ROSS DOUTHAT: Taylor Swift, Donald Trump and the right's abnormality problem
Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024 -- Girl meets boy and falls in move. Conservatives are furious.
Posted — UpdatedLiberalism in 2024 is still in all kinds of trouble, but the truly epochal defeat seems less likely than it did back in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. In part this is because of adaptations within the center-left.
Blue-state COVID restrictions were unwound a bit faster than I expected — in part because of the political peril they created for Democratic politicians. Many of those same politicians have found ways to get some distance from their party’s activists. Ideological fervor on the left seems to have passed its peak, yielding a more contested environment inside elite institutions and a modest left-wing retreat in the culture as a whole.
But the other reason that liberalism is surviving its disconnect from what remains of American normalcy is conservatism’s inability to just be normal itself, even for a minute.
Trump himself is a great abnormalizer. But so are the various fixations and follies that take shape in his wake — like the very-online right’s bizarre reaction to the romance between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, a love story that’s united the two remaining pillars of our common culture: the NFL and, well, Swift herself.
But there are two levels at which the online right’s reaction to this doesn’t make any sense. The first is that celebrities endorsing liberal politicians is just not an especially decisive part of politics. Swift endorsed Phil Bredesen in the Tennessee Senate race, and he lost to Marsha Blackburn by 11 points. She endorsed Biden in 2020 and he won, but nobody looking back imagines that the Swift factor mattered all that much.
If you wanted to stretch a bit to envision a real Swift effect in 2024, you could say that Biden’s distinctive problem with youth turnout and Gen Z disillusionment has created a rare situation in which a superstar endorsement could make a meaningful difference. But the idea that it would matter enough to inspire and justify a media-regime influence operation, complete with some remarkable acting performances by the faking-it romantic partners and some kind of game-fixing shenanigans by the NFL, is the silliest possible conspiracy theory.
The deeper issue, though, is that regardless of the electoral impact of a Swift endorsement, the cultural valence of the Swift-Kelce romance isn’t just normal and wholesome and mainstream in a way that conservatism shouldn’t want to be defined against. It’s normal and wholesome and mainstream in an explicitly conservative-coded way, offering up the kind of romantic iconography that much of the online right supposedly wants to encourage and support.
But the meme-makers don’t want it. They are rejecting for secondary and superficial reasons — Swift’s banal liberal politics, Kelce’s vaccine PSAs — what they should be affirming for primary and fundamental ones. They are turning down the deep story, the primal archetypes, because the celebrities involved aren’t fully on their political side.
But the celebrities aren’t on their side precisely because the right keeps making itself so weird that even temperamentally conservative people (which both Swift and Kelce seem to be) find themselves alienated from its demands.
The second reason for the right’s abnormality problem is that even normal people in the Republican coalition overlearned the lesson of Trump’s election. Having made the safe and moderate choices in 2008 and 2012 and watched both John McCain and Mitt Romney go down in defeat, Republicans made a wild-seeming choice with Trump and saw him win the most improbable of victories. And there was a reasonable political lesson in that experience, which is that sometimes a dose of destabilization can open a path to new constituencies, new maps, new paths to victory.
But the dose is everything, and trying to be abnormal forever because it worked for you once is self-defeating in the extreme. The goal of destabilization, after all, is to eventually create a new stability, in which your party and vision and coalition are understood by most Americans to be a safe and normal place to belong. That is what the Trump-era right has conspicuously failed to achieve. And it won’t get there so long as it sees even cultural developments it should welcome, romances that it should be rooting for, and shakes its head and says, “It must be a liberal op.”
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