Sparks Fly

Taylor Swift and the End of the Culture War

Speak Now World Tour, 2011

You didn’t really think I was going to miss my chance to take a victory lap on this one, did you?

To start with, let me be clear, it’s not like Taylor Swift lacked a public profile prior to the past couple weeks. She has been a dominant figure in American pop music for a decade now—but I think it’s fair to say that she has become a uniquely contested figure as a proxy for the de facto political character of the United States.

Her NFL appearance—utterly innocuous as it was—set off a firestorm for attention-starved conservative influencers and writers. It’s not like this is something new, but I think the character of the conservative backlash is implicitly indicative of what their actual power is as it relates to popular culture more broadly.

The “boycott” against Bud Light at least had some veneer of a movement that was going to conquer their ideological foes and bend the “woke” corporations to their will. As Matt Walsh would often phrase it, they had planned to make their perceived foes bend the knee to their demands. In their telling, they were world beaters that with time and effort could claim the high ground of American culture.

By contrast, the campaign against Taylor Swift has the air of an increasingly marginalized group that is lashing out at the dying of the light. It’s almost entirely characterized by increasingly shrill and unintelligible complaints ranging from Travis Kelce being a woke cuck, to Taylor Swift being trans, to unhinged calls for the public execution of the pair. It’s the sort of seething anger that’s mostly reserved for people who implicitly know they have nothing left to compete with. A wailing and gnashing of the teeth if you will.

This all gets me to what the Taylor Swift moment in popular culture actually represents. It’s the high water mark of the culture wars. There is really nowhere else to go from here at this point. After almost a decade of conflict over what the dominant American political identity will be going into the 21st century, the Eras Tour and accompanying Beatlesesque cultural mania around Taylor Swift has essentially settled the issue.

Politics—as is often said within conservative circles—is in many ways downstream of culture. In the wake of the Eras Tour, Taylor Swift really has taken on the mantle of being a representational symbol of a deeply American cultural strain of liberalism. The political demands and expectations follow from the sort of self-identification of her fans with her aspirational form of liberalism.

If you lose the ability to have any sort of animating draw to your political ideology, what do you really have anymore? People turn out for politics in large part because they have individuals and positive narratives that give them a cause worth believing in. I realize I’ve said it before—but I do stand by it that I think Taylor Swift tends to operate as this form of symbol for much of her fanbase. She’s an animating figure that various people—especially younger women in the wake of Roe v. Wade—can look towards as being able to form a singular point to rally their personal political beliefs behind.

This really is what the Right is so strenuously objecting to. There is no similar right-wing cultural appeal, they have no claim to any sort of mass-inspiring cultural project that could propel their vision of the United States into the hearts and minds of American citizens.

The Right focuses so much these days on securing State power in order to violently impose their particular cultural vision because left to free choice by Americans—nobody really wants what they’re offering. There is nothing aspirational or inspiring about anything that the Daily Wire puts forward outside of an already isolated Evangelical culture that has walled itself off from America writ large.

Quite frankly I think a lot of this ties into what I just wrote about the New Right and the German Conservative Revolutionaries. Their paranoia about being on the verge of permanent marginalization isn’t entirely unfounded. The next generation of cultural influences—going outside of just Taylor Swift—is almost exclusively liberal. The formative experiences for most Americans at this point render the conservative causes almost entirely alien to what the average younger American sees as the moral and ethical ordering of the world.

The Right is now facing down the barrel of a young musician who has become so dominant in American popular life that her influence in voting advocacy is now a legitimate electoral threat. There’s also nobody coming to save them. They’re reduced to the status of increasingly isolated critics of American culture who possess nothing more than a growing list of what they dislike—but no actual vision of what they have to offer anymore.

When you find yourself at war with the most popular musician in America and almost certainly the world—not to mention the NFL—there’s probably not much life left in your political movement. You might continue to skip along for a decade or two longer but in terms of where the arc of History is bending? It doesn’t exactly take Francis Fukuyama to work out the direction.