THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2019 NY P3
are styled as saints (fig. 4)and stamped onto novelty
devotional prayer candles.
Here, political engagement slips easily into the
habits of consumption. President Trump’s fans follow
him around the country like groupies, and Nancy
Pelosi’s boosters fetishize her funnel-neck coat as a
symbol of the #resistance. Candidates’ supporters
now identify as stans (fig. 5)— a term derived from
the 2000 Eminem song about a fan who becomes so
obsessed, he kills.
Political stanning has a way of remapping the
landscape of mainstream politics — maybe even over-
writing physical reality itself. Frantic online cultural
production swarms around Justice Ruth Bader Gins-
burg whenever she experiences a health scare, as if
memes alone could sustain the octogenarian’s life.
Trump’s fans imbue him with improbable prowess
when they edit him into pro-wrestling videos showing
him smacking down CNN. (fig. 6)But perhaps the
most explicit riff on the trend was the infamous Beto
O’Rourke sex tweet, which translated his political po-
sitions into sexual ones.
On its surface, stuff like the spiriting of Warren’s
image into the world of Harry Potter is an innocent
internet parlor game. But the fan-fictioning of political
candidates can be a dark art, too. The power to viscer-
ally manipulate Warren’s image can be used to under-
mine her ideas rather than boost them. Take the “Eliz-
abeth Warren always” meme that swept Twitter this
summer: Though it warmly characterizes her as a
relatably decent person (“Elizabeth Warren always
replaces the toilet paper” and “Elizabeth Warren
always boards with her correct boarding group”), it
has a way of obscuring her political message. As War-
ren advocates progressive reforms, the meme is fun-
damentally conservative in its valorization of the
polite competency of the individual.
The Hermione comparison also flattens Warren’s
pitch into just two facets of her persona — her gender
and her smarts. It also traps Warren in the same pop
cultural avatar that Hillary Clinton’s fans bestowed on
her in 2016, which has a way of eliding the substantial
ideological gulf between the two women. When poli-
ticians are converted into culture, often the first thing
that’s lost is the politics. As one critic wrote in
response to a 30-GIF thread offering “proof” that
Warren “is Hermione Granger”: “Delete this immedi-
ately we are going to lose.”
H
OW DID WE GET HERE?You could spot the roots
of political fandom in the sarcastic sign-waving
crowd of the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,”
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s 2010 effort to con-
vene Comedy Central viewers for an exercise in
preaching political moderation. Or in Barack Obama
Is Your New Bicycle, the 2008 single-serve website
that surfaced pleasing fictions about the candidate,
including “BARACK OBAMA FOLDED YOUR
LAUNDRY.”
But before that, the phenomenon was a little hard-
er to spot. There has long been a political valence to
pop culture, and, separately, a fan participation that
bordered on grass-roots activism. Fifty years ago, the
original “Star Trek” series exemplified the former,
and viewers’ efforts to keep it on the air the latter. But
before the rise of crowdsourced platforms, politics
and pop-culture converged only when media and cam-
paign gatekeepers wanted them to: when a political
cartoonist drew Dick Cheney as Darth Vader, or when
IN JUNE,Senator Kamala Harris of California visited a detention center
for migrant children in Homestead, Fla. When officials at the facility re-
fused to let her inside, she mounted a stepladder, binoculars in hand, to try
to catch sight of the kids over the camp fence. Then she waved, touched a
hand to her heart and gazed resolutely in their direction.
Twitter waved back. Other candidates were at the camp that day,
stumping amid a throng of protesters, but it was Harris who left an im-
pression. A three-second video of her wave was neatly sliced from its polit-
ical context and served up online. (fig. 7) It became a reaction GIF — a
charm that could be stroked to produce endlessly personalized memes.
The tweets detected a hint of faux sincerity in the wave, then magnified it
by grafting it into pettier and pettier scenarios.The comedian @DewaynePerkinswrote above the video: “Me
waving goodbye to the stranger I unknowingly gave wrong
directions to.”The artist @ZoeGawd: “Grandmas on their porch still waving at
y’all from 25 miles down the road.”The photographer @ByDre: “When you tell your friends you
gonna meet them at the next spot but know you are about to go
home and get in bed.”It was not the kind of reception that Harris had been seeking when she
hit the trail. That moment outside the detention center was “heartbreak-
ing,” she told BuzzFeed in a text exchange. “It was horrible.”
And yet the meme was not an altogether negative development for her
campaign. The apparent contrivance of her performance, as drawn out by
the meme, may have been unflattering, but the imagined scenes it was
spliced into were harmless, even humanizing. As the meme spread, Har-
ris’s image did, too, even if her message was left behind. “This isn’t a politi-
cal tweet,” Dewayne Perkins clarified of his entry. It just starred a poli-
tician.
If we used to want our elected officials to represent our interests in
government, now we also want them to represent us in new ways — to
reflect our pop cultural sensibilities back at us; to make a facial expres-
sion in a video that we can relate to our own lives; to serve as a willing host
for a round of internet jokes. A politician may hope that her image res-
onates positively with voters. But maybe it’s enough that her image res-
onates at all.Price tag: $2,990.
MaxMara rereleased
its 2011 funnel-collar
coat after Nancy Pelosi
wore it to a meeting
with President Trump.The site was created
by the journalist Mat
Honan.Barack Obama also
warmed up your car
for you.A meme poking at her performance outside a children’s
detention camp only strengthens her campaign.CASE STUDY
KAMALA HARRIS
WAVES TO
THE INTERNET
fig. 5
fig. 6
fig. 7
Photograph by
Andrew Harnik/
Associated Press