The James Dean Deification of Charlie Kirk

If you worked for a movie magazine and wanted to write about James Dean in 1956, you needed to toe the Warner party line or lose access to Warner Bros.’ movies and stable of stars, the lifeblood of any entertainment publication. It was very much akin to the media campaign we see Turning Point USA and the administration undertaking on behalf of Kirk. If you want to talk about Kirk, you toe the line or risk losing access to government officials, approval for business deals, or even your broadcasting license.

I could list many more uncanny parallels in the way the two cults formed seven decades apart and how they mythologized the dead, but more important are the differences. Warner Bros. was a powerful and wealthy studio in the 1950s, but it did not have the state’s power to compel. It could not intimidate the national media the way the Trump administration can, and it could not punish the growing chorus of journalists, pundits, and writers who denounced the Dean cult and complained about its effects on teenagers. Nor did the James Dean fan clubs that formed in his memory have anything like the reach and penetration of Kirk’s organization to deliver the good news of his life. Xen Harvey’s effusive eulogy aside, Dean did not have a network of churches declaring him the favored of God.

And, of course, the biggest divergence lies in the fundamental difference between the two men, and between art and politics. James Dean and Charlie Kirk both carefully stage-managed their images to appeal to a young demographic, but they did so in mirror-image ways. Dean, personally liberal on many social issues, followed Hollywood convention by almost never mentioning politics and letting the emotion of his acting speak for him. Kirk, as a political activist, had an opinion on everything. Dean said very little in public, and his air of mystery and ambiguity allowed his fans to project themselves onto him and his movie characters and to imagine a deep emotional bond, no matter who they were—male, female, straight, gay, young, old, etc. Kirk never stopped talking—his whole organization was literally rooted in staging public debates—and there is much less room to grow his base of support beyond those 30 percent who already agree with him.