Brief notes on ‘Swiftian Normality,’ chronic onlineness and tradition
My first taste of (albeit opinionated) journalism was for the now-defunct conservative digital magazine American Pigeon, where I made it my perhaps ill-advised mission to opine about all the political happenings of the day.
Something we came to quickly despise as editors of our humble startup webzine was the abysmal state of the online right and its increasing detachment from the real world outside Twitter.
My sentiment on this particular issue has been rather concisely and eloquently expressed in the various writings of the pseudonymous Twitter account Edmund Smirk. Over the last year or so, Smirk has dedicated himself to developing the idea of "Swiftian Normality." Swiftian Normality was originally nothing more than a memetic Twitter phrase meant to praise the politically liberal — but temperamentally conservative — pop star Taylor Swift, as well as more recently Iowa Hawkeyes women's basketball star Caitlin Clark.
Specifically, Swiftian Normality was coined by Smirk in opposition to much of the online right's hostility toward Taylor Swift for her marginally liberal political opinions, despite her popular relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce — a traditionally monogamous, good ol' Friday-Night-Lights-esque relationship — which I would contend is the perfect right-wing meme come true. In a world where celebrities twerking for Satan and pornographic rap lyrics are praised as "liberating" and "empowering" by the increasingly progressive tendencies of contemporary philosophical liberalism, Swift sells out concerts mostly attended by middle-class suburban teenage white girls, their tickets paid for by their parents so they can sing along to "22" or "Blank Space." Despite her ideologically undesirable opinions on surface-level political topics, Swift represents a relatively Normal pop genre refuge in an era that has long conflated liberty with licentiousness.
The crux of Swiftian Normality, this "elusive, vibes-based idea," as Smirk writes in the American Mind, is to push back against those part of what he terms the "Freak Right": the handful of popular online talking heads that currently comprise the bulk of the mainstream conservative intelligentsia, who alienate most "Normal," middle-class suburban voters in favor of "MAGA rappers," alpha male ramblings and numerous other appeals to a downwardly mobile, bohemian aestheticism.
In other words, what was once nothing more than a memetic phrase meant to express discontent to the enemies of "Normality" on both the left and right has since evolved into a full-fledged philosophical orientation detailing the importance of upwardly mobile, suburban middle-class culture — the heart of what the American Dream is often imagined to be.
Rather than fighting the culture war by LARPing on Twitter about being an "alpha male" or having a weird, mostly unfounded hatred of all white women for their shift leftward without any viable means of winning them over, Swiftian Normality urges conservatives to do so by embracing the very thing both the Freak Left and Right seem to despise: Normality.
But perhaps more profound than this is Swiftian Normality's potential to facilitate a deeper conversation about the importance of the temperamental attitudes that form the philosophical basis of conservatism. Smirk's thinking may seem novel to those unacquainted with conservative thought, but Swiftian Normality's temperamental attitudes are very reminiscent of the writings of modern conservative thinkers like Roger Scruton, Russell Kirk, and even Edmund Burke himself.
Like these thinkers, Swiftian Normality emphasizes a deeper, anti-ideological temperament that embraces the irrational, proliferating intricacy of old custom, binding communities together and ensuring the lifeblood of the commonwealth. It stands in direct opposition not only to those on the Freak Right who seemingly prioritize their Twitter punditry above all else but also to the abstract rationalism of philosophical liberalism that has long since atomized individuals, detaching them from their communities in the name of some fantasist notion of "absolute individual autonomy."
While conservatism in the political sense is certainly much more than its core temperaments, Swiftian Normality might present an opportunity for conservatives to reconnect with such temperaments as a way to better guide their policy pursuits and outreach to demographics currently alienated by those on the “Freak Right.”