Republican senator Marsha Blackburn continued her long-running feud with Taylor Swift in a recent interview, warning that the pop star would be the “first victim” of the “Marxist” society she believes liberals are pushing for in America.
“Taylor Swift came after me in my 2018 campaign,” Ms Blackburn, the GOP senator from Tennessee, recently told the right-wing news site Breitbart. “But Taylor Swift would be the first victim of that because when you look at Marxist socialistic societies, they do not allow women to dress or sing or be on stage or to entertain or the type of music she would have. They don’t allow protection of private intellectual property rights.”
(Socialist nations indeed put certain limits on the type of artistic expression, but often robustly fund arts programmes featuring men and women.)
In 2018, Swift bucked convention in the tacit and often explicitly conservative world of country music and revealed her deep opposition to Ms Blackburn in a lengthy Instagram post, when she was running to be Tennessee’s first female senator. Though she was born in Pennsylvania, Ms Swift relocated to Nashville, Tennessee to pursue her music career and is often associated with the state.
“Her voting record in Congress appalls and terrifies me. These are not MY Tennessee values,” she wrote. In her 2020 Netflix documentary, Swift continued expressing her dismay, saying, “She gets to be the first female senator in Tennessee, and she’s Trump in a wig. She represents no female interests.”
For her part, the Tennessee senator thinks Swift and others are making country music too “woke,” even though the genre has a long history of protest songs and has roots in blues and folk music, both of which often comment on social conditions.
“When you talk about country music,” Ms Blackburn told Breitbart, “and I know the left is all out now and trying to change country music and make it woke … When I’m talking to my friends who are musicians and entertainers, I say, ‘If we have a socialistic government, if we have Marxism, you are going to be the first ones who will be cut off because the state would have to approve your music.’”
It’s unclear who or what exactly Ms Blackburn believes is going to bring about the imminent end of American capitalism. Even the most far-left American legislators like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders are advocating mostly for social democracy, and would be considered fairly mainstream politicians in many European countries.
