Taylor Swift vs. profound weirdness of MAGA

Hatred makes people gullible and foolish. That’s a key lesson of the MAGA right’s deeply strange turn against Taylor Swift and her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs star tight end Travis Kelce. In fact, that’s a key lesson from this entire sorry era in American political and cultural life.

There’s nothing new about partisan anger at celebrities. And Swift has dabbled in politics. In 2018, she endorsed the Democratic candidate for Senate in Tennessee, Phil Bredesen, over Republican Marsha Blackburn, and in 2020, she endorsed Joe Biden. Kelce appeared in ads for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. By MAGA’s calculation, between them, the couple express the most infernal combination of affiliations — Democrats and vaccines.

But although traditional partisan pettiness can explain the knee-jerk negative reaction to Swift, it can’t come close to explaining the incredible weirdness of the recent theory emanating from people with some of the largest platforms in MAGA America. According to them, Swift’s rise is an “op” or a “psyop” engineered by the deep state to benefit Joe Biden.

A central part of the plot, of course, is Swift’s fake, deepstate-invented relationship with Kelce. Thus, when the Chiefs struggled earlier in the season, it was a source of rightwing schadenfreude. But now that they’ve surged into a berth in the Super Bowl, it has been revealed as part of The Plan.

Dumb and strange are par for the course with MAGA. If we imagined conspiracy theories as movies, we’d say “Taylor Swift: Psyop” was brought to you by the same studio that produced cult classics such as “Pizzagate” and “The Seth Rich Conspiracy,” not to mention the tentpole franchises “QAnon” and “Stop the Steal.”

MAGA’s relentless villainization of Democrats has created a substantial population of people who believe that the left is miraculously powerful, operates without any moral restraint and is dedicated to destroying their way of life. And if you believe your opponents are capable of anything, it’s a short trip to believing almost anything about them.

The political strain that MAGA’s conspiracy theories has placed on our democratic system has been amply documented. Less documented is MAGA’s threat to American pluralism. On some days, it can seem as if MAGA is engaged in a kind of cultural secessionism in which it turns against popular mainstream products and institutions — Bud Light, Target, the military — and tries to create alternatives. There has been MAGA coffee, MAGA banking, MAGA beer and MAGA rap.

By themselves, parallel economies can be an element of pluralism rather than a threat to it. Creating a business that both sells a product and advances a particular set of values is nothing new.

But combine parallel economies with boycott culture, and you have something else entirely. It’s a cultural manifestation of an old legal temptation — free speech for me but not for thee. For Swift, it’s shut up and sing. But for Jason Aldean, the calculation is entirely different.

And so we’re caught in a vicious cycle. Unrelenting hostility opens up the mind to the worst stories about your opponents, no matter how incredible. This era of politics will end, one way or the other. And when it does, historians are likely to debate whether its defining characteristic was stupidity or malice. I’ve gone back and forth in my own mind, but I now realize the traits have almost fully merged. Malice is creating stupidity, and stupidity is creating malice.