At the time of writing, Taylor Swift has been publicly engaged to her long term boyfriend – the Kansas City Chiefs Tight End Travis Kelce – for about two hours. The Instagram post in question making the announcement has 12.8 million “likes”. By the time you read this, that figure will surely be well past thirty million, approaching forty million. The British Broadcasting Corporation, which once solemnly broadcast sober stories from London around the world, is running a live blog of reactions to the big news.
It’s a changed world.
Yours truly is perhaps in a funny position, as somebody who is much more of an NFL fan than a popular music fan: To me, Kelce, not Swift, is the celebrity. The future Mr. Swift is one of the two greatest players at his position of the last fifteen years, the other being former New England Patriots star Rob Gronkowski. He is a sportsman of rare athletic ability, strength, and intelligence, who has proved impossible for opponents to defend across his career. There is a fair chance he will make it to the NFL’s “Hall of Fame”, which enshrines the very greatest American Footballers in sporting immortality.
But after this, he will forever simply be one of two things: Taylor Swift’s husband, or Taylor Swift’s first husband. We’ll hope, in all seriousness, for the former.
A smart friend semi seriously opined to me last night that the big engagement might actually reverse demographic trends of falling birth rates: Swift is so influential amongst young women, she reasoned, that if she and Kelce get married and have several children, many of her fans will rush to do the same. My friend was joking (I think) but there’s a point there.
Conservatives have a tendency, in general, to dismiss popular culture as either inherently unserious and frivolous, or as being something that it’s simply not “conservative” to engage with. After all, who cares about pop music over in America when you can be appreciating something old and serious that shows what a serious person you are. Frivolous people listen to Taylor Swift, goes the thinking. Serious people listen to old classics over a glass of port and a cigar. Rejecting popular culture ostentatiously is a conservative pathology, a disease that at its worst makes the right culturally irrelevant. If you’re reading this article thinking “why is he talking about this when he could be talking about yesterday’s migration numbers” then yes, I am talking about you.
I am talking about you because objectively Taylor Swift’s impending marriage is a bigger story than Ireland’s immigration numbers. It will have more cultural impact. It will reach and affect the emotions and the well-being of many more people. Its impacts reverberate with more significance across the political and cultural plane – for better or worse.
And for better, I think, is the choice there.
A basic conservative principle is that marriage is good. Not all marriages are good, of course, but marriage as a concept is good. Two people who get married choose to build something together, whether that be a home with children, or simply a shared life for themselves. Every study ever completed on the subject shows that marriage makes people, on average, more conservative: Having found stability in their own lives, they begin to value stability around them. They take more interest in their local areas, probably because they are “nesting” for their prospective children. They commit fewer crimes. They are more financially stable, because bills are shared. They become more selfish, in the best sense of that instinct, and start prioritising policies that benefit their own families rather than doing what teenagers do and voting for parties that spend billions fixing climate change impacts in South Chad. Single people always vote left of the married, on average. That’s why parties of the left spend so much time pandering to the single women in particular.
It follows then that when the most culturally influential female on the planet – a woman who has earned literal billions from singing about her romantic life and her breakups and her heartbreaks – decides to settle down and build a life with somebody, she is setting an example to all who follow her. And it is a good one.
Over the years, some of the stuff I have heard from right wingers about Swift has bordered on the misogynistic. That she sets a bad example by having so many boyfriends, for example. Or that she has encouraged young women to be promiscuous. I always thought that was arrant nonsense. She’s not popular because she tells young women what to do; she is popular because she reflects the reality of life as a young woman today – life that includes a fair few disappointments on the romantic front. It’s her honesty that they love.
That’s why the enormous reaction to her news is significant. Her fans want her to be happy, and they are reacting with enormous gladness to the fact that she has found happiness which is what they still recognise marriage to signify. Marriage, as expressed through that Instagram post, is still the ideal that tens of millions aspire to. That’s a good thing.
What is perhaps a less good thing is that marriage for so many young people seems a harder and harder thing to aspire to. The age of marriage is rising. The number of marriages are dropping. The children produced by those marriages is on average falling.
It’s that contrast that we should focus on. The contrast between what so many tens of millions of people aspire to on the one hand, and how hard they seem to find to achieve it on the other. A marriage shouldn’t really provoke such global coverage. But the fact that it does is notable, and no bad thing.