Why has Taylor Swift driven the rightwing crazy on the eve of the Super Bowl?

A modest proposal :)

You're probably familiar by now with the truly insane rightwing freakout over Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs and the upcoming Super Bowl. To recap, rightwing media, including FOX and many internet based influencers, have been screaming bloody murder ever since Kansas City punched its ticket last Sunday to the Super Bowl, aka, the biggest sporting event on the American calendar, to be played in Las Vegas on February 11. Though, by their standards, the Chiefs did not have a great regular season, they do have the best quarterback in the sport, Patrick Mahomes, who will be playing in his fourth Super Bowl in five years, not to mention the best currently employed coach in the NFL, Andy Reid, the fourth winningest coach in NFL history. In other words, it's not all that surprising that Kansas City again ended up on the NFL's biggest stage, nor does it need a crazy conspiracy theory to explain.

Enter Taylor Swift. For a quick refresher, she began dating KC tight end, Travis Kelce, during the 2023 season. Kelce is Mahomes’ favorite receiving target and is widely regarded as one of the best pass catching tight ends of all time, a key cog in the Chiefs’ two Super Bowl victories in the past four seasons. All of this was true and uncontroversial before last fall. But once his relationship with the planet's biggest pop star became public, and that pop star began regularly attending Kansas City games, the hype machines around both Swift and the NFL kicked into overdrive.¹

That was a source of deep resentment for rightwing media even before last week. Swift has been a bane on the right for years now, especially since she endorsed Joe Biden in 2020. And Kelce has served as a pitchman for Pfizer's Covid vaccine which, you know….

But this already simmering resentment erupted in volcanic fashion when Kansas City defeated the favored Baltimore Ravens last Sunday, earning their spot in Las Vegas. Because, you see, Kansas City didn't *really* earn its place. Instead, and I swear to God I am not making this up, a deep state plot, or as one commentator put it, an out in the open psyops campaign, involving the NFL, the CIA (by some accounts), the Biden campaign, George Soros (by other accounts, naturally) was concocted to ensure the Chiefs' Super Bowl slot. Why? Because the “demonic,” "Luciferian"² Swift is going to fly in from Japan, where she has a scheduled concert Super Bowl weekend, to endorse Biden at halftime of the Big Game, thus swaying her brainwashed minions to unfairly swing the election. As the liberal commentator Sam Seder observed, this would all seem to be unnecessarily complicated, since the Deep State could have just installed her months ago as the main act at the Super Bowl halftime show, an event watched last year by more people than the game itself. In any event, I won't dwell further on how nuts all this is, and how widespread.

But though all of this has been ripe for well-deserved mockery and derision, there is a consequential underlying political shift that this absurd Swift stuff is an outgrowth of.

In recent years, both in the United States and, increasingly elsewhere, young women have have been gravitating toward parties of the left. As John Burn-Murdoch put it in the Financial Times:

In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women. Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye.

In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up.

Drawing in part on work by the scholar Alice Evans, Burn-Murdoch notes that the gap coincides with the emergence of the #metoo movement. But the gap extends well beyond issues like sexual harassment itself:

The clear progressive-vs-conservative divide on sexual harassment appears to have caused — or at least is part of — a broader realignment of young men and women into conservative and liberal camps respectively on other issues. In the US, UK and Germany, young women now take far more liberal positions on immigration and racial justice than young men, while older age groups remain evenly matched.

In the past few years, an ocean of pixels has been spilled documenting and analyzing the shift, especially of White men, but also to a lesser extent, non-White men, to the Republican Party. Less discussed has been the movement among women, notably young, unmarried women, to the Democratic Party. These movements themselves reflect, to some extent, other developments over the past two decades, including the growing education divide between the two parties. Whereas more educated voters once tended to vote Republican in greater numbers, and less educated voters Democratic, those tendencies have flipped. Gender is part of the story here, insofar as the increasing support among young women for the Democratic Party has coincided with their increasing college attendance. Indeed, women now significantly outnumber men among recent college graduates and in law schools and medical schools.

According to a 2023 Pew Study, in 2011, men represented 47% of students enrolled in four-year colleges in the United States. In 2022, that share had declined to 42%. In law schools, while women represented under half of enrollees as of the end of the 20th century, by 2021 they represented 55%. For medical schools, women were the majority of entering students for the first time in 2017, and as of 2022, represented 56% of incoming medical students.

Alongside and presumably related to these educational gaps, the aforementioned Alice Evans believes the ideological gender divide is partly a function of changing social patterns. Two she identifies include 1) evidence that kids are less likely to play with and form friendships with the opposite sex than was once the case, and 2) that social media has created starkly divergent informational and algorithmic universes for girls and boys, feeding differences in outlook, sensibility, values, priorities and objects of adoration.

Talk of gender divides is, needless to say, complex. But where I think some of this converges with the Swift/NFL story is a profound sense in rightwing media that young women represent a serious political threat. I’ll leave for another post the question of how liberal discourse and rightwing discourse differ on the question of what to do about demographic groups with which they appear to be losing ground. But in the Trumpified Republican Party, what the scholar Dan Cassino describes as “hostile sexism” is a key predictor of support for Trump, including against his GOP rivals. In the American context, these developments may be having their biggest impact on young women who are coming of age in the #metoo era and now the post-Roe era, are increasingly going to college and grad school and have role models and communities of support that make them less willing to accept the kinds of attitudes and behaviors that girls and women have had to endure basically forever.

Last fall, the writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner attended a Taylor Swift concert and wrote in elegiac tones about its meaning. At one point, a man at the show commented that there wasn’t “a lot of sex at this show.” As Brodesser-Akner explained, he didn’t really mean anything by it. But she responded:

“That’s because this isn’t for you,” I told him, and I found myself getting angry as I spoke. “She wasn’t created to please you like the other women pop stars. She created herself to please me. She escaped the machine where women are only allowed to be pop stars if they don’t anger or threaten men. This just isn’t for you.”

I’m not claiming that Taylor Swift herself represents a radical new political tendency. But I do think the combination of her extraordinary popularity, the depth, nature and intensity of devotion to her among girls and young women, and the exploration and assertion of self that appears to constitute a powerful part of her appeal, may be a particular kind of provocation to the Trumpian right in the United States. There is an irony here in that Swift is coming under increasing fire in the context of a relationship in which she is the devoted girlfriend of a football player. But a notable fact about that relationship is that, even as she appears at Kelce’s games cheering for him, *everyone* knows that, as great a player as he is, *Swift* is the superstar in the relationship, the global icon, the center of a media universe unparalleled in the world today. She’s the alpha.

In spite of the NFL’s uniformly conservative ownership, its militarism and its super high testosterone culture, it has been a target of rightwing ire before, including Trump himself, especially after Colin Kaepernick took a knee in 2016. But an even greater affront appears to be that a girl, by her mere presence, upstages that most all-American of male pursuits, a football game. That’s clearly driving a lot of people, well, crazy.

1. NFL games accounted for 93 of the top 100 rated television shows in the United States in 2023.

2. Terms one of her many rightwing critics used to describe her.