I Don’t Think Any Politicians Deserve Our Fandom

 
 

By sTACY LEE KONG

 
 

Content warning: This newsletter contains references to sexual violence, torture and genocide. Context links may contain graphic descriptions and/or images.

A note on language: As I’ve mentioned in every newsletter I’ve written about Gaza since Oct. 7, it’s super important that we take care with our language when discussing Israel and Palestine, because the way we talk about this situation has real consequences for real people. So to be clear, when I critique the Israeli government and military, I am not critiquing all Israelis, much less all Jewish people. I also think it’s important to push back on attempts to characterize critique of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as antisemitic. Furthermore, it is disingenuous and actually dangerous to conflate Zionism with Judaism, as this list of prominent Jewish writers has argued. Lastly, when I use the words colonization, genocide, apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing to describe Israel’s actions, that’s based on the analysis of organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the International Federation for Human Rights, the United Nations, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace as well as academics who study genocide and South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice to bring genocide charges against Israel. It is also based on the language Israeli officials and public figures have used themselves, 500+ instances of which have already been collected by Law for Palestine.

There’s a line from a June Jordan poem that I love so much, it might be my next tattoo: we are the ones we have been waiting for. It’s the last line in 1978’s “Poem for South African Women,” which was written to commemorate the 25th anniversary of a massive march against South Africa’s apartheid regime, when 40,000 women and children engaged in bodily protest against their oppressors. Jordan was a poet, essayist, journalist and activist whose creative and political interests focused on liberation, and who was a contemporary of Audre Lorde’s, though Jordan is much lesser known (for remarkably timely reasons). So maybe it’s unsurprising that I didn’t come across that line in the context of the poem—instead, I first heard it in a political speech. Specifically, in Barack Obama’s 2008 Super Tuesday speech in Chicago, after he won the Democratic nomination for that year’s presidential election. I was 23, a baby feminist—and a wholehearted fan of Obama, who, to me, felt like the harbinger of a fairer, more equal world.

I say this to acknowledge that I’m not immune to fandom when it comes to political figures. I mean, Obama’s not even the last politician I caught myself fan-girling over! (That would probably be U.S. Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who I named as my favourite feminist of 2018 in a Flare post that now reads as pretty naïve, tbh.) So yes, I get the impulse to throw your support behind a candidate who makes you feel seen, heard and empowered.

However. My timelines have been full of criticism for the pro-Palestine protesters who interrupted U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris at a rally in in Detroit, Michigan this week, with many people pointing to Harris’ Blackness and womanhood as reasons why these protesters should have been more ‘polite,’ and even turning her response into girl boss-style memes. And… not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s giving brainrot. So this week, I want to think about why we apply the framework of fandom to our interactions with politicians, why that is morally shaky and definitely bad for democracy—and what I’d rather see instead.

How the internet contributed to the ‘celebritization’ of politicians

In 2019, the New York Times published a fascinating interactive feature exploring the “convergence between politics and culture, values and aesthetics, citizenship and commercialism,” and arguing not only that the internet has turned democracy into celebrity fandom, but also that this fandom has become the “dominant mode of experiencing politics.” Comprised of several essays focusing on U.S. political figures who have evolved into pop culture characters, it picks apart the ways voters who might support various political figures have morphed into fans and followers, often organically and with humour. Take what the paper describes as the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s “talismanic power” as an imagined liberal saviour, the last line of defence against power-hungry, rights-removing Republicans. In addition to the fact that her rebrand as “Notorious RBG” by extremely online liberal white ladies is a “trendy class of digital blackface that seeks to imbue professional white women with [B]lack male swagger” (sigh), the paper points to the irony of positioning her as a saviour considering she really started becoming a pop culture icon in the early 2000s thanks to her “fiery dissents” to the rights-restricting opinions delivered by her fellow Supreme Court justices. That is: she was disagreeing with decisions that had already been made by a group of men in a passionate, compelling but still only symbolic way.

The essay on how Donald Trump has evolved into a “content creator-in-chief” role is also very good, though what I find most compelling is writer Amanda Hess’ assertion that politics has always been about storytelling. “The American presidency has always been a content business. A successful campaign captures the national mood, like a best-selling novel. Candidates are assessed on the quality of their live performances. The president’s role includes sustaining an image. It is as much about what he says as what he does,” she writes. “But lately this arrangement has become more literal… Once engineered through speeches, summits and ads, the job is mutating to fit new mediums. When newspapers and television and even early websites mediated politics, candidates were positioned to appeal to mass audiences, and they were evaluated on broad personality metrics: how they kissed babies or drank domestic beers. But on the internet, politics is organized through niche affinity groups, carried on the backs of unexpected cultural properties and translated into arcane jokes.”

What’s different, then, is that contemporary politicians’ internet-savvy personas are a co-creation between voter/fans and the political leaders themselves, with the iterative nature of memes and the inherent sharability of online content propelling these figures to a level of fame that would have been impossible even a decade ago. I mean, looking back now, doesn’t Obama’s “Yes We Can” campaign song feel downright quaint in comparison to the whole Charli XCX brat… thing? Because it is different—leaning into meme culture allows the content to be created independently of the politician, and means the joke can expand exponentially, while 16 years ago, messaging was more unidirectional and close-ended. A politician could craft a message that was shareable, but it couldn’t be added to or remixed. Now, in a fascinating application of Richard Dyer’s theory of the star text, the general public takes part in shaping the politician’s reputation. But… this co-creation feels especially fraught if you consider how firmly it seems to be predicated on vibes, versus any sort of campaign promise, much less actual policy.

Which brings us back to Harris, and her fans’ reaction to the protesters who chanted “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide. We won’t vote for genocide” at the Detroit rally.

The power (and pitfalls) of the so-called vibe shift

Just like how you couldn’t escape Kamala Harris coconut tree memes for a while there, I’ve been seeing the words ‘vibe shift’ pop up in cultural and political commentary a lot recently. As The New Yorker’s Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry and Alexandra Schwartz argued last week, “Harris’s Presidential run has set off one of the most pronounced vibe shifts in recent memory… [a] chaotic but mostly cheerful embrace of Harris’s candidacy [that] stands in contrast to the national mood even a few days prior, when a pervasive sense of doom was dominant.” Their whole conversation was super thoughtful, especially how they talked about how so many people are experiencing a fragile, and frankly surprising, hope. But this shift in mood is also largely based on vibes, or at least on a perception of progressiveness that is not at all borne out by evidence.

As The Nation senior editor Jack Mirkinson argues, “There has been discussion about Harris’s supposedly different ‘tone’ when it comes to Gaza. But, as I have written elsewhere, this idea barely squares with the facts. Harris has occasionally sounded more critical notes than Biden, but if you look at the recent statements that the two have made about Gaza, you will find that the sentiments, and even many of the words, are identical. Both Biden and Harris talk about the “suffering” of Palestinians. Both have said that they want a ceasefire in Gaza. The notion of some deep split between their language is more fantasy than reality.”

That is to say… the idea that Harris is ‘better’ than U.S. President Joe Biden, is also a co-creation, right? And I think that’s important to acknowledge, because that idea of radicalness helped prompt this wave of support among Democrat voters, especially young and racialized ones, and it has also been central to the criticism leveraged against the protesters who interrupted her speech. In short, there is a vocal group of people who are so invested in their perception of Harris’s badassery, not to mention her identity and the way her political success feels like a representational win, that they are making up a progressiveness that does not exist, and are using identity politics to silence any critique of her actual politics.

And just to be clear, those politics are terrible and the protesters are absolutely correct to heckle her. As Mirkinson goes on to note, “a focus on Harris’s words distracts from the more important truth: that she has sent no signal that she would do anything differently than Biden on Gaza. She has never objected to the continued shipment of weapons to Israel, a position confirmed by her national security adviser Phil Gordon on Thursday morning. She has never hinted that she would end the policy of protecting Israel at the United Nations. Right now, the idea that she would respect an international arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu, or do anything significant to stop settlement expansion in the West Bank, is laughable.”

The fan-made fiction that Harris is progressive on Palestine is especially wild considering her administration is literally, currently funding and supporting the Israeli government, even as we have ample evidence that it has bombed hospital after hospital and school after school; killed aid workers; targeted hundreds of journalists; denied preemies medical treatment; destroyed most of the region’s sewage pumps and all of the sewage treatment plants, creating the perfect conditions for a polio epidemic; blocked humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, leading to mass starvation (something its finance minister believes is “justified and moral”); restricted electricity and internet, cutting Palestinians off from the world; had snipers shoot children in the head; desecrated Palestinians’ dead bodies; and engaged in widespread torture, including sexual violence.

On that last point, according to OHCHR, “countless testimonies by men and women speak of detainees [at Israel’s Sde Teiman prison] in cage-like enclosures, tied to beds blindfolded and in diapers, stripped naked, deprived of adequate healthcare, food, water and sleep, electrocutions including on their genitals, blackmail and cigarette burns. In addition, victims spoke of loud music played until their ears bled, attacks by dogs, waterboarding, suspension from ceilings and severe sexual and gender-based violence.” And this is absolutely not restricted to Sde Teiman, btw. Israeli human rights group B’Tselem just released a report characterizing the entire Israeli prison system as a “network of torture camps” for Palestinian prisoners and describing “frequent acts of severe, arbitrary violence; sexual assault; humiliation and degradation, deliberate starvation; forced unhygienic conditions; sleep deprivation, prohibition on, and punitive measures for, religious worship; confiscation of all communal and personal belongings; and denial of adequate medical treatment.”

It's not just Kamala, though—I’m not sure any politician deserves our fandom

There’s something particularly frustrating to me about seeing people, and especially racialized or otherwise marginalized people, abandon all interest in collective liberation for a candidate that represents their personal liberation. Especially when they parrot Establishment lines about being patient or not asking for too much. Uh… pardon? This is abhorrent to me on a moral and ethical level, but also, these people are not our idols, they are our employees. Why in the world would we not demand more from them??? (Also: I don’t quite buy that interrupting an elected official’s speech in an attempt to hold them accountable is the same as committing a racist and sexist microaggresion against them.)

Don’t get me wrong, I also feel the vibe shift, and also think it’s nice to feel the tiniest bit hopeful after years of pure doom and gloom. And obviously, just as Obama’s presidency was monumental, America electing its first female president, and it being a Black woman, would be deeply meaningful. But I don’t quite agree that this moment feels like 2008. Not because Obama and Harris are fundamentally different; I actually think they’re very similar. More because I’ve changed. The difference between me now and me 16 years ago, or even six years ago, is that I’ve had ample opportunity to see what happens when the politicians who I feel represented by actually gain power; they commit so deliberately to the status quo that they leave office with what Human Rights Watch calls a “shaky legacy on human rights,” or they slowly shed the radical ideals that got them elected to become nothing more than an “Establishment liberal.” I just don’t trust politicians the way I used to.

So… it’s not that I don’t understand how you could become a fan of a politician. What I don’t understand is how easy it was to forget everything we know about this politician, to become her fan in this moment. It requires a level of cognitive dissonance that I just don’t have—or perhaps a level of optimism. Because whatever the vibes say, we can anticipate that it will not actually be different this time. She will not change the system from within. The absolute best we can hope for is that she will listen to our demands—and encouragingly, she has already at least demonstrated a willingness to do that, if her pick of running mate is any indication.

But, that does mean we have to make some.

And Did You Hear About…

People’s most boomer complaints.

Writer Gloria Alamrew’s beautiful essay about motherhood.

The Cut’s v. important investigative journalism about a rumoured beef between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively. (Also: their movie It Ends With Us, an adaption of the Colleen Hoover book, sounds like… a mess.)

The Josh Hartnettaissance.  

This man who accidentally adopted a kitten that he named Dandruff (😭😂).

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PoliticsStacy Lee KongPalestine, Gaza Strip, Israel, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Benjamin Netanyahu, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Justin Baldoni, Blake Lively