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December 16th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
When I was a sophomore in high school, I helped build a youth movement and online cult of personality around Senator Ed Markey, winning record youth vote turnout and becoming the first campaign to ever defeat a Kennedy in Massachusetts in September 2020. Now, two years later, I’ve learned that stan politics may be an effective tool for winning elections, but they actively obstruct accountability and grassroots change. If we actually want a shot at a livable future, young people must abandon stan politics — because politicians are not our friends.
“Stan politics” has been defined by Politico as “a new form of deeply personalized, extremely-online devotion to various political figures.” Stans form parasocial relationships with the politicians they support, building up online personalities based on the politician’s actual or perceived policies as well as memes or cultural signifiers. For example, Senator Markey had long-held alliances with youth-led climate groups such as the Sunrise Movement when he launched his campaign around August 2019, the same time I started volunteering. But his first viral moment among Gen Z social media users was an April 2020 tweet of him wearing vintage Nike Air Revolutions, captioned, “If you have to go outside, wear a mask.”
Of course, Markey did not tweet the photo himself — early on in the race, his campaign had hired a talented group of social media-savvy digital staffers who were in touch with Gen Z interests. Yet the tweet was still a sign of his meme-able potential, at a time when politically active young people were hyper-online and searching for a new politician to direct their attention towards after Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren had dropped out of the 2020 presidential race. As young people already organizing on the Markey campaign, my friends and I catalyzed this viral moment into real-life support by recruiting people interacting with Markey’s posts to join our “Students for Markey” group and sign up to phonebank.
By the time of the election, this support had exploded from a few devoted volunteers into a huge online fanbase known as the “Markeyverse” with hundreds of active stan accounts. We earned ire from the Kennedy campaign and awe from the national media, Broadway, even the band Wheatus. To put it lightly, we shook up the landscape of Massachusetts elections that had long been dominated by consultants and machine politics. A new class of scrappy teenage organizers emerged victorious.
When the first memes were posted and the first stan accounts created, we had no idea of the impact we’d have. How rapidly the Markeyverse was growing felt scarily out of our control, but more dangerous were the ways in which our “stan politics” obstructed our ability to hold Markey accountable. As Amanda Hess wrote for The New York Times, “Fandoms are fundamentally about promoting their central celebrity, not holding them to account. Our political representatives are supposed to work for the people, but fandoms reverse that proposition: They make us work for them.” Troubling issues we observed on the campaign, from unpaid interns to overworked staffers, were largely brushed aside — decisions we rationalized because, of course, the goal of a campaign is to win, and everything else is simply a distraction.
More political contradictions didn’t emerge until after Markey was comfortable in another six-year term in the Senate. There was some grumbling from the Markeyverse about his endorsement of Islamophobic Congressman Jake Auchincloss and later his vote against returning the U.S. embassy in Israel to Tel Aviv, but nothing big enough to overshadow the good ideas we felt he was advocating, like the expansion of the Supreme Court and new components of the Green New Deal. That was, until May 2021 and the height of the protests against Israeli settler-colonial violence in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
First, I noticed that Markey hadn’t said anything about the evictions of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah, and I sent out a tweet expressing my disappointment. We — the stans — were aware that he was far less progressive on Israel than he was on climate or healthcare, but we had largely brushed the issue aside during the campaign because Kennedy’s position was slightly worse. Our negligence itself was a form of Western chauvinism, signaling to Palestinians that their liberation was expendable. Who were we to overlook Markey’s abhorrent support of Israel simply because we liked his domestic policies?
When Markey finally spoke, I almost wished he hadn’t said anything at all. His statement framed Israel’s violence as a “both-sides” issue rather than calling it what it is: settler colonialism and apartheid. Other stans were upset too, and we expressed our outrage in group chats of campaign friends that included people working in Markey’s office. We asked the staffers who wrote and tweeted the statement to delete it; they did not. So, we took our pressure to another level — now by brandishing the weapons that we had used to re-elect Markey against him. We were vocally critical online, replying to Markey’s tweets and encouraging supporters to call his office. We collected over a thousand signatures on a letter I co-authored demanding accountability and specific policy actions.
For me, those few days were a chaotic blur of being a full-time high school student and co-managing a national public pressure campaign on a U.S. Senator. I was on the phone with reporters during my lunch breaks and coordinating actions on Zoom calls all day after school. From an empty classroom in my school, I even met with Markey’s Senate office alongside peace advocates and Palestinian organizers — a meeting that I assume his office only took because of the negative media attention they were receiving, and a meeting that ended with zero policy concessions. Besides that meeting, they communicated with us only through carefully-worded press statements.
Retrospectively, my rhetoric online and in the media included many contradictions — I argued Markey’s actions were a “betrayal” because he had promised to let young people lead the way in his September 2020 victory speech and now he was ignoring us, yet I also admitted that his stance wasn’t all that surprising given his voting record on Israel. Therein lay my naivety: deep down, I thought Markey’s newly-garnered youth support and bold progressive imagery had changed him. I was profoundly wrong. Markey never “changed”; his messaging and branding did. And I, and the rest of the stans, had facilitated this change.
Markey won in part because of support from youth and progressives, but he was also backed — as he always had been — by most of the Massachusetts Democratic establishment and the pro-Israel lobby. And they were the ones paying the campaign bills; the stans just translated Markey’s appeal to social media users and Gen Z. This made us complicit in his support for Israeli apartheid, even if we didn’t realize it at the time. Now that Markey had been elected to what will almost certainly be his last term, he didn’t need us anymore.
Markey’s complete lack of accountability on Palestine — an issue which many consider a litmus test for the left — serves as a reminder that politicians can co-opt revolutionary language and cater to youth with the right talking points without actually challenging the status quo. But more importantly, it shows the dangerous limits of stan politics and our own mistakes in becoming fervent stans in the first place. By worshipping Markey throughout the campaign and for the most part uncritically defending him against all attacks, we were setting ourselves up to be blindsided. And even if Markey stayed aligned with us politically, the idea built-in to stan culture that one person deserves to be held up as our savior is inherently counterrevolutionary. Stanning politicians is dangerous regardless of their political agenda.
I don’t claim to speak for the entire Markeyverse and I don’t want to undercut the empowering nature of our youth organizing work, but the experience permanently disenchanted me from electoral politics and made me question whether “accountability” even exists for representatives of a capitalist, settler-colonial empire like the United States. That May, I took my poster of Markey’s September 2020 victory speech off my wall, and I don’t work on campaigns anymore. History shows us that direct action, protest, and internationalist solidarity are far more effective strategies than appealing to the morality of elected officials who are in the pocket of the military-industrial complex. I have argued that Gen Z, facing climate catastrophe and devastating late-stage capitalism, has more revolutionary potential than any other generation alive right now. To be frank, stanning politicians is a waste of our time — we have a future to win.
BEFORE YOU GO – Stories like the one you just read are the result of years of efforts by campaigners and media like us who support them by getting the word out, slowly but doggedly.
That’s no accident. Our work has helped create breakthroughs in how the general public understands the Palestinian freedom struggle.
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