Taylor Swift: queen of the normies?
Politicos used to know how to take the temperature of the nation. They could talk to their cab driver. They could sidle up to the man fixing their toilet. There was the Iowa farmer, the diner waitress. There was Walter Cronkite. Now there is only Taylor Swift. In a society that increasingly consists of mutually unintelligible niches – like multivolume works of Sonic the Hedgehog erotica or reenactments of the War of the Austrian Succession in Roblox – Swift can still fill huge arenas at short notice. Her fans cut across every social and economic class. To a political nation that's often baffled by this new society, Swift has become the great barometer.
