Sydney Sweeney has become the poster child of a predicted rightwing cultural domination. So why is no one watching her films?
I
was on a walk around my local area in London when I was stopped in my tracks by a young man sauntering past me, wearing stone-wash jeans, a pair of shades and a “Reagan-Bush ’84” T-shirt. He gave off an incredibly smug air but, to be fair, he did look good. It’s a nice T-shirt, not like those garish Reform-branded football kits, so I could see why it might be appealing. A quick search informed me that for gen-Z rightwingers in the US, it has become the “conservative take on a band shirt or the once-ubiquitous Che Guevara tee”.
That casual display of conservative aesthetics reminded me of something else too: a much discussed cover of New York magazine from earlier this year, after Trump 2.0’s inauguration, which showed young rightwingers celebrating as they “contemplate cultural domination”.
“Conservatism – as a cultural force, not just a political condition – is back in a real way for the first time since the 1980s,” the journalist Brock Colyar wrote. Perhaps, given the way the British and American cultural spheres seem more enmeshed than ever, it was only a matter of time before I happened upon a Republican T-shirt in my back yard.
