat that with rants about Big Pharma. You let it be.
I dimly recall frogs ironically, and self-consciously so, memeing Taylor Swift into a right-wing figurehead in 2016.
Today's MAGA appears to have decided she's supposed to be /ourgal/ unironically, and can't understand why a celeb smart enough to have rejected an FTX partnership actually has... loosely normie lib views?
Far right frog posters eight years ago seem to have had a better grasp on reality than today's Republican mainstream.
Taylor Swift's reasons for supporting Biden last time were explicitly tied to wanting to support the 'LGBT community' and being against 'structural racism'.
Sure, some of the things the MAGA crowd would hate her for, like being overly promiscuous or 'vaxed', are stupid. But she is a propaganda outlet for the Woke cultural left. In fairness she's also a puppet and her views aren't really her own, she is just compelled to parrot out the line of the establishment media. If she had chosen to identify as conservative, her career would be immediately over.
The capturing of the 'high status' is exactly the insidious Woke plan. Far from being more forgivable, it is people like Swift that are the most dangerous for a healthy culture, because she looks and acts normal. But it's all a psych-op. a sinister manipulation of social dynamics to humiliate social conservatives.
Trump is absolutely justified in calling for 'retribution'.
Yeah, the Taylor Swift thing is bizarre and nice wish people would shut up about it. It's stupid. I quit watching the NFL after trying to like it for a couple of years just to see what the fuss was about all the time. Some of the very rightist right is too much, even for me. And, I tend to be pretty forgiving and understanding of their (some of my) issues.
Naturally disagree with Richard on abortion as a Christian (though I acknowledge Republicans are somewhat stupid on the issue and you actually do need to compromise), but otherwise not much to disagree with. White girls from good homes younger than about 45 all like Taylor Swift. If they're listening to current-year pop, it's basically the best you can hope for, by a wide margin.
I tire of the insanity. I feel like conservatives used to be able to watch and enjoy Jaws or E.T. and not make it about the fact that Spielberg is a large Democrat donor. Hollywood is now unambiguously worse than those days in terms of both quality and messaging, but pop music isn't, really. Taylor is a better influence than a lot of pop singers of yesteryear: Madonna, Cindy Lauper, Britney Spears, etc. etc.
I remember having an exchange with Richard not so long ago and he was more optimistic than me on the Republicans' prospects, which he thought of as 50/50ish. He seems to be coming around more now. The outlook is grim for this party, and I don't really know how it improves. We've been calling it the Stupid Party for most of my life now, but it just keeps getting dumber. I'm inclined to think the Republicans' only hope is for the Democrats to catch up to them in self-destructive insanity and stupidity, because they don't seem able to pull themselves out of the tailspin.
But I mostly think we're living in a many-decade era of Democrat dominance that started in 2008, akin to the era of Republican dominance from 1860-1928, and Trump is our Grover Cleveland. He might even get his non-consecutive terms. Probably not, but maybe.
this piece is brilliant!
"We can understand Taylor Swift Democrats as men and women comfortable with their birth sex, eager to play the roles traditionally assigned to it, not racist but not feeling particularly guilty about the sins of their country, and who will naturally gravitate towards whichever political coalition comes across as the most normal, willing to let them go about their lives watching football or buying makeup from Sephora."
Yep, this is me (in an American context)
Here's the disconnect. There are two archetypes of anti-woke:
- The closet social conservative in the math department. Subjected to infuriating displays of wokery on the daily, and is even made to publicly display fealty to it. Will actually endanger his job/promotion if he voices a minor criticism of Trans. Sees the common folk as allies against a mind-virus spreading amongst his own class. Thinks tattoos are gauche.
- The F-150 driving light beer drinker. Only thinks about woke when the political news is on. Tells gay jokes on the job to riotous laughter from his ethnically heterogeneous coworkers. Sees himself as one of the common folk. Thinks tattoos are SICK, BRAH and doesn't know what gauche means.
The second guy is like "hah, stupid liberals" and goes back to worrying about the Lions versus the Niners. The first guy is the one who daydreams of putting the political enforcers in the blue institutions that he lives in against the wall while he sits through another PowerPoint training.
Notably, the first guy doesn't understand that the second guy doesn't like him.
To let the border smugglers determine the demography of your country is no less crazy than the Republicans' obsession with abortions. Both parties have let the lunatics and extremists dictate the agenda.
Richard this a very insightful analysis. I must admit to having totally missed Republican carping about Taylor Swift, but I don’t watch cable news. I must though admit that Republicans and conservatives in general have gone all in on an oppositional conspiracy focused politics.
Richard I agree with you that Dobbs marked some sort of turning point though not because I believe it was a bad or wrong decision. The problem is that after Dobbs Republicans were like the dog that chased the car and caught it--now that I got what I wanted what do I do now? Republicans never thought about how to play the game after Dobbs. The key was to endorse the decision but not use it to press the most restrictive anti abortion measures--measures without an electoral majority.
Surprisingly, Republicans and conservatives generally forgot that even if abortion is a state’s right you still need to build a governing majority around the issue. Forcing women to give birth to infants who will die or live briefly with terrible health defects and that may limit the mother’s ability to have future healthy children is not how to build electoral majorities.
Unfortunately, the Republican blinders seem to be broad. As a center-right voter I am appalled that the Republican party is going to renominate Trump. Even if he managed to beat Biden, maybe the most unpopular president in my lifetime, it will not be good news for the party or the nation. I believe if Trump wins, the voters will balance the scales by voting in Democrat majorities in the House and Senate.
While I agree with you that the majority of Americans are not in sync with the full craziness of the Woke Left remember this group continues to be in significant policy making and leadership positions in education and media. Moreover, through DEI they have gained a significant foothold in the private and public sectors in America. So they are indoctrinating our kids; inundating us with Woke Leftist propaganda; and misdirecting our economic and governmental institutions. Given the damage these folks can and have caused opposing them seems to be the correct thing to do.
However, I do agree that conservatives and the Republicans have lost their way.
You say Trump is 'crude, dishonest, and corrupt'. That may be true, but he is more of a Bullshitter than a Liar (technical definition). But he is hardly alone in that, very many politicians are dishonest and corrupt. However, the cultural elite will NEVER accept his crudeness. It offends their sensibilities. Its drives them insane. Its the crudeness that really causes TDS.
Support for LGBT, abortion, soft on crime policies and not normal stances for apolitical 'normies'. They're so irrational and outside of most people's interests that the question is 'How they became normalized?' not 'Why isn't the other party adopting them and instead committed itself to lunacy?' Swifty Dems are the results of this process of normalization. Why is abortion such a totem for them despite the fact that most of them will never have one? My best guess is that it is symbolic of their cohort: childless, single women. As an increasing proportion of women fall into this category so increases the importance of abortion. The Republicans never had these women to begin with and they've only ever drifted further apart.
Great piece. Truly pointless and objectively stupid to make TS out as anything other than the Center of mainstream….she’s even written lyrics about Gyllenhaal dissing her stuff as not being indie cool enough. It’s picking a fight with the most successful and recognizable entertainer of the present era, who happens to have a huge and rabid fan base, on something without substance and not based on any principles.
Notably, while Taylor Swift isn't a traditionally loud left-wing activist, she has taken a pretty clear left-wing position on the relevant culture war issues.
https://www.vogue.com/article/taylor-swift-cover-september-2019