We're Gonna Build A Lovely Park Bench And Watering Station

The deeper issue is simply that none of this can provoke material change, which is the purpose of politics. Where your morals leave your head and enter the physical world is precisely where politics begins. It’s not about the feasibility of your beliefs. There are plenty of things that we want that we will never get, politically; I’m an open borders guy and will never live to see that as policy, for example. But support for open borders entails an endorsement of an actual material change in the world that could theoretical come to pass. Support for Taylor Swift as a political symbol could one day achieve… what, exactly? Making an immensely rich and influential woman richer and more influential? Doesn’t seem like left-wing progress to me. The only way the average person might engage in this pro-Swift movement is with their attention and their dollars, neither of which Swift has been lacking for. If the idea is merely that Swifts fans will vote against Donald Trump and his MAGA movement because of all of this, well, I’m skeptical that will happen and would be a little disturbed if it did. It’s much more likely that, as with championing The Wire in a way that draws more attention to yourself than to the show, all of this is just symbolic politics designed to demonstrate that you’re The Right Kind of Person. Which wouldn’t rankle me so much except for the fact that this increasingly seems to be the only form of politics we have, the politics of pure assortment, divided not by morals or ideas or acts but by types of people.