Fauci, RBG, and the Liberal Fandom Dilemma

Over the course of the pandemic, Anthony Fauci has become a cultural obsession. You can, if you so desire, purchase Fauci-themed chocolates, T-shirts, luxury sweaters, yard signs, bobblehead dolls, and votive candles. Fauci, for his part, seems baffled by the attention: “Our society is really totally nuts,” he wrote in an April 2020 email, responding to an online article about “Fauci Fever.”

But he is far from the first government official in recent years to receive this onslaught of adoration. Before Fauci, Special Counsel Robert Mueller was left-of-center America’s unlikely crush and magnet for T-shirt sales; before Mueller, it was fired FBI Director James Comey, whom liberals had reviled just months prior for his handling of the Clinton email investigation. The public servants describing President Donald Trump’s misconduct during his first impeachment had their moment too: Inspired viewers of those 2019 hearings formed a “Fiona Hill Fan Club” for the former National Security Council official.

Politicians have always worked to cultivate devoted followings. Yet as these unexpected subjects of public obsession would be the first to tell you, they are not politicians. They are bureaucrats and functionaries—people who pride themselves on being apolitical, putting their head down, and getting the job done. Most of them were not looking for the limelight, nor are they particularly comfortable in it. But they were transformed into the nerdy heroes of the Trump era, cast as foils to the 45th president and his boorish disinterest in the workings of the government he ran.

Now, under the Biden administration, the culture of idolizing public servants does not seem to be going away. The trouble is that this newfound fandom for the federal government among anti-Trump Americans sits awkwardly with the reforms that, as Trump’s presidency showed, America’s governing institutions so desperately need.

The trend toward obsessive appreciation of political figures who are not actually politicians, especially on the left and the center-left, traces back to 2013, when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was transformed into the internet superstar “Notorious RBG” for her dissent in the voting-rights case Shelby County v. Holder. Since then, plenty of politicians, including Senator Bernie Sanders and Vice President Kamala Harris, have become memes to one degree or another. Writing in The New York Times, the culture critic Amanda Hess describes this as “democracy reimagined as fandom”—people engaging with some of the most powerful figures in American politics as they would with a pop singer or movie star.

But if making a GIF out of a presidential candidate is one thing, buying a T-shirt with a former FBI director’s face on it is quite another. The chaos of the Trump administration—and the hopelessness felt by the many people who detested the president—expanded fan culture to focus on civil servants and bureaucrats as well. As…