Taylor Swift is hard to escape lately. A megastar whose empire is worth over a billion dollars, her tours sell out in minutes. She’s in movie theaters and commercials; her music is everywhere, and so are her fans. Her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce has raised her profile even higher — if that’s even possible — and Kelce’s, too. Swift didn’t need the attention, and arguably neither did Kelce, who is going to the Super Bowl next month and stars in several commercials, including one for a COVID vaccine. Now the internet is saturated with deep Swift thoughts, and sometimes the thoughts are strange.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently joked on X that “a proposed screening Q for the next Trump administration” would consist of two propositions. “Is Swift-Kelce (a) a sweet thing to watch and maybe the last best hope for America, we need them to marry and procreate (b) a psy-op to get NFL fans to get booster shots and vote for Democrats,” he added. “No (b)s need apply.” Either opinion should get you put on a list, I think, and before the day was over, my list had grown.
An editor for the Dispatch, a conservative website, posted, “In the Hallmark movie, titled ‘Champion of My Heart’ or ‘The Perfect Catch,’ Taylor & Travis started out as a publicity stunt, but then they actually fell in love and are going to get married and have ten kids, causing a miraculous turnaround in America’s declining fertility rate.”
Then there’s the paranoid right, which has concluded, seemingly en masse, that Swift-Kelce is a Democratic psyop. Fox News host Jesse Watters claimed that “the Pentagon’s psychological operations unit” had “floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset” in a segment earlier this month. “I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month,” posted Vivek Ramaswamy, the defunct Republican presidential candidate. “And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall.”
I don’t pity Swift, who is far wealthier than anyone ought to be. Her music is not to my taste, and I prefer the Buffalo Bills to the Chiefs. But Swift has melted the brains of even those on the intellectual right, and that deserves some critical attention. It’s not because Swift is a crusading feminist, though to some conservatives she is probably under suspicion. (Being an unmarried 34-year-old woman who owns cats is all it takes.) In reality, she is not that ideological: She endorsed a couple Democrats in the past, including Joe Biden in 2020, and has urged her massive fan base to vote, a nonpartisan gesture that may nevertheless frighten the right. Swift’s fans are mostly women, and many are young — two voting blocs the right traditionally struggles to win. By asking them to vote, she is marshaling an army, at least in the eyes of the fearful.
Swift’s gender may not make her a feminist, but is it why the right cannot be normal about her? On Newsmax, a conservative channel, host Greg Kelly accused liberals of “elevating” Swift as an “idol.” He added, “This is a little bit of what idolatry, I think, looks like. And you’re not supposed to do that. In fact, if you look it up in the Bible, it’s a sin!” Although it may be trite, try to imagine Kelly saying this about a conservative star. You can’t, because it’s unthinkable. Swift threatens certain troglodytes because of what she means to the public. When a girl likes a singer, she’s not necessarily making a political decision, but her choices can have broader ramifications anyway. By liking Swift, girls and women brought her wealth and fame. They also transformed her into a symbol, and symbols have power.
As a symbol, Swift is not all that subversive. Her relationship with Kelce is the stuff of high-school heterosexual fantasy. Yet she is successful without a husband or children, and so she upends the right’s natural order. The social hierarchy it prefers will spare no one. Even if Swift were conservative, she could only realize her value by procreating.
This is vulgar feminism, but these are vulgar times. The right’s Swiftian hysterics are not so deep, even if they happen to be revealing. Conservatives offer Swift the same two choices they offer any woman or girl: reproduce or be crushed by the machine. Their efforts probably won’t work in Swift’s case. They are taking on two categories of obsessive — Swifties and NFL fans — and they are going to lose. No one is going to believe that football is for libs now, and if Swift has lost Ramaswamy, well, her fans certainly won’t care. Nevertheless, Swift is not entirely immune from the misogyny of the right. There are implications for other women and girls, who lack her considerable wealth and cultural power. The situation is dire, and it is getting worse all the time.
