At Vox, we do things differently. We focus on helping you understand what matters. We focus on being helpful to you. We report urgently on the most important stories shaping our world, but we spend time on issues the rest of the media neglects. We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today? You stan him. Drawing general parallels between the two movements can seem easy, even simplistic, but when we look closer, what we find are mutually thorny, mutually complex ideological ecosystems with telling overlap.
In both subcultures, the rise of social media echo chambers has fomented toxicity, extremism, and delusional thinking. While fandom was evolving online in the s, organic political movements were growing more commonplace, with very similar dynamics. At their core, fandom and politics both require emotion, with all the intensity that implies. Fandoms were collectives of people drawn together by their emotional attachment to specific sports teams, creatives, or works of media.
Grassroots political movements of the aughts, from the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street, were localized collectives initially drawn together by a shared narrative of what they wanted their country to become. There are few self-aware stopgaps in modern fandom, and even fewer in politics. Big fandom narratives often segue into big political ones: Several fandom projects of the early internet spawned offshoot social and political movements, like Fandom Forward , which began as the Harry Potter Alliance, and Project for Awesome , an offshoot of the Vlogbrothers fandom.
Both groups encourage fans toward social change. A single piece of Harry Potter fanfiction is arguably responsible for popularizing the Effective Altruism movement. It hardly seems coincidental that during the era when celebrities and pop stars became more immediately interactive with their fanbases, Trump successfully styled himself not as a politician, but as a celebrity who deigned to do politics just to satisfy his long-suffering fans.
From the outset, he presented himself as a vessel for their beliefs. But the idea of Trump as a conduit works both ways. You had to stan him. Increasingly, however, there are fewer self-aware stopgaps in modern celebrity fandom, and, as January 6 taught us, even fewer in politics. In his recently republished book Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy now retitled Dream or Nightmare , author Stephen Duncombe observed that Trump won the election not based on facts β he lied often β but upon his ability to create fantasy masked as truth.
