Fandom Politics

When do the old rules of political communication become obsolete?

Note: There are two things that have been on my mind as I observe everything happening in U.S. politics right now. I am using this space to think through them out loud. This is the first topic. Second to follow when time permits. I am not sure how well this holds together. Feel free to debate!

On January 28th, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded just over a minute after lift-off. This was one of the defining, “where were you when…?” moments of my youth. I remember stapling my eyes to the television in a common area at my dorm at UC Santa Cruz.

Later that day, President Reagan addressed the nation from the Oval Office. I’ve never been what you’d call a big Reagan fan—he wasn’t popular in the bong-littered halls of Porter College—but it’s good. A classic of public solace, delivered to a traumatized nation. Go watch it if you have five minutes.

On January 29th of this year, a passenger airplane and a military helicopter collided over the Potomac River, between Washington, D.C. and Virginia. Sixty-seven people died. This was the first major civil aviation disaster involving a U.S. airline in 16 years.

The next day, President Trump held a press briefing at the White House to address the crash. After a moment of silence and some remarks acknowledging the breadth of the tragedy, he delivered the key message: “DEI caused the crash.” Much of the rest of the 35 minute press conference was built around that political point, and each of the other three speakers repeated it.

The contrast with Reagan’s Challenger address was made by another comms pro I know.¹ In a sharply critical social media post, this person suggested that the White House communications staff should have had the president watch Reagan’s Challenger address and take his cues from it. Many others had similar reactions.²

One way to assess the White House press briefing is to ask, “Will there be any cost to the president from using a mass tragedy to deliver a political message attacking diversity?” We’re ten years into our current political era and I think we all instinctively know that the answer to that is, “no.”

But why?

The starting point of a public statement is always, “who is the audience and why are we communicating this message to them?” Historically, the audience for presidential communications has been “all Americans.” That was the case for Reagan’s Challenger address.

One could think of this as the classical political communications framework. In this framework, you worked through a consolidated and consensus-driven media environment to reach a national audience that encompassed the broadest range of sensitivities. This was a moderating environment that imposed costs for transgressive statements. Transgress hard enough, or weirdly enough, and the costs could be severe.

But that framework is obsolete. There is no consolidated, consensus-driven media environment, and there hasn’t been for more than a decade. There is an atomized world of mainstream media channels that target different groups and social platforms that algorithmically target individuals. There is not really a national audience, other than perhaps the one that will assemble for today’s big football game.

This isn’t an original insight. Technology industry analyst Ben Thompson wrote about the impact of the Internet on party politics way back in early 2016 in an essay called, “The Voters Decide.” That was when Donald Trump was barreling toward his first nomination, to the surprise of many in the political and journalistic establishment.³

But the intersection with my world, and my work, is the question of what makes an address or statement bad or good.

Donald Trump, public figure, is a creation of popular culture. That’s been his trajectory for decades, from his origins as New York tabloid fixture, through his time as a regular on the radio interview circuit and his later career in reality television. He leveraged this history into an influential social media presence which he used effectively to build direct relationships with his supporters.

I think the right model for evaluating President Trump’s statements is pop-culture fandom. A fandom is self-contained and driven by social and participatory media. It has a belief system and it polices itself and outside forces that it interacts with through its social channels. Think of Swifties, Star Wars stans, or the BTS “ARMY.”

In the classical political communications framework, the worst thing you could do was to violate broad norms policed by consensus media. In a fandom framework, the worst thing you can do is betray the fans. And, ideally, you give them what they want. All the usual social media feedback mechanisms apply, which makes this an escalatory environment. Transgressing against broader sensibilities doesn’t matter if your first duty is to a fandom. If your fandom wants to hear condemnations of DEI, that’s what they get. If your fandom is sufficiently large, this is a policy statement.

This reasoning leads to some follow up questions, for which I don’t have super well thought out answers. But…

Is a fandom attached to a political figure just a cult of personality?

I think there is overlap, but they’re not the same thing. Perhaps this is a product of my time in China and fascination with post-revolutionary Maoist propaganda, but I’ve always thought of a cult of personality as top-down political project. Fandoms are organic and participatory. (And they can attach themselves to things that aren’t political.) But one can imagine a political fandom becoming the foot-soldiers of a cult of personality.

Are there other political figures with powerful fandoms?

There are plenty of politics-adjacent figures who seem able to cultivate fandoms, although one could argue that many of them are supporting players in a larger fandom. Arguably Bernie Sanders had a fandom dynamic back in 2016. I am not sure about now. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is a digital native and much more competent at using social media to create that sense of direct engagement with a community than most politicians. I am not sure that has translated into a fandom yet.

And of course, there is Elon Musk, who commands a huge fandom and who also functionally owns a social media platform. If he wasn’t a political figure before, he is now.

Does the fandom lead or the personality lead?

I think it is a symbiotic relationship and they reinforce each other through social media feedback mechanisms.

Seems like there are two big fandoms active in the current U.S. administration. What happens if their leaders have a falling out?

Idk! Good question! How much do they overlap? Where does power lie? Fandom? Money? Control of the Justice Department? Maybe we’ll find out!

Are you, Imagethief, just way too terminally online, and should you just, like, go outside for a while?

Yes, definitely.

If this is the new media environment, can my CEO at Acme Corp. simply abandon all propriety and say whatever they want?

With a few notable exceptions (see above), absolutely not! Your CEO at Acme probably a) has a broader set of constituents to engage and b) does not command a powerful fandom. But you can see some notable founder-entrepreneurs testing this thesis, especially when they have dual-class share structures that insulate them from investor pressure. Employees were once an important moderating constituency, but that doesn’t seem to be true the way it was a decade ago.

Last question: Is fandom-driven politics good for the country?

Probably not. Fandoms are in-groups, which means that they define themselves in part against out-groups. If the out-group is, “people who like Blackpink more than BTS,” that’s probably no big deal.⁴ If the out-group is, “everyone in the country who didn’t vote for me,” the stakes are higher. There is value in being able to relate to a broad, national audience when your obligation is to the entire country. That said, our political environment has been headed that way for some time. The Dixie Chicks were purged for political apostasy way back in 2003.

But there are 335 million of us in this country. Wherever we’re going, we’re all going there together.

1. I’m not going to identify this person. I respect them and it doesn’t really matter who they are. I already feel a bit guilty about an essay-length subtweet.

2. If you’re interested in the intersection of aviation and politics, James Fallows’ newsletter is a good place to start. You can also contrast the White House press briefing with the brief video statements from American Airlines’ CEO Robert Isom. The messaging and approaches to communication are very different.

3. Here I was going to make a joke about all the time I wasted studying Ben Bagdikian’s “The Media Monopoly” in grad school. But, on reflection, Bagdikian was right in principle. Just wrong about what “the media” would eventually become and how it would matter.

4. Unless it becomes “death to the Blackpinks!” in which case, buckle up!