The Taylor Swift Effect is Slowly Eroding
The die is cast
“Disney inflicts a blow to DeSantis,” blared the NYTs this week, as the company whose stock price has deflated 27% since last August, announced the cancellation of a planned campus in Florida that was so unpopular inside Disney it helped get the previous CEO fired. Bob Chapek’s vision of spending $1 billion to relocate 2,000 “Imagineers” to Lake Nona was opposed by many of the employees targeted by the move, and was said to crush morale in the department as far back as October 2021. When Iger returned to Disney last year the Lake Nona project was one of the first things on the chopping block. But, with DeSantis set to announce his 2024 bid soon, Disney saw a good PR opportunity, and gave Trump sound bites in the process.
Before Taylor Swift was writing Stunning & Brave™ songs about “controversial” social issues five years after the Supreme Court codified them into law, she was oddly quiet. She was so quiet in fact that her silence was called “deafening.” It’s possible Swift took Michael Jordan’s approach that Republicans buy sneakers too, or maybe she didn’t want to alienate her Alt-Right worshipers (I would give her the benefit of the doubt on the last once since white supremacists are a vanishingly small market, but others have been circumspect in the past). During the 2016 election Swift was contrasted, disapprovingly, to all the other pop stars intent on the public knowing their every desire. In fact, she was still explaining her silence in 2019 (new Progressive™ music soon followed).
The Breitbart Doctrine states that politics is downstream from culture. Every political war starts with a cultural one, and “culture war” is just a term employed to try to discourage people on the right from entering the public square. However, if a public figure is presumed to be of the left, then silence is violence. The Taylor Swift Effect is a construct where the left publicly harangues corporations to support their policy preferences, while the right treats corporate entities with the sanctity of church and state separation. DeSantis blew all of that up.
For the sake of delicate sensibilities I won’t say what Draconian™ policy DeSantis enacted, only that I know from sitting with teachers that the media mischaracterization of it was very successful. I’ll also propose a truce of sorts for anyone who believes Actual Book Burning™ is happening in Florida: you can place any book in a classroom if you can read it and show pictures from it on the nightly news without violating FCC rules. Predictably, Disney was bullied into Taking a Stand™ on the issue, and DeSantis’ response was the company can’t use his state’s tax breaks to fund a campaign to undermine the will of the voters.
The Taylor Swift Effect is being undermined as player 2 has entered the game. Previously, the corporate calculus was quite easy: one party demagogues you until you say what they want you to say, and the other side leaves you alone. Here, Pascal’s logic would suffice. In May DeSantis signed a bill barring the use of ESG when investing public money, enshrining an idea that has permeated many GOP-led state houses. BlackRock has had billions of dollars in redemptions from state pensions over the ESG monicker, although they’ve surely come out ahead on that gravy train. The same people who previously worried about greenwashing now say greenhushing is an emerging problem, even blaming State Street for shrinking a climate change report and removing a reference to “systemic risk.”