If you happened to be driving along the 405 freeway in Los Angeles on October 22, you may have come across the ugly sight of a group of men holding their arms out in Nazi salutes. Draped along the overpass where they were gathered was a banner. "Kanye was right about the Jews," it read.
By now, the antisemitic remarks by rapper Ye, also known as Kanye West, have been well-documented. They rightly provoked a backlash and the termination of his sponsorship deal with Adidas.
But for the men on the overpass, none of that mattered. Their wildly conspiratorial voices had been amplified. Just weeks before Americans were due to go to the polls to vote in midterm elections, one of the most influential musicians of our time had endorsed their campaign of hate.
Politics and celebrity
The line between politics and celebrity has never been tightly drawn. In the United States, success in both domains has always relied on a commodifiable personality, a voice that commands to be heard. The rise of populism and the advent of mass media have made the boundaries even less distinct.
Ye is a worst-case example, but he is certainly not the only celebrity to have gained recent attention for identifying with a cause. A week before the men gathered on the overpass, singer Britney Spears published a simple tweet.
The simple message with no rallying cry did not escape the attention of Iranian state media, which reminded their English-language Twitter followers that Spears had spent years under her father's conservatorship due to mental health problems.
By pointing out that Spears' life had been ruled by her father, they were tacitly suggesting an equivalence between the systemic oppression of women in Iran and the tragedy of one American celebrity at the hands of her controlling father.
While Spears can be lauded for advocating for the women of Iran, her tweet is unlikely to have had any tangible effect beyond, perhaps, boosting morale for the milliseconds it appeared in her followers' feeds. Her reach may have been better employed by supporting a particular fundraising campaign or appealing for a concrete policy response from world leaders.
A space free of labels
Celebrities, unlike politicians, can choose to reside in a space gloriously free of labels. They need not define themselves as right or left-wing, as conservative or a liberal, as fundamentalist or progressive. Instead, they can champion causes according to their conscience, blissfully indifferent about whether it fits into a proscribed agenda. This is their best shot at having a positive impact.
No one does this better than Dolly Parton. For decades, pundits have been speculating about whether the country music legend is more likely to be a Republican or a Democrat. "I don`t really like getting up on TV and saying political things," she told The Guardian newspaper in 2019, defending herself for not joining co-stars in condemning former President Donald Trump. "When I'm out there, if all else fails, I just do a boob joke."
Parton's obsession with her own fake boobs is an act of political brilliance. Over the years, while primetime TV audiences were treated to droll anecdotes about her self-proclaimed "cheap" look, tens of millions of books were landing every month on the doorsteps of children in the US and beyond thanks to her Imagination Library initiative, a tribute to Parton's father who never learned to read.
Is the cause of literacy Republican or Democrat? Dolly Parton doesn't care. She just wants every child to have a bedtime story.
More recently, Parton donated a million dollars to fund research into a COVID-19 vaccine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Months later, when she went to get the Moderna shot that she had helped fund, she performed an adapted version of her hit song "Jolene" featuring the lyrics: "Vaccine, vaccine, I`m begging of you please don't hesitate. Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, 'cause once you're dead, then that's a bit too late."
Treading a fine line
To embrace a cause so fundamentally polarizing and to remain as uniformly adored as Dolly Parton is an extraordinary feat, one which is difficult to imagine many others pulling off. But her achievements rest on her insistence that she is not the story.
While others have been engaging in identity politics, Parton has been quietly molding society into better shape. How many lives might she have saved when she rolled up her sleeves and sang about a vaccine?
Fellow country music star and Nashville resident Taylor Swift has had a slightly different trajectory to her activism. For years, on the advice of record executives who feared a drop in sales, she — like Parton — refused to situate herself on one side of America's depressingly stark political divide.
That changed in 2018, when she endorsed a Democrat candidate in Tennessee, prompting then-President Donald Trump to announce he now liked her music 25% less. Since then, she has spoken out on causes including LGBTQ rights, gun control and systemic racism.
But her most tangible impact came from an Instagram post in which she urged her followers to register to vote. In the 24 hours after it appeared, the vote.org website recorded 65,000 new registrations — the kind of number that may be expected in an entire month. That same effect has been seen in this year's midterm elections, where celebrity campaigns have provided a huge boost to voter registration.
The lesson, if there is one, is that celebrities should keep their causes specific. Actor Matt Damon chose water. The nonprofit he founded in 2009, water.org, claims to have helped 50 million people access safe water or sanitation. Irish rock star Bono has been similarly single-minded and notably nonpartisan in his campaign for debt forgiveness and poverty reduction.
The idea that celebrities may have more power to influence society than politicians is rather uncomfortable. But even a cursory glance at the list of the most followed accounts on Twitter suggests it may indeed be the case. Former US President Barack Obama and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi make it into the top 10. The rest are celebrities from the world of music, sport and in the single case of Elon Musk, business. No news organization makes it into the top 10.
This need not be as depressing as it sounds. In a hyper-globalized, digital world where language is becoming more slippery and highly charged, those who choose to use their platforms to promote a specific cause rather than an ideological label have the power to instigate real change. Those, like Ye, who abuse their power deserve to see their reach decline.