Plotted Out

Generally speaking, people tend to write off those they consider to hold conspiracy theories as uncritical thinkers at best, and of dangerously questionable mental health at worst. Conspiratorial thinking, the logic goes, exists mainly to offer simple explanations to complex phenomena or questions.

But it's also worth noting that alleged conspiracies offer insight into the anxieties of the people who hold them. Consider the (relatively) new conspiracy theory concerning singing star Taylor Swift. You've likely heard of it, it's being covered all over the place. I won't bore you with the details (everyone else is looking to do that), but suffice it to say that for many people in the Make America Great Again crowd, the Deep State is at it again, in order to ensure that President Biden wins another illegitimate term in the White House.

While it wouldn't surprise me to learn that there was a drinking game at the bottom of all of this, I think that there is something of interest here. Namely, the fear among Trump supporters that Taylor Swift could manage to mobilize a significant number of people that Trump campaign was counting on not voting. After all, what tends to prevent the United States from sliding leftward is the fact that young people, who are the most likely to lean left, tend not to vote. Granted, there's been something of a bifurcation in "the youth vote" recently, with younger men drifting to the Right, while young women drift Left, but the fact remains that a substantial number of votes that would normally wind up in the "D" column are never cast. I suspect that people on the Right have realized that Taylor Swift has at least some power to change that.

And this is important in this election cycle because Donald Trump, while he can turn out the people who already want him to be President, has pretty much given up on making his case to people outside of that group. That is to say, for people who aren't already Trump-style populists, or deeply frightened of or enraged at the Democrats, the Trump movement has nothing to offer. In fact, one can make the case that Trumpism actively alienates people outside of Trump's base. A lot of those people were likely disinclined to vote anyway, given their general disaffection from the Democratic Party. But an endorsement from Taylor Swift could upend that.

If you'd asked me a month ago whether such an endorsement from Taylor Swift could have such an impact on this November's Presidential election, I would have told you "no." And quite honestly, I'm still mostly of that opinion. But the emergence of what looks like a state of open panic over the possibility tells me that there are a decent number of people who believe it. For the record, I'm not convinced that, say, Vivek Ramaswamy is dim enough to actually buy into this. But I think that he understands that if he's going to maintain enough support among Donald Trump's voters to land a cabinet position or the Vice-President's job, he has to talk the talk. And he's not the only one. And I think that as the people who seek to remain influential in the current Republican Party openly espouse the conspiracy, more and more Republican voters will see it as legitimate.

Which, to circle back, is part of their problem. I don't think that Taylor Swift really has the power to sink Donald Trump's chances of winning the November election. The insularity of the Trumpist base is doing that work for her. I know a few people who are big on Trump, and, even more so than most people I know who are politically active, outreach to people who don't already agree with them is simply not on the menu. I'm of the opinion that this is a bigger problem for them than any celebrity.