And when the reality television personality Kylie Jenner threw a birthday party themed around a friend’s favorite show, “The Handmaid’s Tale” — with guests dressed in red cloaks and white bonnets, sipping themed cocktails like “Praise Be Vodka” — the internet threw a fit. Before Jenner tied on the bonnet, the costume had been co-opted by abortion rights activists. The subtext of the outrage was this: A pre-existing political connotation automatically subsumes a frivolous but harmless one. A TV show is serious politics now, not entertainment.

THERE IS GREAT OPPORTUNITY to be found in the fanning of politics — for candidates, corporations, and sometimes, even for us. When civics is converted into a pop culture product and set loose online, it is capable of engaging people who might not otherwise participate. And networks of fans aren’t just used to generate content; they can also mobilize when news breaks or polls open. Enthusiastically memeing Elizabeth Warren into a treasured fantasy world drums up attention and energy that theoretically align with grass-roots campaigning. The media scholar Henry Jenkins has likened photoshopping a meme to writing a letter to the editor: just another mold for citizenship, cracked open to new groups.

Besides, experiencing politics as fandom is not necessarily more harmful to our self-rule than, say, the horse race analogy sometimes favored by the traditional political media, which promotes campaigns’ competitive acumen at the expense of the likely consequences of the outcomes. Memes do carry values across the culture, even if subtly or strangely. Styles of humor vary markedly between political perspectives. A pop cultural alliance can open a window on a candidate’s priorities, or so we have come to think. Aesthetics have become the shorthand for ideas.

It’s not that a politician’s actual politics have become unimportant in these fandoms, but they have become sublimated into spectacle. A candidate’s political reputation — as a centrist or a radical, a liberal or a conservative, independent or corporate — helps inform the online personality that is built up around her, and from there it is inflated or distorted by cultural clues.

All this can make people feel like they have a great deal of control over the political process. But this feeling can be deceptive. Citizens may be the ones creating material about the candidates, but they are also helping to build cults of personality around politicians that erode their accountability. 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.

And this is questionable work that we are doing. The point of translating politics into pop culture may be to make it more accessible, but it can also make politics feel oddly remote — as if it is all just a television show to watch, or a fantasy novel to read, or a game to play. And while presidential candidates need to pitch a wide tent, swaying other people — people who are not like them — to their cause, stans are intrinsically agents of exclusion, posturing above those who don’t already agree with them or just don’t get the jokes. Though political stans ostensibly exist to promote their favorite candidates, you get the sense that they are also looking to build micro-fandoms around their own online personalities. This is a time when social activity — talking with friends, creating media and offering commentary — can be styled as political in and of itself. Activism slips easily into discourse; our idea of what it means to “do something” has become almost indistinguishable from talking about it.