FINALLY: Taylor Swift is Time’s person of the year.

Taylor Swift’s record-setting year just got a little bit bigger: She was named Time magazine’s person of the year, the first entertainer ever to be a solo honoree.

The big picture: Swift’s Era’s Tour was a national phenomenon, she dominated the charts, had multiple albums hit No. 1 in a single year, and released a blockbuster concert film to boot.

• Swift’s year ranks with the likes of the Beatles, which released three No. 1 albums in 1966, and Michael Jackson, who ruled over 1983 with “Thriller,” Axios’ Troy Smith notes.

Driving the news: Time’s Sam Lansky describes Swift in the person of the year cover story as “the last monoculture left in our stratified world.”

• “This was the year she perfected her craft — not just with her music, but in her position as the master storyteller of the modern era. The world, in turn, watched, clicked, cried, danced, sang along, swooned, caravanned to stadiums and movie theaters, let her work soundtrack their lives.”

• Swift also sat for a rare interview, telling Lansky: “I realized every record label was actively working to try to replace me,” she said, referencing the time around the 2009 VMAs when Kanye West interrupted her on stage during an award speech. “I thought instead, I’d replace myself first with a new me. It’s harder to hit a moving target.”

To be fair, Swift’s nomination is arguably a step up from 2006, when Time declared “you” were the person of the year, as Jonah Goldberg wrote at the time:

The intellectual flubber of Time’s decision is manifest on many levels. Though some argue that Time was patting the American people on the head for voting the way they wanted in the last election, the more obvious explanation is that Time’s editors didn’t want to offend anybody. “If you choose an individual, you have to justify how that person affected millions of people,” Richard Stengel, Time’s newly vintaged managing editor, told the Associated Press. “But if you choose millions of people, you don’t have to justify it to anyone.”

Well, isn’t that convenient. Heaven forbid a news editor do something controversial that would have to be defended on the merits. Spare the delicate flowers such hardship!

Stengel added that if Time had to choose a real person to be Person of the Year, it would likely have been Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “It just felt to me a little off selecting him,” Stengel said.

One might wonder if it felt “a little off” to past Time editors who awarded the Man of the Year award to Hitler in 1938 or to Stalin — twice, once in 1939 and again in 1942 — or to the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979.

But the answer is that it didn’t bother the old editors, not really. Because Time’s Man of the Year award was originally conceived as something other than the Mother of All Puff Pieces.

Time founder Henry Luce swam against the stream of Marxist determinism which held that history unfolded according to cold, impersonal forces. He believed individuals — i.e. great men and women — matter. He said the original award should go to the person “who most affected the news or our lives, for good or ill, this year.” That was the point of picking Charles Lindbergh as the first Man of the Year — because he, and he alone, seemed to be ushering in a New Age. Hitler was MOY in 1938 because he might have been ushering in a Dark Age. You are Person of the Year because the editors of Time want to live in a Feel-Good Age where everyone is empowered (hence Time’s rationalizations about the people-power of the Internet)*.

Of course, Time has punted many times before. For example, in 1988, beating the fierce competition, Earth was named “Planet of the Year.” No doubt that choice sounded very clever in the editorial-board meeting.

Time’s 2001 decision, naming Rudy Giuliani person of the year, was even more telling. This was a true profile-in-cowardice moment. There was no intellectually defensible standard for suggesting that the able mayor affected the news or our lives more than Osama bin Laden, who at the time seemed at least to be the Gavrilo Princip of the 21st century. (Princip was the fellow who launched World War I, which in turn launched World War II and the Cold War.)

The only reason not to give bin Laden the title Person of the Year — other than a purely commercial concern about newsstand sales — is that being Person of the Year has become a compliment. Sure, I suppose groups like the Shriners or the Knights of Columbus have always had their Persons of the Year, and they always meant it in a good way. Nonetheless, readers in 1938 and 1979 understood that Hitler and Khomeini weren’t being honored as humanitarians.

Similarly, given the ramifications of his attack, not least of which, seeing the enormity of anti-Semitism on the modern American left for the first time, Mohammed Deif, who planned Hamas’ 10/7 terrorist attack on an Israeli music festival would have been a likely shoe-in to be the 2023 Man of the Year. But Time magazine has spent the sixty years since Luce’s death becoming increasingly irrelevant. Why emerge from its torpor now?

*Because the “wrong” people are empowered by it these days, Al Gore is now having second thoughts about “inventing” the Internet: Al Gore Says Social Media Algorithms ‘Ought to be Banned’, Calls Them ‘Digital Equivalent of AR-15s.’