In his column on Sunday, Ross Douthat casts a gimlet eye toward Kanye West’s current rebranding, both as art and as politics.
I don’t pretend to know how sincerely the artist sometimes known as Yeezy is flirting with reaction — though I suspect Kanyean Trumpism will end up resembling the “fascism” adopted by David Bowie in his Thin White Duke days. But I do know that his flirtations, in which he’s hung out with the right’s own race hustlers, are not a breakthrough moment for conservatives in their eternal quest to make the black Republican more than just an eccentric and embattled species. Instead, a celebrity who may be doing performance art is exactly the African-American “supporter” the Trump-era right deserves.
Douthat pivots from this observation to a discussion of why Donald Trump’s rhetoric and personal racism have made it harder for the Republican Party to attract black voters, even as some larger trends may have opened up new opportunities for the party to do so. But I think it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider whether people from both parties overestimate the value of celebrity converts.
[Kanye West, alt-right darling]
There’s a difference between having fans and having constituents. Plenty of actors, musicians, athletes and writers have enthusiasts who go to their movies, buy their records, wear their jerseys and consume their novels. But not all of them are able to translate that excitement about their core products into something else.
Rihanna can get her fans to buy makeup from her Fenty Beauty line and lingerie from her forthcoming Savage X Fenty collection both because she has designed them to fill an unmet need — women of color have not always been able to find makeup and underwear that take their skin tones as the neutral — and because she has particular brand power. Writer Roxane Gay’s imprimatur can get an essay collection on the New York Times bestseller list. Oprah Winfrey can sell pretty much anything.
Moving product, though, is different from moving voters to the polls. It’s one thing to ask your fans to click over from their open Spotify browser tab to an e-commerce site and another altogether to ask them to get out of the house and pull a lever for a candidate. Some stars won’t even bother with the second request, worried it might interfere with their ability to make the far more personal profitable first. And other celebrities’ relationship with their fans simply isn’t rooted in a sense of shared values or real-world politics. When celebrities do venture into politics, their activism can be more of a brand-building exercise for stars interested in maintaining a general veneer of social relevance than a useful boost for candidates or causes.
There are obvious exceptions. J.K. Rowling has spent a reasonable part of her post-“Harry Potter” career talking politics, drawing on the messages about responsibility and complicity with evil at the heart of her most successful novels, and supporting the social programs that gave her the ability to write the books in the first place. Winfrey was a successful ambassador for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election because she has assumed a unique position in American public life as a quasi-religious figure of authority to the people who are most devoted to her.
One of the problems with the Republican Party’s celebrity outreach has often been that the famous people it can rustle up to speak on its behalf don’t have this kind of potential. When Scott Baio spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2016, he hadn’t had an acting credit in two years, and it had been more than two decades since his most substantial recent project, “Diagnosis Murder,” had been canceled. Stacey Dash, one of Trump’s highest-profile black celebrity endorsers, had been lingering in similar career stasis: Playing the mayor in “Sharknado 4: The 4th Awakens” isn’t so much meta as it is slightly depressing. For stars such as these, wading into politics is mostly about raising their own profiles.
West is obviously more famous and more successful than Baio or Dash. Like Rihanna, he’s made reasonably successful forays into fashion. And had he wanted to go into politics, he had a foundation, if a slim one, in his post-Hurricane Katrina remarks about President George W. Bush. But pursuing political influence always would have been a process for West — and that’s even if he decided to do so as the Democrat most casual observers might have assumed him to be.
The very tint of heresy that allows West to say that his current pivot shows that he’s a free thinker also makes it silly to expect that he’s going to be some sort of political Pied Piper, leading black voters back to the Republican Party. Claiming West as a red-pilled convert might allow certain segments of the right to crow about the power of their ideas. But for the rapper himself, being “an eccentric and embattled species” rather than a movement leader appears to be at least part of the branding exercise.
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