The Weekly Sift

Attacks on Swift demonstrate a more general truth:
Conservatives actually don’t admire people who succeed
through talent and hard work.

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I barely follow contemporary music, so I know little about Taylor Swift, beyond recognizing her picture and appreciating that she has a lot of fans. [1] During the summer, though, she was hard to ignore: Along with the Barbie movie, Swift’s Eras Tour was the big cultural event. Both were identity-affirming experiences for women that, as a man, I could only envy. [2]

Recently, though, she really caught my attention when MAGA-world decided to take on her fans, the Swifties. God knows what they were thinking. I always thought politics was about connecting with popular movements, not daring them to run over you.

The backstory is that early in her career Swift was resolutely non-partisan, to the point that many people speculated that she was a Republican. But in 2018 she decided to come out against Republican Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn. In this video (I think from a documentary about Swift) she’s telling her reluctant Dad why she needs to do this:

She votes against fair pay for women. She votes against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which is just basically protecting us from domestic abuse and stalking. [Points to herself] — stalking! She thinks that if you’re a gay couple, or even if you look like a gay couple, you should be allowed to be kicked out of a restaurant. It’s really basic human rights, and it’s right and wrong at this point. And I can’t see another commercial and see her disguising these policies behind the words “Tennessee Christian values”. Those aren’t Tennessee Christian values. I live in Tennessee. I am a Christian. That’s not what we stand for.

Her father doesn’t argue with any of those points, but he worries that violent right-wingers will target her.

But recently Swift did something the ticked off MAGA-world even worse: She encouraged people to register to vote. And it worked.

On Tuesday morning, the singer posted a short message on Instagram encouraging her 272 million followers to register to vote. Afterward, the website she directed her fans to — the nonpartisan nonprofit Vote.org — recorded more than 35,000 registrations, according to the organization.

Not so long ago, encouraging people to vote was non-partisan, but that was before one major party turned against democracy. [3] Now Swift (and her new boyfriend, football star Travis Kelce) are being roundly denounced online. The august Federalist magazine took time from its regular projects of corrupting the Supreme Court and inciting panic about transfolk to label Swift’s popularity as “a sign of societal decline“. One of the magazine’s founders then got to the heart of the matter in a tweet:

Taylor Swift is dumb and her music sucks.

Here, I’d say: Go back and read her reasons for opposing Marsha Blackburn. Rather than dumb, she sounds pretty well informed. But “dumb” wasn’t insulting enough, so American Greatness writer Roger Kimball took it a step farther.

Also, she is homely.

As if none of the rest of us have eyes, and women like Swift should care whether Kimball finds them attractive. (Did I mention she’s dating a football star?) And famous “alpha male” Nick Adams retweeted what he thought was an apt comparison. [4]

Raise your daughters to be classy like Lauren Boebert, not trashy like Taylor Swift.

Salon’s Olivia Luppino pointed out what a pointless exercise this is:

This next-level success she has today she accomplished after navigating a polarized political climate. When she speaks up, people listen.

More importantly, there’s nothing the right could do that could meaningfully affect Swift. She has an incredibly devoted fanbase, a sold-out tour that lasts until November 2024, which again, is going to make her a billionaire, and maybe even has a hot new boyfriend. You can’t convince a Taylor Swift fan that she’s ugly or untalented, and these days, they seem to run the world.

And another Salon writer, Amanda Marcotte, hit back, claiming the anti-Swift venom comes from incels whose worship of established-in-court-sexual-assaulter Donald Trump has made them even less appealing to women.

GOP propagandists have learned that a great way to get their mostly male audiences fired up is to indulge their grievances about women these days. Modern chicks, the gripe goes, have been spoiled by feminism, and that’s why it’s so damn hard for a Trump voter to get a date. … Indeed, the irony of all this is that, in appealing to young men through grievance, the right is only making men’s problems worse. If you’re having trouble with the ladies, going MAGA intensifies your unlikeability. But isn’t that what cults always do? Sell their members “solutions” that actually compound their existing problems. 

Those are the kinds of points that other people are much bettered positioned to make than I am. But I do have one thing to add that I don’t think is getting enough attention: American conservatives often praise capitalism as a system where anybody who has talent and works hard can rise to the top. So in theory, they should love people who make that climb. In fact, though, they hate those people, especially the ones who remember where they came from and try to help other people rise too.

The heroes of conservatism are almost invariably folks who were born rich: Donald Trump, the Koch brothers, Elon Musk.

Have you ever wondered why conservatives demonstrate such hatred for “the Hollywood elite” and athletes who get political like Colin Kaepernick? That’s because entertainment and athletics are industries where poor and working class people can hit it big if they work hard and have talent. People like Stephen King or Ben Affleck or Eminem are villains, even though they are White men who have lived genuine Horatio Alger stories. And if you’re Black like LeBron James or female like Barbra Streisand, forget about it. You’ll never have the right to an opinion of your own.

Swift is not the best example here, because she was raised in the professional class and never had to wonder if she’d be able to afford college. But her parents didn’t have yacht-and-mansion money, like she does now. She had talent and worked hard, and it paid off for her. But she doesn’t support the billionaire class politically, so she should “stay in her lane“, just like LeBron should “shut up and dribble”.

The point of the Horatio Alger myth is to keep the masses content: We may not have much now, but we could someday. We should admire the billionaires because maybe, just maybe, we’ll be one ourselves someday.

But that fantasy is never supposed to come true. Conservatism is all about keeping the rich on top, not opening their ranks to admit climbers.

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[1] This isn’t unusual for me. Back in the 70s, I remember being amazed that so many songs I recognized from the radio were all by the same artist — some guy named Elton John.

[2] Male identity is a tricky thing to affirm these days, and people who try are usually more embarrassing than inspiring.

[3] When I was reading the Washington Monthly article in that link before citing it, I unexpectedly discovered that it quotes me.

But the most prescient analysis of what has recently become more obvious came from Doug Muder back in 2014 in an article titled, “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party.”

[4] I have to insert a caution: There is a raging and unsettled debate over whether Nick Adams is a parody, based on the optimistic theory that no one can be that consistently clueless. But he has fans who appear to take him seriously, including Trump.