It happened last Sunday in Las Vegas: American football player Travis Kelce, who had just won the Super Bowl with the Kansas City Chiefs, received on the field a passionate kiss from Taylor Swift, queen of global pop and current owner Give Your Heart. It was a kiss that has transcended said courtship and has had a huge social echo.
In fact, everything Taylor Swift related is huge. 53% of Americans declare themselves his fans. In Australia, an academic symposium on it has just been held, with the complicity of seven universities. Her fortune exceeds one billion dollars and is going up. Her Eras de ella planetary tour, which began in March 2023 and will end next December, fills stadiums with capacity for up to 73,000 spectators and will bill another billion dollars. Swift was on the cover of Time magazine as “person of the year” in 2023, and was considered one of the most powerful women in the world…
How is all this achieved? From her beginnings in country music at age 14 – she is now 34 – to her becoming the queen of pop, Swift has composed and sung songs that chronicle her personal growth and her enjoyable love life. . And they are, for many young women, a mirror of their own intimacy, with parallel experiences: the bad but irresistible boy, the tendency to stumble twice over the same stone, the desire to recover someone who has been lost… Add to all this a special empathy with fans – “I don’t distinguish them from my friends,” says Swift (something that may not excite her friends) –, astute management of the networks and a well-oiled public relations machinery and we will have the recipe for a success enormous, which goes beyond music and affects politics.
Taylor Swift does not hide her sympathies for Democrats and has presented herself as a feminist, defender of LGTBI rights and philanthropist willing to contribute with her donations to alleviate some natural disasters. Joe Biden’s limping pre-campaign before the November elections would benefit from the singer’s explicit support. By the same token, many Republicans would resent such support. From this party, they recommend that she not get into politics. And the most conspiratorial wing of Trumpism raves that Swift and Kelce are pretending to have a romantic relationship with the sole purpose of adding media forces and putting them at the service of the Biden campaign. In other words, there is fear in Trump’s ranks that Swift’s fame and a clear position could sway the outcome of next fall’s presidential election.
Is that possible? We will have to see it. But some believe it, convinced that such an empathetic singer can influence the popular vote in this uncertain situation. It is understandable that the electorate feels little attracted to the Democratic candidate Biden or the Republican candidate Trump, if they are the contenders. Because Biden’s talents are hidden by his ailments. And, even more so, because Trump is mired in a hundred legal cases, for political, economic or sexual trickery, and because his narcissism, his arrogance and his erratic behavior are a guarantee of problems for the world.
Now, none of that would justify choosing one candidate or another in the United States out of mere sympathy for the queen of pop.
All of which reminds us of the excessive power that fame and celebrity have achieved in our society, regardless of their origin. It is enough for a singer to be liked by the social majority for her to be seen as a potential prescriber of presidential candidates. It would be preferable if the people most listened to in this matter were, above the entertainment figures, those with a greater political culture and better discernment about what is best for the United States and the planet. But when a psychopath with Trump’s record has already occupied the White House, the supposed beacon of global democracy, willing to silence the voice of the polls and incite his hordes to storm the Capitol, collective political reason drags the effects from a blow from which it is difficult to recover. There we are.
