Cults of personality are most common in, though not limited to, totalitarian regimes. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Saddam, and North Korea are all well-known examples. Usually it's a government propaganda technique once a leader is in power but it doesn't have to be. Trump had one even before he was elected and Gandhi is accused of having one in India.Can you fill that out just a little more?
While I don't think celebrity fandom is dissimilar to cults of personality, I think there are some key differences.Perhaps the modern era is the place for a cult of personality - we see it in celebrities, more so in the Golden Years of Hollywood than now. It requires the cooperation and willing use of the press - or total control of it.
You're correct, although there are religious aspects to celebrities as well - Elvis lives! I think people saw a hero in McClellan who reflected what they needed to see, not what he really was. The press made him their darling for that reason...and Little Mac did not want to disappoint. If he stepped down a little and dirtied up his uniform, he just might do that. If the king does not move off his throne, he can never trip.While I don't think celebrity fandom is dissimilar to cults of personality, I think there are some key differences.
A cult of personality is more religious - the leader as a savior of the nation.
A cult of fandom is more about...I guess jealousy or covetousness is the best way to put it. The desire of the fan to be, or to be with, the celebrity.
I saw this discussed in another good article some time ago - that slant was not so much about religion but mental health. There was a fad in history of attributing mental disorders of all sorts to all sorts! It seems to me there is a difference in a man who believes he, basically, IS God (take Henry VIII) and a man who believes he is on a mission from God. If this were the case, McClellan should have behaved more like Stonewall Jackson - that general was 100 percent on a mission from God! I would suggest McClellan's complex was not a messianic one but a martyr one. Heroic defeat can be just as rewarding as triumphant victory.Here is an article that argues. George McClellan had a messianic complex. It was a very godly man and thought god purpose for him was to be "the savior of the union"... Its a good read... It has a part about Lincoln questioning God's will... Deus Vult...
In God We Trust: Did George B. McClellan Suffer from a Messianic Complex?
Did George McClellan suffer from a messianic complex? How both the Union and Confederdacy believed they had God on their side during the Civil Warwww.historynet.com
In an 1894 article for Century Magazine, James B. Fry, formerly on McClellan’s staff, wrote, “The belief that he had been called to ‘save the country’ had seized upon him….[T]he strong religious element of his character served to fasten the conviction and blind him to the obligations and influences which governed him at other times. Under the power of this hallucination he was insensible of his own weaknesses and errors.”
T. Harry Williams bluntly stated that McClellan “developed a Messianic complex.”
James B. McPherson echoed that in his 1988 Pulitzer Prize–winning Battle Cry of Freedom, claiming that “McClellan’s letters to his wife revealed the beginnings of a messiah complex.”
Stephen W. Sears offered: “Taking the role of God’s chosen instrument might be dismissed as nothing more than a harmless conceit but for the effects it produced on his generalship. It was at once the prop for his insecurity and the shield for his convictions. With Calvinistic fatalism he believed his path to be the chosen path, anyone who raised criticisms or objections…was at best ignorant and misguided and at worst a traitor.”