Let Fandom Swallow You Whole
or, modern politics is a carnival for sale
Before we get into today’s essay, I want to share a piece of political good news.
We’re seeing real movement to expansion of railroads and even the possibility of a high speed rail.
From the High Speed Rail Alliance: Here’s Why Amtrak’s New Borealis Train Matters.
Anyway, onto today’s essay. Also it looks like this may cut off in your email so you may need to click over to the site to read the whole thing.
When Paste Magazine published a negative review of Taylor Swift’s new album, her fans lost their minds. I found it curious that Paste would publish the review without a byline, but it began to make sense when the Swifties went on the hunt to dox the reviewer. They landed on the wrong person but they believed it strong enough to send her a bunch of death threats and swamp her with hate.
Also, that review has a very funny opening line:
Sylvia Plath did not stick her head in an oven for this!
Delicious. I love it.
K-Pop fans go bananas and swarm whenever someone deigns to mention that they don’t like K-Pop. Disney has some segment of its fans that are constantly melting down over something, whether it’s Star Wars or Marvel or the newest Disney Princess.
When John Mulaney got divorced from his wife, certain people felt personally betrayed and became vociferous fans of his ex-wife. Another way to say this is that they took sides in a divorce because they felt a stake and claim in it.
We all know this. We don’t need to be told. People grow so attached to toys and games and movies and whatever else that they seem willing to fistfight over it.
And this deranged freak shit was all easy to ignore when it was about comic book heroes or popstars you’ve never heard of, but it didn’t stay there.
It became everything, everywhere, all the time.
Most notably, it became the dominant way many people think about and interact with politics and politicians.
Sunday claimed a historic moment: Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the Presidential Primary. He did this threeish months before the election.
Some people are telling everyone that there’s no time to find a replacement but we’ve seen two elections this year in major western democracies that took less time than our primary so such concerns are largely an indictment of our political process, which lumbers along like a massive golem with a bottomless hunger for money. More on this below.
In the lead up to Biden announcing he was leaving the ticket, a war broke out between pundits. Some felt betrayed by the fact that someone could actually question Joe Biden.
In the weeks since Biden’s disastrous debate performance, many media people remained bullishly behind Biden. They lied to our faces, telling us that Biden was still sharp, that it was just a bad night. They pointed to the subsequent rallies and interviews where he looked like a man dying and told us that he was fine.
They told us that Biden was the only way forward and the only chance to beat Trump and save democracy.
When he stepped down, some people just absolutely lost it.
Van Jones appeared to cry on TV.
For a politician.
Never mind the reports coming out that he had been in bad shape for a long time and basically incapable of doing the job of being president.
When Biden stepped aside and threw his weight behind Kamala Harris, a lot of people went berserk for her. People who were leery of Biden immediately hopped on the wagon and went all in, donating however much money they felt was necessary to show that they’re a Good Person or a Good Democrat.
They posted about how Harris was the only way forward and the only chance to beat Trump and save Democracy.
I want to take a moment to drill down on this alleged moment that almost certainly didn’t happen. But let’s be charitable and just assume that this lady with a million followers is telling the truth.
What does it say about you as a parent that your 11 year old feels this invested in Joe Biden? And maybe this should be a whole separate essay about the ways we fuck up our kids, but I’ll just take comfort in the easy assumption that this lady is lying.
But it didn’t stop there.
Whatever you might think of Timothy Snyder as a historian and academic, can we not at least look at this and just feel depths of embarrassment previously unknown?
This is fandom behavior.
These are politicians. Our relationship to them is meant to be transactional. We invest them in power to do a service for all of us. We don’t need to fawn over them like demigods and kings.
I don’t know when this all began, when politics became a fandom for people addicted to the news, but I imagine it started when we first began to obsess over celebrity endorsements. It coalesced around President Obama when he became, essentially, a celebrity. He was friends with Jay Z and Beyonce!
Joe Biden became a meme!
And then, of course, an actual very famous B or even D-list celebrity became president and our politicians began behaving like social media influencers. Back then people would talk about politicians by comparing them to characters from Harry Potter. And I suppose that was the final canary in the coalmine.
Parasocial relationships formed with politicians that were previously kept only for Britney Spears and One Direction and other obscenely famous people. Now in the age of tiktok and youtube stars and thousands of reality TV shows churning out personalities made to be loved or hated, fandoms have become a normal state of most people’s lives.
And now this kind of relationship is everywhere and people behave as if real life is some fandom to be argued over, the be fought over, where there are good guys and bad guys, where life is straightforward and morality is legible.
We tie our personhood so deeply to some Brand or Celebrity or bit of cultural ephemera that it becomes all consuming and anyone who disagrees or isn’t gleefully jumping aboard is deemed an enemy. Within hours of Harris announcing her candidacy, I saw people threatening to block people for not being sufficiently supportive enough. Like they’re still in middle school, arguing about Xbox or Playstation.
And listen, you can be all in on Harris but don’t be surprised if Harris faces a tough election. She was such a weak candidate in 2020 that she dropped out almost immediately. Nothing in the last four years has made her seem like a stronger candidate, though she is currently polling better than Biden.
I’ll remind you that Biden looks like a man dying.
Inching ahead of him isn’t really the accomplishment we’re pretending it is.
What does she stand for? Who will she be as president? Will she continue the Biden Administration’s antitrust cases against Google, Facebook, and Amazon? Will she do something about immigration? Will she continue the war in Ukraine? Will she support Israel or Palestine? Will she do something about abortion? Will she do something about healthcare and housing costs?
What kind of government will we see with Harris?
For the curious, Matt Stoller wrote something about her history as a politician.
And for Jacobin, Branko Marcetic wrote about her history as well.
But what do most people think she stands for? What do most people think will be a key policy for her?
Who knows!
Doesn’t matter!
We’re part of the KHive, baby, and you better get on board or shut the fuck up.
But I promise you that you don’t have to be excited about Kamala Harris becoming the nominee. If you are, great! Be excited and happy!
But if you’re sitting there and wondering what the hubbub’s all about, just know that that is a very good question.
And since we skipped the whole primary, which is at least a wave towards general democratic processes, will we have an open convention where at least our representatives will be able to vote on who the next nominee will be?
Or will we just declare Harris the winner and carry on into November like a candidate didn’t just get shot in the fucking head, like the sitting president isn’t sundowning so don’t ask him anything after 4pm, like Harris isn’t widely disliked by the electorate?
Politics is reality TV for people who believe they’re too good for reality TV and we treat these developments the same way we treat surprises on the Bachelor or Survivor or The Real Housewives, with all the toxic parasocial madness that goes along with it.
And money is an important factor here in any US election, which is what makes it, as the kids say, embarrassingly antidemocratic.
Elon Musk has claimed that he’s going to donate 45 million dollars to Trump’s campaign every month until the election. Kamala Harris gathered 80ish million dollars in donations within 24 hours for her candidacy. Both of these are pretty alarming.
People are seeing the money as a sign that she is the real candidate. And while that is, in a practical sense, true, I find it staggeringly depressing. The candidate who raises the most money has a significant advantage in US politics. And while I certainly prefer all that money to come from a more distributed model rather than one where some random billionaire driven by angst and whims can massively influence an election, my hope would be for this to finally come to an end.
Bernie Sanders raising huge dollar amounts through grassroots donations was very cool but it’s become so swallowed by the DNC apparatus that now everyone on the planet gets texts and emails every week from some automated account begging you for five or ten or twenty more dollars to SAVE DEMOCRACY.
What I mean is that I don’t think of the small money donation campaign the same way I did in 2016. Back then, it felt like we—regular voters—were making our voices heard through our dollars spent (more on this in a few sentences), but now it feels like when you go to the grocery store and the cashier asks if you’d like to help raise money for homeless people or cats or whatever.
Because, baby, I would like to help raise money and the best way I can think to do it is to demand the massive company I’m buying food from to donate to these organizations, rather than ask me.
Better yet, why don’t we enact a policy that will strengthen the social safety net rather than rely on crowdsourcing charity.
But back to democracy happening through money spent: I think the concept of Voting With Your Dollar has poisoned the minds and hearts of my generation, allowing capitalistic impulses to burrow deep into our bodies, where Brands have Causes and we are not simply buying shirts or gardening gloves or printer paper, we’re standing up for that Cause. And in this way our spending money becomes moral. And in this way the Brand is a stand in for morality. And in this way, the Brand needles its way into becoming part of our identity. The logos we wear say something about our identity, our morality. We don’t buy from the homophobic chicken company because we’re Good People. We buy clothes from the Walmart alternative because they sell shirts that say Trans Kids. Never mind that when we all discovered the homophobic chicken restaurant, we also discovered that the Walmart alternative that’s now deemed progressive was donating millions to the same antigay campaigns as the chicken shop, which, incidentally, no longer donates money to antigay causes.
Even while we raged against the Supreme Court ruling that spending money politically was protected under the First Amendment and therefore destroying any notion of democracy we had left, we have also bought into this idea fully.
How we spend money is political and moral and it speaks to the kind of person we are.
Tragic.
I often say that I try to avoid writing about politics here, and I’m mostly all right at it. But this really does seem to be my ongoing thesis for politics.
If you like this kind of essay and want more of it, you can check out the previous installments in why everything is so stupid in US politics.
People talk about electoral politics in terms of parasociality, but I wonder if that framing makes it seem like a new thing when it's much older. Like, up until pretty recently a huge chunk of political messaging was built around the question "which of these two men would I prefer as a drinking buddy" ?
You nailed why I so uncomfortable with what is going on now. Movie stars are texting me madly. I feel ashamed that anyone could think this would influence a person who is thoughtful.