Taylor Swift’s remarkable commencement speech urged young people to be grateful and fix themselves instead of the world.
Swift’s remarkable commencement speech urged young people to be grateful and fix themselves instead of the world.
T aylor Swift may prove to be as wise as she is talented, and since she’s one of the great pop artists of this century, that is saying something. This week, she gave the graduating class of NYU a rousing, funny, thoughtful, and thematically perfect commencement speech in Yankee Stadium. The speech is notable not only for what Swift said, but for what she didn’t say.
The TL;DR: Everybody makes mistakes. Be grateful, especially to your parents. Be enthusiastic when others are nihilistic. Focus on being a better person, instead of trying to make the world wobble on its axis. Don’t blow up things that work.
As is true of many a progressive Democrat, Swift harbors an outlook that is more conservative than she knows. I encourage you to read the whole speech, but here’s a representative slice.
There will be times in life when you need to stand up for yourself. Times when the right thing is to back down and apologize. Times when the right thing is to fight, times when the right thing is to turn and run. Times to hold on with all you have and times to let go with grace. Sometimes the right thing to do is to throw out the old schools of thought in the name of progress and reform. Sometimes the right thing to do is to listen to the wisdom of those who have come before us. How will you know what the right choice is in these crucial moments? You won’t.
Follow-your-heart, trust-your gut Romanticism tends to infest these speeches. But Swift suggests that if we don’t know how this or that revolutionary idea is going to play out, let’s consider it carefully before we change anything at all.
The attitude is antithetical to Millenarian thinking but also to the progressive approach to culture, policy, and civilization: Everything is poisoned, everything needs to be changed, it needs to be changed right now, and if the change doesn’t work out the way we want, we’ll just change it again. The epistemological modesty Swift espouses is one of the foundations of conservatism. Here’s another: gratitude.
Someone read stories to you and taught you to dream and offered up some moral code of right and wrong for you to try and live by . . . And maybe they didn’t do it perfectly. No one ever can. Maybe they aren’t with us anymore, and in that case I hope you’ll remember them today. If they are here in this stadium, I hope you’ll find your own way to express your gratitude for all the steps and missteps that have led us to this common destination.
Gratitude today risks becoming a dead language among young people. The early 20s have been an age of virulent ingratitude among America’s young — knocking down statues, trashing the Founders, denying that they grew up in some of the best years experienced by the best country that exists. Swift’s words suggest a rejection of mindless iconoclasm, a renewal of preexisting principles — a pop counter-reformation.
Instead of telling the graduates, as many commencement speakers do, that grownups have ruined everything and hence it falls to youth — with all of its vast knowledge and infallible instincts — to fix it all, Swift reflected on her own flaws and explained to the graduates that they are flawed too. Probably very flawed. Behold these truth bombs:
In your life, you will inevitably misspeak, trust the wrong people, under-react, overreact, hurt the people who didn’t deserve it, overthink, not think at all, self sabotage, create a reality where only your experience exists, ruin perfectly good moments for yourself and others, deny any wrongdoing, not take the steps to make it right, feel very guilty, let the guilt eat at you, hit rock bottom, finally address the pain you caused, try to do better next time, rinse, repeat. And I’m not gonna lie, these mistakes will cause you to lose things.
Daring stuff. Instead of promising open vistas and joyous revolutions, Swift provides the secular version of a sermon about the certainty of sin.
Compare her groundedness to, say, Hillary Clinton’s generation-defining speech delivered to her Wellesley class in 1969, in another age of angry ferment. Then Hillary Rodham, she urged her fellow Boomers to “practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible,” said that “our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic assumptions underlying our education,” issued a brief plug for mind-altering substances (“We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living”), claimed that “to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation,” and quoted a poem to the effect that we must “understand that limitations no longer exist.” Year Zero was here: Cue the Age of Aquarius.
Swift, though, ignored all the trendy buzzwords we are always being told constitute the central problems facing youth today — “rape culture,” “toxic masculinity,” “systemic racism.” She didn’t warn about climate change or the supposed scourge of inequality. She didn’t mention Roe v. Wade. By not pushing any kind of political agenda, she suggested, accurately, that politics ought not be central to a young person’s formation.
The speech amounted to a diss-track response to yesterday’s biggest hit single: the loud buzz of moaning. The historical context of her address is four years of exhausting but ultimately irrelevant youth-led #Resistance, concurrent with an unprecedented obsession with male sexual misbehavior concurrent with and succeeded by a febrile imperative to throw public tantrums about racial injustice that cost dozens of lives and billions in property damage while producing nothing good whatsoever.
All of this was heaped on top of incessant fulmination about how inequality and climate change are existential threats to everything we know. And the whole dismal, clanging, tuneless anti-symphony played out in the dark, chilly void that was the hysterical draconianism of the American Covid response, which among other moral errors amounted to a sustained campaign of psychological abuse of young people in general and college students in particular. NYU graduates just spent two years being tormented by idiotic and useless regulations in the name of the farcically unachievable goal of stamping out a highly contagious airborne virus.
Among young people, Swift is a thought leader. Her words matter, and she delivered them to exactly the right audience, at exactly the right time. She rebuked everything young people are being told these days and urged them to get back to what matters: Welcome to the truth, it’s been waiting for you.