Can Taylor Swift save U.S. democracy if Joe Biden can’t? Here’s an idea for 2024.

You’ve probably heard it a gazillion times already: Democracy is on the ballot in the 2024 U.S. election, with a showdown between President Joe Biden, aging defender of the American Experiment, and Donald Trump, who has essentially promised a dictatorship that will punish his political enemies, dismantle the federal government, and create a war posture at the border.

It’s a dire situation, yet I’m starting to think it’s overly optimistic. Is American democracy even going to make it until 2024? Or even through this week?

On Capitol Hill, a small clique of extremist right-wing House members is on the brink of shutting down the federal government by next weekend — for no reason except the nihilistic thrill of it all. In Republican statehouses from Madison, Wisc., to Raleigh, N.C., that critics have dubbed the “laboratories of autocracy,” lawmakers are using and abusing their powers to remove noncompliant election officials ahead of 2024 or to oust democratically elected judges and prosecutors. Instead of using a new election cycle to forge a clean break from an ex-president facing federal and state charges for trying to subvert the 2020 vote count, Republicans are rallying behind Donald Trump even as he suggests a respected Joint Chiefs of Staff general should maybe be executed.

The conventional wisdom is that 2024 should be teed up for the Democrats, except that there is nothing conventional about the state of American politics as the nation limps deeper into our newish millennium. Most nationwide polls show Trump — architect of that failed coup, with his 91 felony counts — in a dead heat with Biden, or even winning by a point or two (or 10, in what the pollsters admit is an “outlier”), which is even more problematic when you remember the GOP edge in the Electoral College.

What gives? Some of it is politics, with Biden facing problems — higher prices, even as inflation has cooled considerably, and a flood of refugees — that would vex any incumbent. But the bigger problem is that the Democratic brand is too toxic for too many voters. The reality is that the optics of the party’s gerontocracy — the now-80 and sometimes mush-mouthed Biden would be 86 at the end of a second term, and older stalwarts like Nancy Pelosi or Dianne Feinstein won’t step aside — puts off younger voters increasingly angry about what Dems haven’t accomplished on issues like the cost of rent or college. Too many might stay home on the night of Nov. 3, 2024 — and wake up on the road to fascism.

What a mess. Who can save us?

I’m thinking Taylor Swift.

OK, hear me out. No, I’m not suggesting that the Democrats dump Biden and replace him on the ticket with America’s reigning queen of pop — even though technically, she’d be eligible to serve as America’s 47th president after she turns 35 on Dec. 13, 2024. I don’t think Swift is ready for the Oval Office; heck, she might sic the U.S. Justice Department on a few of her ex-boyfriends. But this Berks County native has already shown she understands the stakes next fall — and has the power to do something about it.

On Tuesday — National Voter Registration Day — the now-Nashville-based singer posted a plea to her 272 million Instagram followers to sign up for the ballot, triggering a sizable response. “I’ve been so lucky to see so many of you guys at my U.S. shows recently. I’ve heard you raise your voices, and I know how powerful they are,” Swift wrote. “Make sure you’re ready to use them in our elections this year!” The group Vote.org posted its biggest day since the heated 2020 election, with many of the 35,000 new voters coming not long after the singer hit the “send” button.

The Swift maneuver was very much in line with something I’ve been thinking about lately. America needs something a lot bigger than our corrupted political parties if we’re going to stop this slide into authoritarianism. I’ve said in the past that the Trump personality cult has turned the GOP into an antidemocratic movement, not a political party. I now believe that defeating this MAGA cult will require not just a countermovement, but a mass movement that saves our politics by transcending politics — led by the best and brightest of pop culture and moral virtue.

Call it the Democracy League or the Fight For Our Freedom — anything that will help the wider and too-often apathetic public see that what’s happened in 14 months is a clash between two diametrically opposed philosophies. And that the only choice is working with a flawed democracy under the Democratic Party to fight for a better America, or surrender hope under authoritarians who reject the nation’s founding principles.

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Make saving the country both vital and cool. Make Swift the honorary chair — a queen has more power than a president, last time I checked — and go out and enlist LeBron James, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Lady Gaga, Patrick Mahomes, Simone Biles, Bruce Springsteen, America Ferrera, the Rev. William Barber, Laverne Cox … I’m throwing out names, but I’m talking about the nation’s most respected poets and scientists and preachers and more.

It need not be overtly partisan. In fact, it shouldn’t be. We need the most popular and listened-to Americans doing what Swift did last Tuesday — talking about the importance of the ballot box, and the horrors of what will happen if the right to vote is taken away from us. A Democracy League could make it clear that when a majority of the electorate is well-informed and shows up at the polls, the human rights supported by a clear majority of Americans — reproductive rights, for example — will also be saved.

Other people are thinking along similar lines, sort of. Just last week, a group of military veterans — point person Amy McGrath, the Kentucky Air Force pilot behind a failed 2020 campaign against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — launched a bipartisan campaign called Operation Saving Democracy to stop Trump’s MAGA movement in 2024, playing up the threats to national security. That’s helpful, but I wonder if the “national security” pitch is going to resonate with the kind of young or alienated voter — many believe, correctly, that America spends way too much on the Pentagon — needed to actually save democracy in 2024. We need to be thinking much bigger and bolder.

My hope is that a pro-democracy mass movement could offer a reality-based slap in the face to an electorate that needs to understand the real choices here before it’s too late. Sure, Biden is a doddering grandpa on stage who might say the wrong word or even wander off the stage, but he is inarticulating the values of a pro-democracy, pro-middle class, anti-climate change government, with a cadre of smart aides who’ll implement whatever he was trying to say. A President Trump 47 won’t stutter and will be very easy to understand when he’s stuffing the Pentagon with loyalist generals who won’t stop his next coup, or ignoring floods and wildfires to turn the fossil fuel spigot wide open.

Let’s get even more candid. So you’re concerned that an 80-something Biden won’t make it through his second term, either through early retirement or death? His replacement would be Vice President Kamala Harris, who revealed herself as a not-great politician when she ineptly ran for the White House in 2020. So would you prefer an occasionally cringeworthy President Harris filling the next U.S. Supreme Court vacancy with a justice who supports reproductive and LGBTQ and workers’ rights, or to have a cocky second President Trump naming the second Brett Kavanaugh?

These are the stakes.

Politics 101 says the Democratic Party is the vessel for making this argument. But the reality is that millions of Americans — the young and the disaffected — won’t listen to the Democratic Party in 2024, but they might listen to Coco Gauff or Steph Curry ... or Taylor Swift. Think that’s silly? How many of you are only reading this column because Swift was in the headline and the main photograph? The message that Americans need to hear about democracy requires the arena-rock decibels of “The Eras Tour,” not the low-volume mumbling of POTUS 46.

Please get the Democracy League cranked up, preferably today. Start planning the Woodstock-sized concerts and start filming the celebrity-laden TV ads that will get not thousands but millions of young people to register over the next 12 months. From the basketball court to the poetry slam, make it clear that our fundamental rights — to cast a vote, or read a book, or control our own body — are on the line. I guess if I’m going to write about Taylor Swift, I’m supposed to end with some pun about how Biden and the Democrats need to shake it off, but America is past the point of dad jokes. The stakes are getting way too high.

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