Taylor Swift Is Time’s Person of the Year Because America Is Disgusted With Politics

Time Magazine’s announcement yesterday of Taylor Swift as its annual Person of the Year is an emphatic fuck you to politics, marking the first time in almost a decade that the Person of the Year wasn’t a political figure — an accurate reflection of Americans’ disgust with politics.

Here are Time’s previous choices:

• 2022: Volodymyr Zelensky 

• 2021: Elon Musk

• 2020: Joe Biden / Kamala Harris

• 2019: Greta Thunberg

• 2018: Journalists facing persecution

• 2017: The #MeToo movement

• 2016: Donald Trump

• 2015: Angela Merkel

Despite much griping online (Why not Biden? Or Trump? Or Netanyahu?), Time was right to pick Taylor Swift. The simple fact is that, in the last several months, Swift has become more popular than any political figure, including President Biden, as reflected by Google Trends data from the past year.

This is a new development. Biden outpaced Swift during the first year of his presidency, before entering into roughly equal footing. Then around October of last year, Swift surpassed him for good.

While Swift’s music isn’t for me, it’s easy to see why it’s resonating with people so much this year especially: it’s almost an exact counterpoint to our political climate. Whereas shambling corpses dominate both political parties — from 81-year-old Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who can’t stop freezing up in public, to Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein who died in office at age 90 — millennial Taylor Swift doesn’t just embody youth, that’s her audience as well. Put our top political leaders in the same room with her, give her a shotgun, and it would look exactly like a zombie movie!

I won’t bother to go over the mountains of polling data that shows young people are deeply unhappy with the political system. Consider their unprecedented rejection of the Washington consensus on Israel; or compare Biden’s polling numbers with people under 35 to Obama’s. Given the discontent, is it any surprise that when someone speaks to the youth, they listen?

I recently asked a friend why Taylor Swift commanded such a devout following. (I put it a bit more flippantly, asking why Taylor Swift is the Hassan Nasrallah of young white women.) His answer was insightful.

“As the father of two such women, who the fuck else are they going to look up to? Hillary Clinton?” he replied.

Popular figures today aren’t politicians, they’re entertainers like Dolly Parton, who wields the gold standard of power: the power to inspire.

Until the political system can learn how to do that, get used to a lot more articles about plummeting youth participation in politics. And when you look at what’s on offer, can you blame ‘em, Jack?