The Bluestocking, vol 326: Millennial cringe and Brown M&Ms
For every Karen we lose, we’re going to win a Jamal and an Enrique
Happy Friday!
There was simply too much news last week—the election was such a vast turnover of names and faces that it took me several days to absorb fully what had happened. The first time someone not called Ian Paisley has been the MP for North Antrim since 1970! The fall of arch-NIMBY Theresa Villiers! It took me three days to realise that one of my university friends was now an MP, embarrassingly (I had expected him to lose). Even now I’m still finding people that I knew as policy wonks and trade union officials in the 2010s are now in the Commons.
If you consumed all the election night TV but are still hungry for more trivia, this week’s Page 94 podcast has you covered. We talked a little bit about how unlikely it would be that Reform would make it to the end of the parliament intact, and sure enough—Ben Habib has already been told by Nigel Farage that his services as deputy leader are no longer required. “I have long held concerns about the control of the party and the decision making processes,” Habib wrote on X, catching him up with anyone who has followed Nigel Farage’s various electoral vehicles over the years.
Elsewhere, the pro-Gaza candidate who ran Jess Phillips a close match in Birmingham Yardley has decided that . . . er, he is just going to act like he won? He put “MP” in his X handle (since removed) and started doing grand tweets about his “constituents”. Shocked to see that someone who would join a party led by George Galloway would demonstrate poor judgement. (Incidentally, has anyone seen Galloway? He’s gone awfully quiet.)
My favourite “small party problems” story of the week, however, was the Green co-leader Adrian Ramsey opposing a scheme to put pylons across his constituency, which would carry electricity generated by offshore wind in Essex. (He wants much more expensive buried cables instead.) What do we want? Net Zero! When do we want it? After “a pause while the other options are considered”!
Helen
PS. I also did the Today podcast this week, allowing Amol Rajan to out himself as a Bluestocking reader. (He said it assuaged his guilt at not reading the New Yorker.) He wasn’t the only one: I discovered this week that Count Binface, who has a Substack, is also a Bluestockinger. As are 22,000 other people and counting.
The Millennial Cringe of Taylor Swift (The Atlantic, gift link)
The entire experience was—and I say this with love—one of the dorkiest things I have seen in my entire life. Let us pray that Ron DeSantis never hears that academics are delivering papers with titles like “Puurrfecting the Swift Brand and Feline Fandom in Taylor Swift Advertising Spots,” or he would start a full-blown campaign to defund the universities. But everyone here got the joke—the new field of Swift studies is both serious business and self-consciously awkward fun. Dorkiness is, after all, the core of Swift’s appeal.
What makes Swift the perfect artist for a media-saturated, overanalyzed culture is her ability to absorb painful breakups, tabloid headlines, industry sneers, fan backlashes, being upstaged by Kanye West, and losing control of her masters to Scooter Braun—and then turn these knock-backs into hit singles. This superpower of reversal is never more apparent than when someone tries to argue that Swift is uncool. Of course she is. She has written a lot of songs about it.
It’s me, hi, attending an academic conference on Taylor Swift and then seeing her live at Anfield. Along the way, I answer the question: why is she the biggest artist in the world right now?
I Was Wrong About Biden (Slow Boring, Substack)
What makes this all so hard is that a lot of the relevant facts here are like the rabbit-duck illusion. There were tons of data points that, if you looked at them the way the majority of the public was looking at them even before the debate, point to the idea that Biden is too old. Most people have been seeing the duck all along. But I was seeing the rabbit.
What does the rabbit look like? It looked like a president who delivered a strong State of the Union. And sat for a long interview with Howard Stern. And did an hour on the SmartLess podcast. Biden has been zipping around the world for various foreign summits and meeting with world leaders. Does he maintain a lighter schedule than most presidents? Yes, but so did Donald Trump. Is he a bit more teleprompter-bound than I would have liked? Absolutely. But the State of the Union, again, leant credence to my rabbit view of this. Heckling from backbench Republicans forced him to go off script and while doing so he used the term “illegals.” That’s a no-no in contemporary progressive politics, but would be second nature to a 1990s Democrat like Biden.
My rabbit view of the whole situation was that Biden’s team was excessively worried about this kind of thing (rather than defend his choice of words, staff seemed to apologize for it and the president himself backed off that language). When a candidate speaks off the cuff frequently, they naturally wind up saying things that a speechwriter wouldn’t have written. In Biden’s case, this sometimes opened up a gap between his personal old guy instincts and contemporary progressive language politics. I thought the smart play would be to put Biden out there more, to “let Biden be Biden,” and to have the staff back up his authentic instincts rather than try to make him sound like a thirty-something Yale Law School graduate.
After the debate, though, I’m seeing the duck.
*
Matt Yglesias dunked on me when I wrote about Biden’s age being a problem in February, so I was prepared to enjoy this piece in a high-handed, told-you-so-idiot kind of way. But actually it’s just a very good, honest explanation of how a person can succumb to faulty thinking, which happens to all of us. Boo.
Chaser: One of the things that threw liberal journalists off, in my opinion, is that Donald Trump’s campaign, and its network of allied influencers, was pushing “senile Joe Biden” so hard. I think some people therefore assumed it was essentially fake news—another hyped-up nothingburger like Hillary Clinton’s emails.
The weirder truth appears to be that the Trump campaign was right, and it has been almost too successful in persuading Americans that Biden is too old. Team Trump is now panicking that the Democrats might replace him, at which point its winning electoral strategy is torn to shreds.
My colleague Tim Alberta has spent months following the Trump campaign, and had a frontrow seat at the belated freakout over this realisation (Atlantic, gift link). That piece is also full of other juicy nuggets: 25 cents on every dollar Trump has raised has gone to his legal costs; his iPad playlist for Mar A Lago goes from Pavarotti to Axl Rose; the Trump campaign thinks there are only four battleground states (Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). They are now focused on winning Black and Latino young men, reasoning that suburban white women are far less likely to be swing voters this time because of their disgust with abortion restrictions. One Trump ally puts it like this: “For every Karen we lose, we’re going to win a Jamal and an Enrique.” Charming.
Quick Links
“The unhappy implication is that Labour has been writing policy without listening to the people affected.” Sarah Ditum’s piece on women and gender has a nice namecheck for my Brown M&M Theory of Politics: small, otherwise insignificant details can tell you whether a politician or party is really on top of an issue (Unherd).
“Then Justice Secretary Chris Grayling, who is high up in the list of the least competent people to be given high office in British history, decided to partially outsource the service to the private sector.” Sam Freedman’s new book, Failed State, is out this week. In this extract, he considers the limits of outsourcing—trying to use market principles in services, such as children’s care homes and the probation service, where they are simply not appropriate (Comment is Freed, Substack).
“There is a way to get a test faster – on the black market. Dozens of businesses offer fast-track tests, advertised through WhatsApp groups, websites and driving schools. The array of dates on offer is staggering. Fees range from £120 to £350 for tests that should cost £62.” How scammers took over the driving test market (Guardian).
New live event: I’m talking to Tim Minchin about his new book of life advice at the Brighton Dome on September 3. Tim is a horrific combination of extremely funny, extremely talented and extremely smart, and is ageing disgustingly well, so he is one of the few people whose life advice is worth taking. Tickets are on sale now. In celebration of this, please enjoy Ralph Steadman’s typically deranged cartoon of Tim, from when I interviewed him for the NS:
See you next time!
The utter hypocrisy of Adrian Ramsey is astounding. The bright side of this is that the Green Nimby is never going to be able to preach at anyone ever again as every time he opens his mouth he will have this thrown in his face.
There is another and more serious point. He and others who airily suggest the burying of these cables have little or no idea of what it involves. Apart from the cost, which is between 4 and 20 times that of overhead cables, is the environmental cost. Anyone who thinks that once buried it is a case of out of sight, out of mind couldn't be more wrong. The burying of these cables involves a swathe of land which is, obviously, the full length of the cable run and is as wide as major road. Once finished the surface must be kept clear,no trees for example and the site must be accessible to vehicles.
Another point is that wherever joints are needed in the cable run, and keeping in mind that we are talking of very high voltage, the joints must be made in substantial buildings on the surface.
Compared with this the overhead option is much more attractive with the loss of land restricted to the concrete bases of the pylons and no restrictions on the use of the land under the cable run.
These Nimby objections have a long history, the canals the railways, the arterial roads and the motorways were all subject to the same objections. The Romans probably had the same problem when they built their roads and Hadrian's wall.
Come to think of it Ramsey's objection could be labelled - Adrian's Wail.
Just found your Substack recently. Definitely one of my favorite finds of the year. Thank you for all that you do!