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Pop Star-In-Chief: How Politics Can Echo Fan Armies

At political conventions like the DNC, candidates like Kamala Harris can seem like pop stars preaching to their fan armies. There's more drama ahead.

Presidential politics has been its own form of pop stardom for decades — certainly since Bill Clinton worked the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show, and probably since actor Ronald Reagan won the White House. Now that pop culture has swallowed everything, fan relationships help people define what tribe they belong to, the way class or place of origin did before the Internet made those things so much less relevant. The closest thing to an open question was the potential for disruptive protests over the war in Israel and Gaza, which seemed like they could echo the ones that took place during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, also in Chicago.

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