Take Me Out To The Ball Game

I’ve written before about the bizarre way that many white liberals, in the 2000s, made their attitude towards The Wire into a metonym for their racial purity. To a degree that I’m not sure I’ve seen before or since, people just really really desperately wanted you to know that they weren’t racist because they liked an HBO show, yes because the cast was predominately Black but also because the show’s racial politics were considered particularly sophisticated. And of course people have done the same with movies and TV shows and music for a long time. (Amusingly, in years past one of the most prominent of these liberal political stand-in figures was Kanye West.) Of course people didn’t come out and say that they expected their politics, and particularly their racial politics, to be conveyed by the kind of television shows they liked to watch. That would be a very clumsy thing to do. But they wanted that little syllogism to work for them, socially. Well, here we have the same thing breaking out, only now almost no one is being coy about it: you’re a liberal if you support Swift, you’re a conservative if you don’t. Conservatives, for their part, will… I don’t know, get vaguely mad about her and yell about it on “X” like a doofus? There’s zero stakes here, but the fact that so many people are so animated about zero stakes reveals a rot that is itself genuinely high-stakes. I tell people all the time that politics is a thing you do, not a thing you are. It gets a little more bleak when all you are is all you buy.