I recently wrote a short piece arguing that a desire to associate oneself with high-status views plays a role in how people who want to be thought well of both adopt and express political views. To illustrate my point, I used the case of Taylor Swift, an accomplished liberal performing artist who recently decided to end her practice of not weighing in on electoral politics to endorse two moderate Democratic candidates in her home state of Tennessee, and that of Kanye West, an iconoclastic producer and rapper who has recently embraced Donald Trump — see Kyle Smith’s latest on l’affaire Kanye for more. For the record, let me just say that both celebrities are well within their rights to share their opinions. But allow me to gaze at my navel for a moment.
I tend to avoid writing about cultural currents through the lens of such larger-than-life figures, as there’s always a danger that how readers may feel about the celebrity in question will overwhelm the particular point the writer is trying to make. And that’s pretty much what’s happened. When I write about, say, the earned-income tax credit or fiscal equalization, issues I consider absolutely central to America’s future, I’ll often hear crickets. But weigh in on the incentives that might shape how a couple of famous people talk about politics? Look out.
Though I was careful to acknowledge that I don’t have firsthand knowledge of the inner lives of the celebrities in question, one of the chief criticisms I’ve heard is that I don’t have firsthand knowledge of the celebrities in question. I’m struck by the fact that people impute motives to prominent cultural and political figures all the time. For example, there are lots of celebrated writers and thinkers who routinely accuse conservative politicians of being driven by deep-seated racism or sexism. “Well, did you interview Judge Kavanaugh about whether he was drunk with white-male ragetitlement?” You’d be laughed out of the room for asking such a question. The people who stand accused of this or that unseemly motivation aren’t likely to cop to it. In my case, I wasn’t even suggesting that there was an unseemly motivation at work: To care what other people think about you is to be a member of civilized society.
Consider the following from Lee Drutman, an incisive liberal political scientist, which he shared with Thomas Edsall of the New York Times in May: “Opinion leadership among Democratic elites has become much more ‘woke’ over the past several years … Democratic politicians and journalists have spent more time talking about social justice issues and championing the causes of historically disadvantaged groups, and there’s a basic cue-following that happens.” To draw on Drutman’s language, I dared to suggest that young liberals are engaged in basic cue-following, and I went on to state that conservatives do much the same thing.
My real point, though, was that for the many ordinary people who take part in social-media rage spirals, there can be such a thing as being overly concerned about status and prestige, and that feeling insecure about your status can make matters worse. We often hear this point made in the context of “white fragility” — the notion that the reason why white conservatives are concerned about, say, immigration is that they are anxious about their status in a changing society. But to suggest that young liberals might be subject to a similar dynamic, albeit one that leads them to proclaim that they are in tune with high-status beliefs? That, apparently, is a bridge too far.
And how did I end my piece? By arguing that traditionalist conservatives ought to care more about helping young people feel more secure and orienting their economic policies to that end and less about feeding rage spirals of their own.