Capital or the Capitol? The Hunger Games Fandom and Neoliberal Populism

Populism has become a standard explanation for Donald Trump's surprising electoral-college victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.¹ To the annoyance of left political activists, liberals compared Trump's presidential campaign to that of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders because of their criticisms of party establishments. Such equivalencies neglect the differences between right and left populisms but capture something important: individuals' political ideas, much less political coalitions, rarely express neat ideological cohesion.² This essay explores how the diverging populisms so visible in the 2016 campaign season converged in an unlikely spot: responses to the popular young-adult (YA) dystopian fiction trilogy The Hunger Games (THG) by Suzanne Collins. Using techniques drawn from Janice Radway's classic study Reading the Romance and from scholars of utopian studies, I interviewed THG fans and read Internet commentaries on the series to understand how a single political fiction could become a universal allegory for contemporary politics despite a polarized political environment. I argue that "neoliberal populism," a seeming oxymoron, unites fans of this series, despite their many real political disagreements.

Following Radway's lead, I chose the most popular recent dystopian text and sought to understand what fans liked about it.³ THG has remained the most popular YA dystopia, based on rankings at Amazon and Goodreads. The first book in the series sold more twenty-seven million copies, and the films rank among the highest ticket sales in U.S. history.⁴ On the social media site Goodreads, THG surpasses all recent dystopian series, as well as the classics of dystopian literature, including 1984 and Brave New World, in the rankings of "best dystopia."⁵ These fans read the book not as escapist fantasy but, as Kenneth Roemer notes about readers of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, as an allegory for contemporary politics. Roemer explains that readers "placed Bellamy's ideas and narrative episodes within the contexts of key events in their lives, events that represented crucial paradigm shifts or had become icons of strong beliefs."⁶ As utopian studies scholars argue, dystopia and utopia are inherently political genres, imagining new societies or warning about our current ones. Such imagined worlds are especially significant for young readers; as Carrie Hintz and Elaine Ostry argue, they "may be a young person's first encounter with texts that systematically explore collective social organization."⁷ THG's fandom is not limited to young readers. In an episode of the leftist Intercepted podcast, describing Trump's blending of reality television (TV) with the presidency, host Jeremy Scahill intoned darkly, "we are now all part of Trump's Hunger Games."⁸

Rafaela Baccolini argues that dystopian fiction's "function is to warn readers about the possible outcomes of the present world and entails an extrapolation of key features of contemporary society."⁹ THG extrapolates the following features: class division, metropolitan–periphery division, a sadistic televised reality competition, and state surveillance. The series departs from contemporary conditions by portraying a strong state in control of an extractive economy in an allegory to ancient Rome—thus the society's name, Panem, taken from the Latin phrase panem et circenses (bread and circuses). Series author Collins began as a writer for TV, a medium demanding polysemy to appeal to mass audiences.¹⁰ Thus, the series is similar to post-9/11 TV and film representations of war and national security that David Holloway describes as "allegory lite." For reasons of "pure capitalist utilitarianism," these texts appeal "simultaneously to multiple audiences, alienating as few customers as possible, while transferring responsibility for any politicizing of films to viewers themselves."¹¹

THG's narrator is sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives in District 12 of the country Panem, a dictatorial state whose power is located in a city known as the Capitol. The Capitol extracts wealth from the districts, keeps them under surveillance, and holds an annual tournament in which two young "tributes," a boy and a girl, chosen by lottery from each district, fight a battle to the death on national TV. The tournament, called the Hunger Games, takes place...