Still Just One Cheer for Kanye West

There are good reasons why Kanye West has millions of fans outside of politics. He’s been a creative musical force for two decades, and everyone from rap aficionados to rap-dislikers (I count myself in the latter camp) recognizes that he is a fantastically talented musician, maybe the most inventive in the history of rap. He’s won two dozen Grammys and sold over 150 million records.

There are also good reasons why conservatives have taken positive notice of Kanye’s periodic forays into right-leaning politics, from denouncing abortion’s effects on black Americans to boosting Donald Trump to trolling the Black Lives Matter organization to going on Tucker Carlson. There is likewise value in the openly Christian elements of his music and his public speech. He’s bringing some conservative or right-leaning messages to people who don’t hear those messages very often, and he’s showing the courage to buck the leftist conformity of the industry and genre in which he swims. It helps that Kanye is, like J. K. Rowling or Elon Musk, too big to cancel. Moreover, like Trump, he simply has a gift for drawing attention to whatever he does.

So, one cheer for Kanye. But it will never be more than one, and to understand why, consider this weekend’s entirely self-inflicted controversy over tweets in which Kanye said, among other things, “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE. The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also.” There really is no way to read any of this as anything but textbook, open antisemitism.

Kanye does not appear to be an ideological Jew-hater, or the type of public figure who traffics in this stuff regularly. This is, however, entirely consistent with a wider conspiratorial worldview and pattern of erratic behavior that connects everything from his obvious mental instability to his notorious “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” blast in 2005 to his 2009 bum-rushing of the Grammys stage to champion Beyoncé while Taylor Swift was receiving an award, to the various messes he has made of his personal life, to his weird half-hearted 2020 presidential campaign. Kanye may be a curious and open-minded thinker, but he is also a bundle of ignorance and resentment.

Musical savants are often characterized by minds that don’t think the way everyone else’s does; read this excellent essay on Paul McCartney’s freakish emotional and musical memory for a sample. Kanye can see connections that nobody else sees, but that also means he will see things that aren’t there, and is easy prey for conspiracy theories. Antisemitism has a long and deep interconnection with conspiratorial thinking. The raw, nakedly emotional vulnerability that deepens the power of his musical vision and gives authenticity to his public statements comes with the emotional instability that leads to saying stuff like this out loud. None of those aspects of Kanye’s personality and behavior are ever going away.

The bad reason for conservatives to be embracing Kanye is simply desperation for affirmation from the dominant culture, which is typically peopled with folks who despise us and everything we stand for. Worse would be ever trying to recruit him as a candidate for any office of public trust. He’s a huge celebrity with some good ideas and some terrible ones. A healthy culture can recognize him as a talented artist and an occasionally useful partner in the culture wars, but we need not choose between excusing him at his worst or permanently “canceling” him for it. On this occasion, there is no excusing.