Taylor Swift, poet laureate of girls, has a new boyfriend. Anyone who has an internet connection and eyes will have clocked this. She is in a relationship with Travis Kelce, an American football hero who was already quite famous as tight-end for the Kansas City Chiefs. When Swift started turning up at his games, he got much, much more famous.

Footage of the pop star delightedly hugging and kissing Kelce as he won a recent match, catapulting him to the Super Bowl in a fortnight’s time, went viral last week. So did right-wing conspiracy theories, aired breezily on Fox News, about Swift being a Pentagon-planted “asset” infiltrating America’s beloved game.

Images and footage of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce kissing have gone viral. Credit: AP

Cue a new wave of nasty right-wing trolling of Swift – yet another dire measure of the bogusness of the MAGA Republicans. They fear Swift because she is enormously popular and has endorsed Democrat Party candidates. Polling shows nearly 20 per cent of voters would be influenced by which candidate she endorses. She’s an incredible songwriter; she also has the power to impact elections.

The political weaponisation of Swift’s private life is indicative of the increasing ideological polarisation of the United States; polarisation which is radiating outwards to the rest of the globe (with some eager encouragement from self-interested politicians).

Football and love – two solid sources of human happiness – are turned into political battlefields, injected with misinformation and vitriol. For those of us who like to win, it is depressing.

And it comes as some pundits express anxiety about the new political divide opening up in younger generations. Research from across the globe shows today’s under-30s are pulling apart, politically, along gender lines, and one Washington Post editorial from last year worried that this might hasten the collapse of marriage as an institution.

The editorial cited research showing that since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the percentage of 18- to 30-year-old single women who identify as liberal increased from 20 to 32 per cent. Young men have not become more liberal – if anything, they have become more conservative.

“In another era, political or ideological differences might have had less impact on marriage rates,” the editorial stated. But politics was becoming more central to a person’s sense of their own identity, and “this mismatch will mean someone will have to compromise”.