Heartbreak is the National Anthem (Taylor's Version)
What I saw at the Eras Tour
Welcome to Family Matters…are you ready for it? On tap:
The Main Event: Why Taylor Swift is the voice of her generation—or at least a voice of a generation
Sideshow: You can have my credit card, baby
It’s Me, Hi: Mentioned in the New York Times and New York magazine
Et Cetera
The Main Event
Taylor Alison Swift was born on Dec. 13, 1989, one month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, making her the perfect avatar for those born when history temporary ended. Just as The Beatles came to represent an entire culture-shaping generation, it’s easy to see Swift personifying the Millennials, who will remain the largest post-Boomer cohort well into the foreseeable future. She bestrides the pop culture world like a Colossus, about to wrap up her Eras Tour, which will end up grossing $2 billion. And — as you may have heard — she’s been in the news a bit lately, inspiring the usual passionate loyalty, conspiratorial musings, and unhinged contempt.
What is it about Swift that inspires such strong reactions? Yes, she’s an attractive, talented celebrity, but America has plenty of those. What makes Swift polarizing is what makes her popular — the electric, empathetic, telepathic connection between her and her millions of listeners who hear familiar patterns of infatuation, heartbreak, empowerment, and revenge across her corpus, and can find themselves in her songs all too well.
Swift is far from the only artist to find commercial success in turning the particulars of her life into universally-recognizable tropes. But her songs and story connect with her predominately (though far from exclusively!) female and Millennial fan base in something that goes deeper than pure fandom. After some recent first-person reporting, I feel confident in saying that the global phenomenon that is Taylor Swift can help illuminate why it feels like something’s gone wrong in the contemporary interplay between the sexes.
Even as she’s become a global mega-star, Swift hasn’t offered Beyoncé’s brand of ethereal celebrity, Lady Gaga’s spiky complexity, or the explicit sex appeal that made Madonna or Britney Spears stars for a time. Instead, what cements the bond between Swift and Swifties is something more than the girl-next-door image of her first three or four albums, but the woman who isn’t afraid to let her see you put in the work to do everything Fred Astaire did backwards and in high heels.
Swift is the incandescent chanteuse for a generation of women who saw themselves in the character of Hermione Grainger, to borrow another Millennial touchstone — talented but hard-working, putting in long hours to get to the top, running as fast as they can and putting in the work while others question how much they deserve. (It is surely no accident the song that plays over the two-minute countdown prior to her entrance on stage is Lesley Gore’s feminist anthem “You Don’t Own Me.”)
As a performer, she may be not innately gifted (and has admitted as much herself, even poking fun at her reputation for awkwardness in the “Shake It Off” music video); but she makes up for it by the preparation and intensity with which she pours herself into it. In “mirrorball,” from her pandemic-era album folklore, she offers what is essentially a mission statement:
I've never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try
I'm still on that trapeze
I'm still tryin' everything to keep you looking at me
And the screams that rattle stadium stanchions worldwide are evidence that in the teardrops on her guitar, the stars around her scars, her blood, sweat, tears, and starved body, so many see themselves in a star who pours everything she has into something and still wonders if it’s enough.
Swift’s discography and trophy collection speak for themselves. And yet the men in her life, infamously, have not seemed to measure up. I don’t know if Swift has ever read Richard Reeves’ work, but something about the story of a woman who has achieved every professional milestone, all the while wondering why her paramours can’t get their act together, must surely hit home. Women increasingly surpassing men in the classroom and are achieving parity in the office; yet the frustration with men who drift in and out of relationships with a telos is hardly unique to Swift. She and her most recent beau, Joe Alwyn, dated seriously for six years before they broke up, immortalized on “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” from this year’s The Tortured Poets Department:
He said he’d love me for all time
But that time was quite short
Breaking down I hit the floor
All the pieces of me shattered
As the crowd was chanting “MORE!”
I was grinning like I'm winning
I was hitting my marks
Cause I can do it with a broken heart
No one can accuse Swift of never hitting her marks. (Indeed, perhaps the only drawback of the “Eras Tour” might be that it felt a little too pre-programmed; the rigors of performing for over three hours non-stop, barring costume changes, each night from Singapore to Indianapolis to Warsaw leave little time for spontaneity.1) She has fame, wealth, unquestioned artistic and commercial success. Per the terms of contemporary empowerment, she doesn’t, strictly speaking, need anything else.
But that doesn’t stop her from searching, explicitly so in her Alwyn-era Lover (“I like shiny things, but I'd marry you with paper rings…”) Maybe she’s read her Brad Wilcox, or just knows instinctively that the highs of infatuation pale against long-term stability. Even in Tortured Poets, filled with songs influenced by the end of their six-year relationship, she remembers a prank that left her wishing for a solid future:
At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger and put it on the one
People put wedding rings on
And that's the closest I've come to my heart exploding
Even though she has it all, she still yearns for the stability of commitment. And for all the jibes at “childless cat ladies,” including the self-deprecating ones, my impression is that many Swifties would themselves like to see their own love story end with saying yes. But it takes two to tango. As journalist Anna Louie Sussman wrote for the New York Times, “For as long as people have been promoting marriage, they have also been observing that a good man is hard to find…to truly address the decline in heterosexual marriage, we must attend to the details — to acknowledge the qualitative aspects of relationship formation.” Or as AEI’s , author of the American Storylines substack, found last year:
“Women more than men report having a greater number of potential deal breakers when it comes to dating. They are also more likely to report having difficulty finding someone who meets their expectations. But for many young women, dating expectations refer less to a laundry list of must-have qualities and more to basic standards of how they wish to be treated.”
It’s not uncommon to hear young married couples joke (or, sort of joke, but not really) that they “feel like they caught the last chopper out of ‘Nam.” Modern dating, we hear from reliable reports, is a hellscape. Perhaps young women need to lower their standards; perhaps young men need to step up their game. But the equilibrium is not clearing, which helps explain why so many young women end up in the cul-de-sac Swift found herself in; waiting for a man who might not be treating your relationship with the same level of seriousness you are, wondering why all-nighters to attain academic excellence and career success never quite feel like enough when men who seem to coast (we prefer “conserve energy”) do just as well, weighing whether another year of a relationship with no firm plans for the future will be a step closer to forever or ultimately just sunk costs.
This election has been billed by Puck’s Peter Hamby as the Taylor Swift-Joe Rogan election, illustrating the gender divide that threatens to become the defining characteristic of American politics in the years to come. On a political level, it would certainly behoove conservatives to find rhetoric that gives 30-something women in the Midwest less reason to find them toxic. But the more fundamental concern is what happens if wished-for pairings end up failing to launch.
I think all of America is hoping Swift’s next album will feature a change of pace; instead of heartbreak, perhaps Miss Americana will sing about what it’s like to be the cheer captain who locked down the football star. I don’t expect that alone would reverse the decline in America’s marriage rate. But if Swift and Travis Kelce were able to model for America’s young adults what a healthy example could look like — of confident masculinity, mutual interdependence, and commitment between two high-status peers who actively want to trade optionality for permanence — it might even help kickstart some conversations (or DTRs, I’m told) among commitment-shy Millennials. Talk about an achievement bigger than the whole sky.
Sideshow
Former President Donald Trump’s latest stab at populism has him suggesting price controls. “While working Americans catch up, we’re going to put a temporary cap on credit card interest rates,” Trump said on Long Island this week. “We’re going to cap it at around 10%. We can’t let them make 25 and 30%.”
Capping interest rates isn’t out of bounds per se; after all, many religions condemn usury. But 10 percent is not only below the long-run average for credit card interest, it’s lower than the average rate at any point since at least 1991. It would unquestionably restrict credit to borrowers with anything short of a sterling credit score.
The optimistic gloss on this proposal is that cutting low- and moderate-income families off from credit is a feature, not a bug. American consumerism does lead too many households to feel pressure to keep up with the Joneses and maybe restricting their ability to live beyond their means would be a subtle long-term benefit. But most American families wouldn’t see it that way. Cutting off personal credit would mean families with an unexpectedly pricey trip to the auto repair shop or a kid who breaks a bone falling out of a tree would have to resort to payday lending (or worse) to cover those expenses. There are viable tools at policymakers’ disposal to improve Americans’ financial standing; this particular idea should be quietly retired in favor of, say, an expanded Child Tax Credit.
It’s Me, Hi
The New York Times’ Ross Douthat mentioned the recent EPPC report on support for moms and babies post-Dobbs in his subscriber newsletter “What is Pro-Life Realism?”
As Patrick Brown of the Ethics and Public Policy Center noted recently, since the fall of Roe “every state that has laws on the books protecting life in the womb has passed laws that expand support for pregnant and new moms and their babies.” But those steps have been insufficient to the scale of what abortion restrictions ask of women in difficult situations, and therefore insufficient to the task of creating a post-Dobbs social contract that conflicted Americans find credible.
My COMPACT piece on IVF and subsidizing birth was mentioned in New York magazine by Irin Carmon (“The Truth About the Right and IVF”)
Et Cetera
Upcoming Events
Upcoming hearing on state misuse of TANF funds, feat. special guest Brett Favre, Sept. 24, Capitol Hill
Lunch presentation on pro-family policies by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Students for Life’s Tina Whittington and American Principles Project’s Jon Schweppe, Sept. 27, Washington, D.C.
Articles
Harris wants to limit child care costs to 7% of family income (Tami Luhby, CNN)…Trump is giving away the store on taxes (Brian Faler, Politico)…China’s ‘Silver Economy’ Is Thriving as Birthrate Plunges (Claire Fu and Daisuke Wakabayashi, New York Times)…House GOP split on how to address IVF (Annie Grayer, CNN)…Doctors in Texas perfromed 113 abortions to save the lives of pregnant women in Texas over the past two years (Kendall Tietz, Fox News)…How the Last Eight Years Made Young Women More Liberal (Claire Cain Miller, New York Times)…Want a girl with blue eyes? Inside California’s VIP IVF industry (Megan Agnew, The Times)
Takes
Conservatives should adopt policies from the recently-launched “Blueprint for Life” (Huckabee, Newsmax)…Parents Should Ignore Their Children More Often (Darby Saxbe, New York Times)…ProPublica’s Misleading Abortion Ban Stories Are Part of the Problem (Isaac Schorr, Mediaite)…Is 2024 the year of the 'pro-choice’ Republican? (Leigh Ann Caldwell and Theodoric Meyer, Washington Post)…America is still working (Scott Winship, FUSION)…Book Review: The Two Parent Privilege (, Substack)
Roundup
North Carolina: A new initiative seeks to reimburse parents for child care expenses incurred as a result of going to vote in person…South Carolina: Special Joint Committee to Study Childcare holds hearing on workforce challenges…Institute for Family Studies launches new Family First Technology Intiative
Just for fun
SpaceX astronaut performs the music of John Williams while in orbit…Shohei “50-50” Ohtani is incredible.
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Though let it be said her acoustic set changes up each night (with no repeats), including our performance’s inclusion of an acoustic rendition of the best song off her best album, “the last great american dynasty.”
You see that theme as early as her song Love Story