Taylor Swift, The White House Demolition, And Pathways Of Persuasion
There's a difference between lifting a finger to the wind and making the weather.
There’s a certain kind of open-minded music aficionado who will give every composition a fair hearing, no matter the artist, and form opinions about each one on the merits. They have favorite artists, and artists they don’t like, and artists in between, but their ideas about what constitutes a good song or good album are generous, rooted in real knowledge, and clear in their minds.
Most of us aren’t like that. We might try to fake it. We might aspire to expertise and even have picked up some technical knowledge along the way. But we are less-sophisticated music consumers who use subjective heuristics to determine what we like and don’t like. Some of us are sponges for catchy tunes, whether they’re innovative or lazy. Some of us have our self-images wrapped up in genre—our music is cool, other music1 is not. Some of us will come around to whatever music is popular at any given moment, in our communities or in the culture at large. Some of us fit in multiple categories.
I’m typically that middle snob.
For most of her career, I both could not name a Taylor Swift song and also knew in my guts that I wasn’t a fan. Not (obviously) through familiarity with her music, but through tribalism, my sense of who I am, and how I want others to perceive me. Since my teenage years I’ve written off almost all corporate pop in the same way. Listening, contemplating, opening myself up to it would have felt like a betrayal of some truer faith.
And…I guess honestly, I’m still no Swiftie. But I’m not so dug-in either. And not—definitely not—because I’ve become less of a snob. It’s not because I made a rare exception and gave her catalog careful study. It’s not because a true aficionado sat me down and helped me understand the nuances of her genius. It’s not because a carefully crafted public-relations campaign sold me on her. What happened instead is that, over time, my communities filled with people who like her music. Being too cool for it became stubborn old-guy shit, which is terribly uncool in its own right.
So I relented a bit. I listened. I allowed earworms to crawl in. Immersed in a milieu where respecting her artistry is a default expectation, I budged: from someone who’d have had to Shazam her songs to someone who occasionally finds himself humming them—who even knows a little bit about her dramas and feuds and their influence on her writing.
All the sight-unseen scorn is gone. In other words, I have been persuaded.
You may have gathered by now that this boring story about my short journey from Swift skeptic to Swift agnostic is an elaborate metaphor for politics, and, if so, congratulations. You nailed it.
Many of us aficionados like to think that political ideas and public opinion form through careful, open-minded study, rather than through social signaling. That it’s “[M]illions of people making decisions about what does and does not matter to them,” as one Democratic operative put it recently.
It is a big country, and so this may, literally speaking, be an accurate description of the sub-universe of well-informed, ideological voters. But for tons and tons of people political ideas form like fashions and fandoms. Who’s a face and who’s a heel? How do we know? What are the pressing problems in society and what aren’t? People alight on the “right” opinions to hold by looking around and adopting views that reinforce their social statuses. The iconoclast at the dinner table may want you to believe he’s an independent thinker, but it’s at least as likely that he just enjoys being a contrarian ass.
How often over the past, say, five years have you found yourself confused to see something small, local, fringe, minor in the scheme of thing become a dominant issue in political discourse?
How do people in Georgia come to care about whether San Franciscans honor Founding Fathers with school names and statues? Why do voters who’ve never met or interacted with a transgender person decide they’ve learned everything they need to know about a politician based on whether they respect (or how they talk about) other peoples’ gender identities? By what process do people who watch Fox News or hang out on Twitter or consume wellness content transform from normies into zealots?
Strident views can arise seemingly out of nowhere the same way trends do. People of influence drop them intentionally into the cultural slipstream then fan and fan and fan them until they’re ubiquitous enough to make us incorporate them, one way or another, into our identities.
This is something Republicans in particular understand about opinion formation, and, thus, persuasion. Democrats by and large do not.
Everyone I’ve asked, from all walks of life, had a visceral reaction to this week’s images of physical wreckage at the White House. Nearly all of them understood intuitively that if Joe Biden or Barack Obama had spent bribe money to bulldoze the East Wing, their presidencies would have ended. They knew enough about politics, in other words, to intuit this difference between how Republicans and Democrats react to shocking developments.
I suspect most elected Democrats had the same visceral reaction you and I did to those images. But they largely suppressed their indignation. They did not treat it as an emergency (i.e. a political opportunity) and reverted instead to their own, socially-constructed, default opinion that Regular People™️ would not care.
It is self evident to them that their feelings about what’s happening in the world, their instincts about what constitutes important news, are unreliable barometers of public sentiment. The fact that they’re upset about something doesn’t imply the voters they need to persuade will care. To the contrary, as out of touch elites, it’s likely that our fixations are of no interest to Joe Sixpack. They can not imagine that Joe Sixpack has few fixed views and is mostly just glancing around for cues about what’s important and what to think about it. They don’t reason that if people in Georgia can be made to care about school names in San Francisco, those same voters can be made to care about the White House reduced to rubble.
And so Democrats did not reach for their phones, or race to TV cameras, or rush legislation to the floor. They followed the advice of the people in the party who do what’s known as “persuasion work,” who tell them to exercise tremendous discipline and avoid the pitfall of driving excess attention to stories and developments that are unlikely to change anyone’s mind.
What kinds of things do they believe are persuasive? Policy issues. Economically significant developments in the world. The great moral issues of our time.
An astute commenter on BlueSky put it this way: Democratic outrage over the White House demolition was “not as strong as the [Republican] pushback against the change in the Cracker Barrel corporate logo.”
This perfectly captures one of the most important sub-ideological differences between the parties: How their respective strategists conceptualize the process of changing people’s minds. The difference between politicians who lift their fingers into the wind, and those who make the weather, knowing it’s the wind that carries voters along.
Republicans, thus, engulf Joe Sixpack in cues that all say: Democrats are evil, violent, censorious, and sexually deviant.
When Cracker Barrel briefly got a Madison Ave. makeover, did Republicans spend significant sums testing the persuasiveness of Cracker Barrel messages, or did they just reason to themselves: This is a fight we can win, and in winning, we’ll win twice, because we’ll also demonstrate to the public that we are the tastemakers and trendsetters. We will provide people clues as to who’s on the side of right and who’s on the side of wrong. And then we’ll move on to the next fight of our choosing.
If you wondered a few weeks back why Cracker Barrel was in the news, or where all the chatter about Sidney Sweeney came from, this is where. Republicans created the weather knowing Democrats would have to react to it, and that Democrats, as weather vanes, would get batted around rather than acclimate.
By contrast, as Democrats tested the wind to determine whether making a stink about the White House demolition is worth their time and effort, Republicans began acclimating. They’ve compiled whataboutisms and crafted excuses and soothed the public with euphemisms like “renovation.”
But the demolition scandal is still live. Organic anger may yet give Democrats the permission they think they need to show interest in it—if not today, then whenever the focus-group findings and message tests come back.
What I want, more than anything, is a change in political culture that frees Democrats to exploit Republican liabilities proactively, without fussing over whether they’re persuasive in intimate, controlled settings, or crowding out some master narrative.
Democrats should have been promising to demolish the Trump palace ballroom at the first opportunity, long before the excavators arrived at the White House. They should certainly promise to do so now. They should introduce legislation to end the demolition and rebuild, if not precisely to its prior specifications then to some public consensus about what should be built where the East Wing once stood. They should expose and hound the donors who financed Trump’s vandalism. They should warn contractors that they will be debarred in the future if they continue the demolition or move on to the construction phase.
It’s not that there’s no value in testing messages like these by and by. And I’m not saying Democrats should ignore laboratory findings about what matters to voters, or what voters want to hear. I want these stickers affixed to everything Donald Trump has made more unaffordable. I want people who lose their health insurance because of Trump on the news and in 30 second ads. I want people to think of him as Mary Antoinette or a modern-day robber baron. I want it to become socially awkward, a sign of supplication, to make excuses for the economic havoc he’s wreaked. It should be a sign of loserdom and weakness to blame Trump’s failures on Joe Biden or mysterious saboteurs or even the business cycle.
But none of this has to come at the expense of pouncing when he makes a mistake that has nothing to do with wallets and bank accounts—when he fantasizes openly about dumping shit on citizens exercising first amendment rights, or orders his defense attorneys, who now run the Justice Department, to pay him a quarter-billion dollars in taxpayer money.
Or when he demolishes a priceless historical artifact to build a gilded monument to himself.
We can forge a new social consensus in which Trump’s party loyalists are depraved, greedy villains, and he is a demented mad king, simply by pointing to the wreckage and his ballroom renderings and saying so. Many Americans have invested so much of their identities and egos into supporting the man that they will never turn on him…unless they can tell themselves (and their friends and family members) that they cut bait because something about him changed.
Millions of people abandoned Joe Biden in part because they were made aware, endlessly, of his physical diminishment.
Taylor Swift (apparently) lost tons of fans to a new social consensus that her latest album is bad, and her Charli XCX dis track is petty and unattractive2.
Donald Trump is susceptible to changing winds no less than anyone else. But, for now, he and his allies are the only ones making the weather.
Particularly the music enjoyed by the kids these days…
Did I get that right?
That Cracker Barrel comment burns. Like, I flinched when I read it. So true.
Brilliant article. I will forward to a few smart people I know.