There was a recent article from Newsweek that caught my eye. Entitled “Why Republicans’ War Against Taylor Swift Could Backfire,” it delves into an X (formerly Twitter) spat between The Federalist’s Sean Davis and left-wing activist Victor Shi. In response to an excellent piece by Mark Hemingway detailing the shallowness and vapidity, both technically and spiritually, of Swift’s music, Davis quipped, “Taylor Swift is dumb and her music sucks.” In response, Shi wrote, “Nothing says more about how little Republicans understand Gen Z than them now saying Taylor Swift is “dumb & her music sucks” after she registered more than 35,000 people to vote last week. If you attack Taylor Swift, you also attack Gen Z. Good luck, Republicans. You’re screwed.”
Sadly, they’re both right.
Taylor Swift is indeed dumb, and her music is beyond insufferable. As for her politics, they are a jumbled mess of tired cliches and contradictions. She remained amiably silent about her personal politics until 2018, when she succumbed to the woke mob and started parroting their platitudes. But she owes her astonishing success to the fact that she’s smarter than her dupable fan base. That’s not saying much, but that’s the point.
It is easy to disregard the aforementioned Victor Shi and his sophomoric tweets. He’s a 21-year-old privileged brat whose self-assured acumen is never troubled with plagues of nuance, introspection, or humility. He’s also male, Asian, and rich, and he’s operating under pure delusion if he thinks he’ll get a chair when the intersectional music stops. But even when he’s wrong, he’s always right. About everything. All the time. It would be a mistake to dismiss not so much Shi but the mindset by which he is driven. He categorically represents Gen Z, and Gen Z is the future.
Shi is correct in that criticisms of Taylor Swift, no matter their validity, are a mouse compared to the calamitous elephant of her influence over Gen Z. She just got 35,000 of her fans to register to vote, most of whom will vote for whoever she tells them to, without question. How many people did Republicans register to vote during the same time frame? What’s our strategy? Cross our fingers and hope those 35,000 new voters don’t live in Arizona or Michigan?
Taylor Swift and her paint-by-number leftism is nothing new in pop culture. I grew up in the era of Pearl Jam, Marilyn Manson, Rage Against the Machine, Green Day, and the like. They were uniformly leftist and had no qualms about shoving their politics down the throats of their audiences. And millions of confused, impressionable teenagers like me lapped it up.
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But by the time we reached legal adulthood, we had since figured out that there was something just a tad disingenuous about these multimillionaire celebrities cranking out three-chord mediocrities against The Man. These celebrities were The Man, and they laughed all the way to their greasy, capitalist, WASP-run banks. Their product was less music and more indoctrination enmeshed with a few trite guitar riffs, and marketed to the me-against-the-world youth who were told exactly what they wanted to hear.
What sets Gen Z apart is that (with significant exceptions, of course) they don’t appear to be maturing past this phase in any aspect of their lives. They’re less likely to be employed than their counterparts in previous generations. Scores on the ACT are the lowest in over thirty years. They are more isolated, more depressed, and more obese. Managers report that many Gen Z employees lack the initiative, emotional maturity, and social skills needed to perform basic work. Their understanding of American history and basic economics is almost as non-existent as is their patriotism.
And they think you are what’s wrong with America.
And Taylor Swift just got 35,000 more of them to vote against the American experiment.
And if she snapped her fingers, she’d get another 35,000 to do so.
Whatever we’re doing to try to stop the ever-encroaching leftward lurch into every corner of our private lives has been largely ineffective in moving the cultural needle in our direction. What I call the Taylor Swift Problem is indicative of long-term cultural rot, compounded by our public schools’ concerted and sustained efforts to dumb down our students to the point that “public education” should be reclassified as unionized child abuse.
In every civilization other than contemporary America, only the most talented musicians could hope for an audience from the cultured classes of society. Parvenus like Taylor Swift, Sam Smith, Billie Eilish, Eminem, et al. would have been street minstrels at best. But the advent of mass marketing, made possible first by television and then by the internet, has brought these hacks—and their anencephalic opinions—into our living rooms.
Nobody with any sense in the ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome, Persia, or Egypt thought that they should hit up their back alley jugglers and lutists for senatorial policy proposals. Yet here we are. As a result, their civilizations lasted for thousands of years longer than ours is slated to.
“The Gettysburg Address,” perhaps the most famous and consequential speech in human history, was heard at the time it was orated by only a small handful of people. On the flipside, Taylor Swift has 272 million Instagram followers. Millions of them literally have no ability to think critically, but man, are they good little revolutionaries. They’re all too happy to vote in favor of making their vote meaningless.
How do we course correct? How do we get an entire generation to snap out of its uninformed arrogance? Embark on some sort of reverse version of Gramsci’s Long March through the institutions? Good luck with that. The entire Republican Party cannot get more people to register to vote than Taylor Swift can. Even if we began today, wresting control from the vice grip of the Left of our schools, media, popular culture, financial and government institutions would take a generational, concerted, and sustained effort, the benefits of which maybe our great-grandkids would be lucky enough to enjoy.
Conservative activists need to call out and challenge the Taylor Swifts of our society, publicly and specifically. When Swift bleats out something as insanely idiotic as she did when she said that rights are being “stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” why isn’t she being challenged to name a single “right” she’s referencing?
Whenever Swift or her peers rhetorically pollute by virtue-signaling on social media, our conservative heavyweights need to challenge them to open, structured, and live-streamed debates. Swift posts some drivel about empowerment or racism or whatever, and her legions of trained seals will bark and clap. But get her on a debate stage against Heather Mac Donald, Ben Shapiro, or Candace Owens, and she’ll be exposed in about seven nanoseconds for the dunce she is. And if she refuses to do a live-streamed debate (which she will), she needs to be called out for her cowardice, consistently and repeatedly, by our conservative leaders.
Taylor Swift isn’t a rebel or a hero. She’s Joe Biden in a romper. Even Gen Z is subject to instinctual graspings of human interaction. If they see Swift and other celebrities either embarrassing themselves on a debate stage or hiding behind their “Block User” buttons, maybe enough of their eyebrows will raise to dent the carefully marketed façade they’ve built around their public images.
As minds change, so do votes.
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