Taylor Swift, The White House Demolition, And Pathways Of Persuasion

(Photos by Gareth Cattermole/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management / Eric Lee/Getty Images))

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.

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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 are correct.

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 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 themes 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 consumer 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.