A masterclass in getting your attention, starring Sydney Sweeney

Does it matter how Sydney Sweeney voted in the last US election, and the one before that? Should I care? Should you? Should we? Should I start buying clothes from American Eagle, a brand I’d never heard of until last week? Should you boycott it? Should we take a brave stand and refuse to visit any of their stores, which shouldn’t be too hard given that there aren’t any left in the UK? Does any of it matter?

The actress recently filmed an ad for the brand, which was released last month. What you need to know is that she’s blonde, she has blue eyes and a cracking rack, and the slogan played on the fact that (good) “jeans” and “genes” sound the same. Sydney Sweeney has both, apparently. That’s what the American public was told, and it was expected to respond by buying more cheap denim.

There is a world in which neither you nor I ever heard about this ad, being the Europeans that we are. What a beautiful world that is! What a thought to cherish! Sadly, it isn’t the world we live in, and instead we have had to deal with the press churning out inch after inch of outraged, amused and pointless words on the topic.

According to the people tasked with keeping us informed, we don’t know if Sweeney knew the ad was a fascist dogwhistle, and we don’t know if people are right to worry about whether it was, but we do know that, somehow, it’s bad for liberals and progressives, and shows that Donald Trump has won against the woke – yadda, yadda.

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Now, at risk of stating the obvious: there is nothing all that special about the actress. She looks good, as do many people who do her job, and she sometimes does things in order to earn a lot of money, which is something famous people have been known to dabble in. The original controversy about the ad isn’t all that interesting either.

Instead, what’s worth thinking about is just how those events spun out of control. It isn’t hard to imagine a world in which, say, a handful of people on social media took exception to the slogan, given the current political context and Sweeney’s pale skin, blue eyes and blonde hair. Whether they were right or wrong to do so is irrelevant: here, we merely care that they did so.

Similarly, because of the nature of algorithmic social media, it shouldn’t be a surprise that those views ended up being seen by people who disagreed. What should give us pause, however, is the speed with which establishment conservatives, on both sides of the Atlantic, managed to turn it into a bona fide political issue.

Within around a day, what could and should have stayed hidden within the confines of the internet had made its way to television and radio channels, and every single outlet seeking clicks. Suddenly, the wokesters had gone mad, and sought to cancel a hot young woman, all for the mere crime of selling some trousers. Aren’t they tedious? Wouldn’t it be hell to be ruled by them? What does Kamala make of it all?

It was once argued that social media would be a force for good as it sought to lift up previously marginalised voices, but the present doesn’t seem to have lived up to that hypothesis. What seems to have happened is that right-wing populists, never ashamed to lie and cheat to get their way, managed to entirely manipulate the attention economy to suit their own political ends.

Somehow everything LeninBoy420 posts on X should be addressed by establishment Democrats or, on this side of the pond, some Labour spokesperson. Meanwhile, anything happening on the right can and will be treated as an isolated incident, barely worth bringing up. This is a major issue, as whatever gets discussed in politics is often just as important as whatever sides people happen to take on said issue.

Controlling the narrative isn’t everything, but it can get you a hell of a long way. The left and the centre have now spent a long time figuring out where they stand on this or that topic, and ought to focus on how to drag the discourse to their comfort zone for once. We’ll just be stuck talking about insipid, pointless denim ads forever otherwise.