The Parasocial Style in American Politics

“The internet brought people together,” Megan Garber notes in her book Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves Into a State of Emergency. “The hyperlinks that bound its pages made bonds among humans, too. People watched one another through the screens as they always had and as they had never been able to before.”

As Garber observes, the Internet, the smart phone and social media revolutionized things by turning our media consumption experience from a one-way audience model to a two-way participatory one. Viewers became performers themselves and vice-versa. And at the dawning of this era, there was a great deal of optimism about what it portended:

Scholars, watching to all, talked excitedly about "participatory culture" and the potential of society-via-screen. People were creators now. They were consumers. They were "netizens." They were leaders. They were centered in the story. They were celebrities-in-waiting.

These scholars were unfortunately right. Garber argues that “as more people are experiencing celebrity, more are also bearing celebrity's risks. Fame elevates and belittles at the same time. Its new accessibility has meant that anyone might become a star. But anyone, too, might be dimmed.”

The parasocial relationships of our current internet do predate contemporary social media. Books, theatre, radio, movies, and television all offered audiences performers and fictional characters to whom they could form attachments. People fell in love with imaginary individuals. They wrote fan fiction. And politics steadily became more and more about the cultivation of a personal brand over the course of the 20th century, with charm and physical appearance becoming increasingly valuable assets. But, as Garber observes, the smart phone and social media revolutionized things by turning our media consumption experience from a one-way audience model to a two-way participatory one. Viewers became performers themselves and vice-versa. No one could escape the infinite, layered circles of viewing and performing. 

We follow, worship, and loathe everyday strangers—because, ultimately, the two-way relationship is frequently illusory. We don’t really know most of the people with whom we interact and perform online. And we have all become ourselves characters to whom someone else could form the same attachments. 

What has unfolded in the last twenty years has been, in my view, dangerous at best. Our relationships both to major leading figures in public life and to our fellow Americans in general have degraded into strange brews: fandoms, obsessions, resentments, hatreds, jealousies, and pure fictions concocted from the performative, piecemeal way media allows us to experience one another. Of course, positive examples exist for most of us. Real connections and edifying relationships can be forged online. But the opposite is clearly true, too—deadly true. The parasocial style in American politics doesn’t only threaten to undermine our democratic institutions. It risks dissolving the basic social adhesive that holds our republic together. 

Obama girls in the KHive

Parasociality with political figures is different from attachments to celebrities or the personas they portray. After all, despite the distance, we *do* have really existing relationships with public figures. Their actions directly affect our lives, and, most importantly, they are constitutionally presumed to *represent us.*

But that only makes it all the more peculiar for us to treat presidential candidates and members of Congress like Page Six celebrities or our favorite characters on a television show. Celebrity worship is already frequently a toxic force in American life. Transposing it onto politics is a dangerous activity, but one that’s been well underway for decades—finding some of its earliest expression in Camelot mythos of the Kennedy years. 

Politicians themselves came to understand this power over the course of the 20th century. As Garber notes in Screen People, Bill Clinton’s appearance on Arsenio Hall demonstrated how the young candidate had grasped the fan culture turn in politics: 

He sold himself as a leader by presenting himself as a performer…Winning votes, Clinton’s campaign assumed, amounted to winning fans—and fans are won not through facts but through feelings. In that, Clinton was prescient. Politics is, evermore, a matter of abstract devotion.

But it took 21st century media and technology to truly transform the landscape of politics into just another realm of celebrity worship. In 2007, the viral “Crush on Obama" video captured the ascendant star power of the then-junior senator from Illinois, with an attractive young woman singing about her political and physical infatuation with the man who would beige our 44th president. Yes, it was a comedy video. But it also perfectly encapsulated the rabid, popstar-like fandom that Obama generated from Millennial and Gen-X voters when he first burst onto the national scene. We loved Obama. Perhaps we were in love with him a little, too?

On the other end of the spectrum, Donald Trump has been probably the most significant beneficiary of the parasocial style in American electoral history. His rise in 21st century politics came thanks to his starring role on the reality series The Apprentice. Many Americans admired the captain of industry version of Trump they saw on their television screens and later embraced the bigoted, shoot-from-the-hip candidate they saw on Twitter, phoning into news shows, and finally on the campaign trail. 

Kamala Harris offers another example, but one that also allows us to examine the intersection of race and gender in a deeply troubled moment for American politics. Harris launched her 2020 presidential bid to high expectations that fizzled before the primary process got fully off the ground. Despite suspending her campaign before the end of 2019, Harris commanded a passionate core of supporters, and they made themselves heard online as she ran to become the first Black woman to serve as vice president. The most vocal of these Harris label themselves on Twitter with the hashtag #KHive. In 2021, Sophia Ankel reported on the KHive for Business Insider, which has become known for both its effusive support for Harris and occasionally toxic behavior toward her critics:

The group is united in its celebration of the vice president and amplifies the policies she promotes: KHive members speak out in favor of racial, gender equality, and LGBTQ inclusion. They support the right to an abortion and have applauded Harris on her carbon-neutral climate plan.

[…]

But some members of Harris's digital army have also been accused of taking their loyalty too far.

Last year, a Huffington Post investigation found nearly a dozen people who said they had been threatened or harassed by some self-identified members of the KHive.

Multiple people told the Post their personal information had been published online after some fans instigated harassment campaigns against them for previously backing Democratic candidates other than Harris.

The KHive was back in full force in 2024 as Harris took the reins from Biden late in the re-election cycle. But if the most diehard members of the KHive have engaged in toxic behavior, Kamala Harris herself also spent the last few years on the receiving end of extraordinary abuse. That abuse, inarguably tied to misogynoir, has been leveled with a degree of vitriol few other politicians have seen. And, in fact, the bile directed at Harris is part of the fandom culture in the MAGA right of the Republican Party, a version of rallying around shared ideas not dissimilar to the KHive’s positive celebrations of LGBTQ rights and reproductive health. In short, the anti-fandom of Harris is inextricably linked to the fandom of MAGA. As an October 2024 article at the Council on Foreign Relations observed:

In late September, a group of Kamala Harris supporters was assaulted in York, Pennsylvania, by an assailant shouting “n— supporter.” The incident occurred after a sustained campaign of racist vitriol against Vice President Harris during the 2024 election cycle, perhaps displayed most blatantly in July when former President Trump told an audience of Black journalists in Chicago that he had not known about Harris’s mixed-race background “until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black.”

  […]

The misogynoir characterizing the final days of the 2024 campaign is, in fact, one of the key channels through which the Republican party and its standard-bearers connect with the violent fringes of their movement. Much as it accompanied racist violence in prior eras, racism against women of color stands out in modern violent extremist canon. 

Even as politicians have increasingly cultivated and benefitted from fandom-like followings, they have also become subject to forms of obsessive parasocial hatred that would not have been possible in previous decades. The base prejudices of our society have not necessarily changed. But they have become supercharged and personalized in ways that threaten to turn our politics into a traveling circus of the amygdala, careening from love to hate, from infatuation to jaundiced disgust. 

Poster’s madness 

While social media changed the intimacy with which people could feel their affections and resentments for politicians, elected officials and candidates are at least meant to be mass public figures. They do at least play a daily, immediate role in the welfare and direction of the country. But as we’ve seen with the rise of Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok influencers, our modern media environment enables us to fashion cults of celebrity and parasocial attachments for anyone on the social web. Frequently, the feelings we assign to these individuals are wildly, terrifyingly out of proportion to roles they play either in public life or—more importantly, perhaps—our own personal lives. 

Consider the frequent eruptions on Twitter and then later Bluesky over Will Stancil, a policy researcher and law school graduate in Minnesota. Online, he’s amassed a substantial following by posting frequently, often combatively, about public policy and how Democrats can win in the Trump era. But Stancil stands out as a recipient of outsized rancor and venom, from both his right and his left. 

Far-right trolls have directed threats at him, doxxed him, and even accused him of rape. Last year, it was reported that Grok, the built-in AI on Musk’s X, was being used to target Stancil:

Grok explained, in detail, how to break into his home, assault him and then dispose of his body. According to Stancil, in the past, Grok would refuse to respond to similar violent prompts. But he claimed with the update, that seemed to go out the window. 

Stancil’s left-wing critics often treat him with equal contempt. And they engage with his posts and comments in a way that suggests a deeply unhealthy and unrealistic relationship to Will Stancil, the real human being. Instead, they appear to have concocted a character, always presumed to be acting in bad faith, and against whom no transgression is too far. 

You can easily find posts accusing him of transphobia, misogyny, and other bigotries. Users regularly interpret Stancil’s words and actions in ways that test the bounds of basic reality. 

In a TikTok post shared across other platforms, one creator accuses Stancil of having outed an intricate honeypot operation run by Twin Cities women against ICE Agents. In fact, as Stancil himself explained, “There was no ‘operation.’ I know people who did it, on their own, they stopped because ICE largely left, and said I should talk about it.”

Quotes and replies to this one post find users talking about how much they hate him and hoping he gets attacked again, a reference to Stancil being punched by a protester in Minneapolis after he filmed them setting fire to public property. 

During this week’s row, another user proudly told Stancil they had filed reports with both the Minnesota Bar and Minneapolis police, all in response to what they perceived as his transphobia. It’s worth stressing again that Stancil is a progressive activist with a public track record of pro-LGBTQ stances. If you feel a bit insane reading all of this, as if it’s a bunch of random pieces of utterly meaningless information somehow fused together into an incomprehensible controversy, that would make sense. None of this is normal or healthy. It’s absolutely flabbergasting that this kind of behavior is aimed at a random, if prolific, poster on the internet. But it does matter, not in the sense that Stancil is someone of world historical importance but because it exemplifies how unglued our online political socialization has become. 

Will Stancil is not in high office. He is not fabulously wealthy. He does not hold a position at a major media company or have millions in book sales to his name. None of this would excuse the bizarre behavior directed toward him, but it does highlight the severity with which parasociality has penetrated our politics. One no longer needs to be a Bill Clinton or Kamala Harris to engender rabid fandoms or anti-fandoms. You no longer have to be a Kennedy to find yourself at the center of the deranged conspiracism of total strangers. 

Stancil frequently points this out himself, only to be shouted at by the same people ascribing all manner of villainies to him. There’s a degree to which some of this behavior comes across as a kind of digital version of the Synanon Game, the attack therapy pioneered at the infamous California rehabilitation program that soured into a violent cult. While those on the right simply hate Stancil for being a liberal, anti-Trump talker, his left-wing critics seem to believe they’re engaging in some sort of personal corrective activity by piling their abuse onto him. It’s simultaneously coldly cruel and inappropriately intimate. They do not know him, have no place to assume the depths of his character and soul, and yet they delight in mistreating him even as they claim it’s for a higher purpose. They are performing for one another and enticing each other to increasingly cruel behavior. It’s an anti-fandom in action. 

Of course, none of this is unique to Stancil. This is how many such swarmings go. People perform for one another and they engage in showy abuse of the subject of the pile-on, telling themselves a fantasy narrative to maintain the belief that what they’re doing is somehow just—or at least justifiable. 

Observing each other to death

I have written before in this column about the corrosive effects of reality tv and the spread of this mindset across society. Our screens are two-way, yes, but we can easily forget that the people on the other end exist as more than characters for our enjoyment. The degradation and humiliation rituals of reality television now play out across our social media feeds. 

Sometimes the subject is genuinely famous—a Blake Lively or Olivia Nuzzi—but oftentimes they’re at best digital celebrities, people with sizable followings on one or more platforms but who lack the kind of institutional celebrity power of a Hollywood actor or star journalist. Other times, they’re not even prominent on the internet. They’re just unfortunate enough to have become that day’s “main character.” The language itself shows how we distance ourselves from the human at the center of what is frequently a mass exercise in schadenfreude. 

But our screens and platforms allow us to go beyond merely watching the downfall of some stranger we’ve turned into an antagonist in our minds. We can join in. And our desire to be voyeurs to the trials and suffering of others is perhaps only superseded by our temptation to participate ourselves when the opportunity arises. We hurl invective in the comments section and post our own theories about how and why this person arrived at such a moment of ignominy. 

I’ve argued before, with evidence behind me, that our screens short- circuit the critical pathways we have for truly recognizing another person. In this context, the parasocial relationships—the fandoms and anti-fandoms—we cultivate online are always already deficient in the empathy and mutual recognition that make genuine human relationships function. A democracy full of other characters, protagonists and antagonists, rather than fellow citizens is hardly a political society at all. It’s only the idea of one. 

Featured image is Orestes Pursued by the Furies, by John Singer Sargent