“But it’s her most conservative album!” That was the reaction of a Taylor Swift-besotted friend when I complained, as a longtime Swift listener by daughterly proxy, about the coarseness of Swift’s “Life of a Showgirl.”
We’re both right: The latest exercise in Swiftiana combines bawdiness with a certain impulse toward conservatism, as the singer embraces suburban dreams of marriage and white-picket fences while rhapsodizing about her fiancé’s reproductive organ. In that sense it’s an appropriate text for the Trump era, when coarseness and right-wing politics have been married in a distinctive way, and also an opportunity to ponder whether that marriage can last beyond this presidency.
But before we indulge in that contemplation, a brief note to Swift fans: I am not saying that by acting excited about her impending nuptials, the Last Princess of Pop Culture has suddenly become a Trumpist or a reactionary.
What I am saying is that in the current cultural moment, however you run the polling, the impulse to elevate marriage and kids as core life goals is much stronger on the right than on the left, as are heteronormative life scripts and the actual practice of heterosexual marriage. So singing about how “when I said I don’t believe in marriage that was a lie,” or expressing a newfound desire to “have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you” — or for that matter, celebrating male endowment in a song called “Wood” — is inevitably conservative-coded, even if the singer undoubtedly voted for Kamala Harris. The progressive-feminist Swift fans melting down over this album’s messaging are overreacting — but their take is still directionally correct.
So now let’s consider how conservatism and coarseness fit together — because at the very least they share a coalition now. The portions of America that rebelled against progressivism and voted for Donald Trump include some of the country’s most religious precincts but also representatives of all kinds of varieties of libertinism, from raunchy bro-culture “Barstool conservatives” to the polyamory-curious libertarians of Silicon Valley. The Trump administration is stuffed with traditionally inclined Catholics and evangelicals, but its leader is a much-married heathen, his on-again-off-again Silicon Valley ally is a Promethean tycoon with a harem, and the public language of Trump-era conservatism defaults to the scatological without even a residue of puritanism.
And while the pious and hedonistic cultures of the right are somewhat separate in the real world, they entangle constantly online. The religious pronatalist who wants babies in lifelong companionate marriage shares a post-liberal ecosystem with the secular pronatalist who wants them by any means necessary, from polygamy to hatcheries. Likewise the would-be Calvinist patriarch and the would-be Andrew Tate disciple, the heterosexual e-girl flirting with Catholicism and the homoerotically inclined Nietzschean vitalist, and so on through the carnival.
Last year I wrote about the struggle on the left to fashion a new morality that balances the imperatives of sexual liberation with the desire for workable ethical frameworks and taboos. That struggle has been unsuccessful so far, yielding a strange progressive culture of safety-ism and sterility — and one fruit of its failure is a shift rightward by all kinds of different groups that feel stifled or alienated by a therapeutic progressive approach to sex.
But can the right do any better at fashioning a coherent 21st-century vision of sexual morality, one that makes room for all the different tendencies that it has recently absorbed? To some degree it plainly can’t: Like the deep tension between traditionalism and Silicon Valley transhumanism, the inherent conflict between conservative religion and post-sexual-revolution individualism will eventually divide factions currently united by their hostility to wokeness.
A conservative culture that experienced a sustained Christian revival, especially, would become a much more uncomfortable place for unconverted libertines. So one can easily imagine a future where the current sexual big tent on the right constricts, and anti-woke secularists who would have been social liberals and Clinton Democrats in the 1990s end up rejoining the center-left. Or, alternately, a future where the divide between Christian forms of conservatism and an explicitly post-religious right — vitalist or transhumanist, polygamist or hyper-libertarian — is conservatism’s clearest internal division, bigger than Reaganites versus populists or any other split.
But this prediction comes with two cautionary notes. First, a certain incoherence in cultures and coalitions can last a long time. The tension between feminist and Hefnerian visions of sexual liberation, for instance, was a lasting feature of social liberalism from the 1960s through the early 2000s, with each tendency remaining part of the same coalition because they were both arrayed against the old religious consensus. If progressivism made room for both Playboy and Ms. magazine for two generations, conservatism might make room for its traditionalists and its unwoke libertines for longer than you might expect.
Second, it is possible to have a culture that’s more traditionally oriented than contemporary America and also much raunchier and more ribald than, say, our Eisenhower-era past. Any reader of “The Canterbury Tales” or Shakespeare, for instance, knows that both medieval Europe’s age of faith and the Reformation’s age of zeal could be much less sexually inhibited than late-Victorian England or the early days of American suburbia. You can have a broad cultural orientation toward religion and fertility without having especially puritanical social norms; you can have fairly conservative norms around marriage and a lot of frank and bawdy realism about the myriad ways that eros gets expressed.
And really, as long as the internet exists, it’s impossible to imagine certain kinds of puritanism establishing themselves for very long — as the would-be inquisitors of wokeness discovered, to their cost. So any enduring revival of religion, any plausible era of neo-traditionalism, would necessarily have to find a way to coexist with public language and imagery that would make a censor blush.
But I’m afraid I’m still not playing “Wood” for my kids.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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