Liberal Swiftism Going Mainstream

What's Good for Girl Pop is Good for America

There’s now an incalculable number of articles about how Taylor Swift could impact the 2024 elections. New York Times even had their opinion writers debate this exact question. People are even writing about how a course on Taylor Swift at Harvard can be the potential savior of the Humanities. Hell, even Bill Kristol has started to advocate for Taylor Swift to run for office.

Liberal Swiftism has officially gone mainstream.

Or at the very least, I think it’s fair to say I really called my shot on this one.

It’s not that I wrote that original piece entirely ironically or anything—I do sincerely believe that a figure with immense cultural clout is a powerful indicator of political trends. The Eras Tour has been arguably the largest cultural event since the Beatles, and quite frankly Taylor Swift’s cultural cachet has only grown since I wrote that. I mean shit, she was even Time’s Person of the Year.

However, I do sort of want to just take a moment and maybe clarify what I was trying to get at when I wrote that. I don’t think it’s so much that Taylor Swift makes really fun pop music that has put her in this strange position of being a symbolic figure for American liberalism—it’s more that she emerged into a vacated space in terms of how many people wish to see liberalism.

It sort of reminds me of the speech that Biden gave after winning the 2020 election in which he emphasized that his vision for America was predicated on Americans rising to the better angels of our nature. As much as it pains every technocratic number-cruncher who plans out rational policy—political movements live and die on the mythos they create about who they are.

American liberalism has sort of struggled during the Biden presidency to maintain in the popular consciousness a positive and romantic story that we tell ourselves about who we are. I think the animating force behind the now-mainstream political symbolism of Taylor Swift is that there is an actual story that can be told.

I know I’ve said this before, but it’s worth saying again that for millions of people, Taylor Swift forms a political ideal about what is possible to achieve. She’s a figure that serves as a landmark for people in terms of what they ought to seek out and demand in their own lives—which of course translates over into political action.

If Taylor Swift is a feminist, then it’s almost assured that the vast majority of her fans are too. It is almost entirely impossible to enmesh yourself in her fandom without taking on the dominant characteristics of that social milieu. It’s not as though she isn’t quite open about her political beliefs at this point.

Assuming none of this changes—and there’s no reason to think it will—Taylor Swift is only going to continue to be a focal point of ongoing American political arguments.

This gets me to my final point, this is probably the best possible thing that could have happened to Democrats going into 2024.

In most ways the success of Taylor Swift is revenge for normal people who like getting drunk with their friends and singing pop songs. It’s being asked to choose to either hang out with a bunch of people who go around trying to ban Bud Light or to go out bar hopping on a Saturday.

If there’s one thing that liberals need in the backdrop of multiple ongoing wars overseas and a homegrown authoritarian movement that operates on their own fictional internal mythology—it’s a vision of the world that is relentlessly optimistic.

And really, isn’t that the whole point of listening to fun girl-pop?