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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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Seriously people, how hard is it to get Beyonce to perform?

As hard as Beyonce wants it to be. She sets her own price.

I'm curious if it's genuinely a matter of price. The Harris campaign is rolling in dough, and spending it in much worse ways. If it were worries about getting tied to a sinking ship, the endorsement is enough of an albatross.

My first thought is that there's some process limitations that make it hard to get done so quickly. There's reasons charity concerts after disasters often take the better part of a month if not months to assemble: planning properly for a 10k+ person assembly is a nightmare, and converting one type of assembly into another doesn't buy anywhere near the sort of stability you'd hope for.

But I have seen that sorta thing move faster before, and Harris (surrogates) have been motioning around it as long as there's been a Harris campaign. So I dunno.

I think it comes down to Beyonce doesn't want to do it.

Why? I don't know. Speculation? They don't see themselves as circus clowns for whatever the Democratic candidate of the day is. They truly believe in themselves as black royalty. (Which others, like the NFL, seem to agree with)

When it comes to the black elite, it's them and...people allied to them. There's no hostile Elon Musk-style billionaires on the other side. They're the top of the layer cake and have a monopoly on "celebrities who can mobilize black voters" or, more cynically, "celebrities white female staffers believe can mobilize black voters".

They might be willing to take a somewhat deferential stance towards Barack Obama, but he actually was the first black president and actually did win his elections before retiring to make enough money to be in their tax bracket. He can be primus inter pares.

Kamala Harris is no Obama.

Beyonce doesn't actually need to dance around for her and it's somewhat demeaning for there to be an expectation that she has to (for a person that doesn't even deign to give interviews anymore, so certain is she in her cultural cachet) so Kamala can salvage a campaign event. She's Queen Bey after all, her laying hands on Kamala should achieve the goal of telling her people who to vote for. She did Kamala - and the Democrats - a favor already.

There's nothing odd about this: Anne Hathaway and Scarlett Johannsen support Democrats but don't have to do soliloquys for whoever the Democrats randomly picked to lead them. They give an endorsement and the party is happy to get that much.

Leave that the dancing bear behavior to the Meg Thee Stallions of the world. She's still hungry and climbing the ladder.

This is kinda off the wall, but I'm wondering if the local democrats didn't make enough problems to prevent Beyonce from performing? The Harris county democrats are at least partly(but not entirely) tied to/infiltrated by the state level GOP and it's entirely plausible that this is a cheap favor by democrats for Ted Cruz.

Sounds like her endorsement doesn’t mean much.