I. Setting the Stage
A few weeks ago, a waxwork-looking Antony Blinken made a symbolic public statement with geopolitical reverberations by purchasing a Taylor Swift album in Beijing, deliberately catching the media’s attention.
What lurks behind such an action? Why did the press take such an interest in the intersection between Tay and US foreign policy? As we’ll see, this certainly isn’t the first time that Swift has popped up in US-China relations. In fact, she bizarrely seems to be a recurring character in geopolitical relations, usually as an antagonistic figure.
Because of this, the US secretary of state chose to pose alongside her record not as a simplistic, symbolic nod to mainstream American ‘culture’ but rather because the artist, Miss(?) Taylor Swift, is a senior agent of the American Empire. Indeed, it was only during a later draft of this article that I found that some Conservatives have made this exact accusation! Or at least, the MSM has wrung its hands thinking that they did.
For the record, I don’t believe that Taylor Swift is passing secret codes to the CIA. But why then is she seen as part of American power? Why is she so symbolic of the USA at the metaphysical level? Newsweek asks “Can Taylor Swift Conquer China?” while noting that the country has notably moved away from Western entertainment in the past decade, yet this trend seemingly hasn’t caught up with TS.
The strong implication here is that Taylor Swift acts on behalf of American foreign policy interests as they pertain to the ‘soft power’ of US cultural influence. In this case, such influence serves to erode the host culture in favour of the newly-presented one: American Liberalism. Thus, we will here examine and promote the bizarre but satirical (but not really) statement that Taylor Swift is, in some sense, an agent of – or perhaps a node in – the global American world-system of cultural corruption designed to bring about the End of History.
Why this is so, alongside what it reveals about the two great power rivals of our time – America and China – shall be explained here.
II. A New Cultural Revolution for China?
Since the beginning of this year, the US press has bizarrely celebrated the fact that everybody’s psychogf of choice has all but inaugurated a second cultural revolution in China. Or one may think so if one were to read how the popular press has celebrated the pop star’s supposed antagonisms of the Chinese ‘conservative culture’.
The National Post lauds, Pravda-style, how American ‘values’, apparently made incarnate in Swift, are currently rocking ‘conservative China’ like they’ve never seen before. The dusty old Chinese conservative elite must put down their Mahjong and come to grips with:
Women belting out feminist lyrics that denounce gender inequality. Teenagers in glittery dresses dancing to songs celebrating LGBTQ freedoms. The number 1989 — the most sensitive year in modern Chinese politics — displayed in huge type on the theater screen.
Outstanding display of American soft power, there. You can imagine the stuffy Chinese suits choking on their rice wine at this display of unstoppable youthful freedom, terrified at transvestite men and haughty women as if Gheghis Kahn himself had returned.
As we shall see, the National Post are not alone here. Basically, the collective American MSM demands we consent to a reality in which Taylor Swift is swiftly capturing the optimistic hearts of promising, devil-may-care young Chinese women who look only to the future, not their staid Confucian past. These women are supposedly finding their own 5,000 year old culture a bit passe. Instead, they yearn to join their Western counterparts in experiencing what being the centre of the Universe is like. Of course, this is not actualised by real achievement (as is famously promoted in traditional East Asia) but by living in a neoliberal consumer bubble-reality, joined at the hip with feminism and homonormativity, in which every day looks more or less like a scene from the Barbie movie.
II. Organism and Environment
With regards to the American (or American-Israeli-NGO) interconnected global influence network, Taylor Swift serves not only as a product of said system but also retains an active stake in its perpetuation, in addition to its cancerous spread. She is clearly no American nationalist, granted. But the pop star may be aware in some unconscious capacity that her survival – or at least enormous wealth – depends upon its continued dominance over rivals. Taken as she is, Swift could not thrive to the same extent – living a life a Roman aristocrat couldn’t have dreamt of – within any other cultural habitat in today’s world. In fact, we cannot really imagine someone like Taylor Swift existing without also imagining contemporary America alongside her: a rich yet decaying country of liberal excess that promotes her lifestyle and attitude which serves also as the generic template for women of her time and place. America is thus the platform that provides the brightly-lit stage for her self-image to blossom in a triumphal fury, and, to a lesser extent, of her fans and imitators by proxy. Swift appeals directly to the inner consumer-narcissist existent within us all and for this reason has potential global appeal as an ambassador of such a lifestyle and thus ideological system.
Swift, then, is a product and beneficiary of her environment and, semi-aware of this, tirelessly and ferociously advocates this same ‘environment’ against all possible competitors, directly provoking the Chinese in their land as a self-aware ambassador of US cultural norms. A more profound culture would not lavish its highest honours (and millions of dollars) on such a person, even if it had no reason to attack them. On display here what some biologists label an organism-environment coupling. The environment makes the species in some sense, so that any particular one couldn’t thrive as it currently does if moved to another environment. Just as the treefrog is hard to conceive of without the jungle, Taylor Swift is difficult to conceive of sans the American environment of late-liberal exuberance.
We here zero in on the alignment of interests between Taylor Swift and the perpetuation of the culture that birthed her. Each helps the other perpetuate itself. This pact extends to American foreign policy, as the arena of foreign relations is the most ferocious cultural battleground humans have yet devised. It is the American culture industry of narcissist hyperconsumption alongside its partner principles of female empowerment and anti-normativity that produced and sustains her. Simultaneously, it is precisely this ‘culture’ that America quite explicitly attempts to impose upon the rest of the planet, making in-roads in all continents. This is why the ostensibly conservative National Post gushes at how:
The values celebrated in [Taylor Swift’s] show stand in stark contrast to President Xi Jinping’s increasingly conservative vision for women, providing a rare outlet for young women rejecting ever-tighter social controls and the Communist Party’s rigid expectations.
The article emphasises that, above all, Swift’s aggressive feminism most sets her ideology apart from the rising world power bloc of China and friends. While China certainly has had, for a very long time, all of the rights, protections and privileges that first and second wave feminists demanded, it fails to centre the economically-independent, rootless, ultra-confident and promiscuous urban woman as the feminine ideal or pinnacle of human progress as such. Woman is instead just but one part of a holistic system called a ‘civilisation’ and not its apex, end-goal or sacred cow. This brings Tay and the American Empire into a marriage allegiance against the reactionary, right-wing and conservative… Chinese Communist Party.
This tension works to put Tay at odds with one of – if not the most – ancient cultures mankind has to offer. But is Tay up to the challenge?
III. Freedom’s Values Are Everyone’s Values….Or Else
No doubt, Swift does not see herself as inseparably connected to any particular time, place or cultural system. She simply is. Just as with most women of her age and socioeconomic background, as well as almost all popular celebrities of every kind, she arrived at the precise ideology of late-American liberalism all by herself, without prompting or indoctrination. She simply is goodness embodied, believing what any other ‘good’ person believes.
Put more bluntly, a good person believes unquestioningly in the social narratives depicted throughout the newsmedia, educational institutions and streaming services. We all know more or less what these are. Slutting around and/or polyamory, the deconstruction and demonisation of prior cultural ideals, the switching of gender norms, cheap consumer products and mass immigration, of no-questions-asked gender transition surgery for preteens, and a vague and childish conception of ‘freedom’. These values loom tall over all those who have yet to adopt them, whose cultures have yet to be ‘made free’.
From what we can gather from Newsweek, Bloomberg and the National Post, ‘freedom’ does not designate any freedom of speech or steering the ship of one’s destiny (classical conceptions of freedom) but giving the finger to some simulacra of crusty old men in suits who just can’t grasp that girls just wanna have fun and the Universe was created for them to do so. Or that a young teenager is free to undergo gender reassignment surgery without intervention, and so forth.
It is the promotion of these specific, very new conceptions of ‘freedom as endless fun without consequence’ – not freedom of thought, speech or association in the abstract – that the American neoliberal system demands, without qualification, that the entire world population adhere to unquestioningly.
As is often the case, in reality American ‘freedom’ (aside from the most famous and wealthy) degenerates into eking out an existence as an isolated, lonely, deracinated and alienated consumer-entity, nodding along to the endlessly battering waves of sugary American infotainment without argument or reflection. To the extent that the reflective mind accidentally ‘turns on’ during its exposure to this propaganda, a tsunami of psychological tactics designed to shame, exclude and terrify the wayward individual arrive via a series of pre-planted emotional triggers within them. This eventually sediments into a Pavolovian avoidance for the vast terrains of thought which exist outside of liberalism. Such is the promise of freedom.
The Chinese, of course, see things differently. One irony of 20th century Communism was that is shielded such countries from liberalism, as witnessed also in Eastern Europe. The Chinese, therefore, view Swift as embodying a chaotic and degenerate system with discrete social values to which it is entirely possible to mount an ethical-intellectual defence against. As such, we observe an insurmountable gulf between the US and China. For America, extreme feminism, consumerism and LGBTQIA- are non-negotiable on both domestic and foreign fronts. Other nations must adopt these ideals, which are nothing else than the march of inevitable progress anyway. All political realities with few notable exceptions (e.g., the military success of Israel) are therefore subordinated to these sacrosanct ideals which America sees as its raison d’eitre to uphold.
A very important (and exploitable) tension arises here, however. Most liberal Americans, obediently trained by well-organised institutions into despising and diminishing every aspect of their own history, are now ever-increasingly aggressive in applying this logic to the once-sacred category of people of color the world over. For a long time, PoC and non-white cultures were quasi-religiously held up of bastions of earthly wisdom and empathy, immune to all outside criticism. But following the tune of the US state-media establishment, this halo effect draped over non-white cultures is rapidly fading to the extent that these other world-systems are a threat to Israeli-American hegemony. The illiberalism of the rest of the world is increasingly uncovered by the liberals of the West, quite to their dismay.
Now, the “progress” as articulated and dictated by this establishment is seen as equally inevitable for non-white cultures. Whether they like it or not, they too must encourage their teen daughters to join OnlyFans and their sons to transition; or they at least mustn’t serve as any obstacle to the manifestation of such sacred events. After all, the current American system is an inevitability, one can only briefly impede its progress. An obstacle anywhere in the world that might impede Liberalism’s fruition is a deviation that must be swiftly rectified, by force if necessary. The great irony is, as many international observers note, we have entered a new kind of colonialism, in which Westerners forcefully apply their current religion upon the world as they once did their Christianity (despite the fact that what are now called ‘Western values’ are often confused with subversion by outsiders- this for another article).
IV. The Cold War Episode 2: The New Cope
Many have noted that for such ideological reasons, as well as economic and geostrategic ones, the world is currently experiencing a renewed Cold War, or at least something very close to it. This means that the battle of ideas rises between East and West again, with the South caught in the middle. Cultural influence and subversion thus has extreme importance, as it did in the first Cold War. So what is American to do?
Trying desperately to recreate its previous winning formula, the American liberal system is attempting (yet failing) to position itself as a paradise of free choice, fun and adventure juxtaposed to a sombre, restrictive East. Thus we see bizarre attempts to try and recreate the spirit of 1970s and 80s style ‘rock n’ roll and blue-jeans’ freedom and export it, since it was once successfully contrasted against the stuffy and authoritarian Soviet union. Except, this ‘recreation’ falls short and looks more akin to an unwanted comeback tour of an old, STD-riddled rocker with brain-rot through decades of drug abuse and trailing a long list of sex scandals. The old songs, channelled through a husk of their player’s former glory, just don’t hit like they used to. Awkward silence descends on a disinterested audience. Having lost the spirit and sex appeal it once had, America fails to win over anyone to its paper-thin conception of ‘freedom’.
In short, for various reasons that we do not have space to go into here, America fails to inspire neither confidence nor affection on any large-scale in either its intended domestic and foreign audiences. People trust the American system to bring them happiness as much as they would trust Joe Biden to park their car for them. China is, despite several hiccups, overall a rising and flourishing power in which the population more or less sees their lives improve from decade to decade and feels some sense of global-historical purpose. This stands in stark contrast to the West, in which our lives grow more or less get worse each decade, save the mixed blessings of technological advances. The sense of an open canvas onto which the nation’s future is still to be painted can no longer animate the USA or the West generally, which has simply become glumly accustomed to a pervasive feeling of hopelessness and impending doom.
Few now look to America for a model of freedom. Few Americans themselves see their nation as worth defending, as we see from the latest recruitment figures (a phenomenon repeated in Britain, to Boris Johnson’s dismay). The glory days cannot be repeated because the bright past that was once ahead of it was empirically revealed to be nothing but a flash in the pan, an illusion of sorts.
Yet America strives nonetheless to sew its trademark discord into other nations. And it still has quite a large budget to do so. Who, then, is left to pour the CIA’s vast resources into? One of the few remaining demographics that can be appealed to by such a decaying system are antisocial, bored and spoilt women, which have long been the norm here in the West (indexing a long period of prosperity) but not yet in China, until recently. This cohort is thus perhaps one of the very few lifelines that the liberal international order has left to reach out to and so it seeks to exploit these elements wherever possible.
The other lifeline, of course are the LGBTQIAO= community, as the above articles explicitly note. The idea that sexual deviants exist in all societies and see the USA as their Mecca is now widely accepted both at home and abroad. Anti-social elements within other countries, China included, are thus thrown bait via popular media in order to create a contingent of foreign citizens of hostile nations who retain loyalty to Uncle Sam. If this loyalty can be channelled through a likeable pop figure, then all the better. America is well-aware of the power of pop culture and has used it in all of its wars and conflicts, often using a figurehead such as TS.
As such, the liberal order is well-advised to promote their materials to them. But I fear they will never again replicate their past successes. American liberalism appeals to the lowest-common denominator of any population, or to the lowest and most base aspect of individual persons. The tactical benefit of this choice is that it can recruit to its side large swathes of people who cannot dream of a culture founded upon any higher principles. This is coded as ‘moral’ within the liberal framework. Harkening to a glorious past or looking upward to a more sublime future are coded as fascistic and demonic and counterposed to the ‘Open Society’, the enemies of which grow by the day, and thus must be suppressed without mercy.
But there is a flaw to this strategy. What the various tendrils of the American system (two aspects of which, as we have seen, are the unlikely allies of the State department and Taylor Swift) fail to realise is that 22 year old feminists do not actually dictate state policy in a serious country such as China. Neither would they would not do so here if they were not allowed, encouraged and facilitated to do so. Any such power they have to determine culture at a large scale is largely illusory: the system itself is what promotes these values, not outside agitation or influence.
This is hard for members of our own culture to realise, as feminist complaints about the nature of so-called patriarchal society, or LGBTQIA& complaints about heteronormativity, almost always determine policy between a few months and years after they are first proposed. But since China has witnesses the plummeting birth rates, rising divorce, social discohesion both in the West, as well as echoes of this within their own societies, liberalism will not be a societal model that it forcefully imposes on its own population via the typical routes of education systems, entertainment and newsmedia.
Unfortunately for the American news outlets cited at the beginning of this article, China will therefore not be caught with its starchy trousers down to a youthful and dynamic movement of hypersexual liberalism that leaves its leaders red-faced, giving the people the freedom that they want to they can rock the CCCP, man. The future will not be written by who can make the most appeals to the sacrosanct values of polyamory, antisocial sentiments and gender fluidity. Cultures which tap into the more primordial and perennial values of virility, glory and aesthetics (alongside the cosiness of family and heterosexual romance) may still have the last laugh as a new chapter that begins after ‘History’s End’ had already been published in the 1990s.
We have all re-entered the currents of history. There is everything to play for.
V. So what’s the next stage of the drama of Mankind?
To some extent, I hold to the Spenglerian position that civilisations work as biological organisms do. They experience periods of birth, flourishing and finally decay. Despite its supreme confidence – until only recently quite justifiable – this hegemonic system of thought and social organisation labelled ‘Ameircan liberalism’ appears evermore on its last legs. Many of the geopolitical ‘surprises’ we have seen pop off in the last years (Afghanistan, Ukraine and Gaza to name but the most prominent) metaphorically symbolise vultures circling a dying beast, anticipating an imminent feast. The ‘West’ may therefore not be that facing its death; in its place may be only the American global order of liberalism.
There is every chance, then, that the world will exit out from the swirling drain of American liberal ‘values’ and learn again to look upwards. And looking upwards will mean both a looking back to our past coupled with (re)writing an as-yet unwritten future. Certainly, these attempts at forging a new path will be met with violence on the part of said system. But the slow draining of the world’s virile lifeforce to be replaced with media-addicted consumer-nodes in a cold, uniform system no longer seems quite the inevitability that it once did. With all this taken into account, we will here do our utmost best to both chronicle the continued decline but to keep a constant eye open for possible areas of renewal and rebirth.
Just nobody tell poor Tay.
Articles Referenced
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-10/taylor-swift-wows-chinese-women-tired-of-xi-s-conservative-era
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a46612616/taylor-swift-super-bowl-travis-kelce-right-wing-conspiracy-theory/
https://www.newsweek.com/taylor-swift-china-eras-tour-concert-movie-1850762
https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/us-news/blinken-taylor-swift-album-beijing-b2535795.html
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/taylor-swift-vs-conservative-china
