Kamala Harris and the tyranny of vibes Harris and her online acolytes are the weirdest people in politics. Brendan O’Neill
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/12/kamala-harris-and-the-tyranny-of-vibes/
“The new politics of vibes is even more degraded than the politics of personality. That political style of the 1980s and 90s also spoke to a decline in democratic seriousness, where politicians would seek votes less on the basis of what they believed than on their spin-doctored pose as intimate, authentic ‘good guys’. But at least they tried to connect with us, at least they talked to us. Aloof, inscrutable ‘brat’ Kamala is something far worse – a politician without substance or personality. Bereft of both vision and character, all she has to offer is strange vibrations.”
I was thinking the other day: what do I know about Kamala Harris? Off the top of my head, no Googling, I know she was the attorney general of California. I know she locked up lots of people for marijuana violations. I know she likes Venn diagrams. I know she didn’t fall out of a coconut tree. I know she’s ‘brat’, though I don’t know what that means. I know her ceaseless cackle will haunt me to my grave. I know she’s unburdened by what has been. And I know she was the border czar, even if she herself seems to have forgotten that fact.
And that’s it. That is the long and short of my knowledge about the possible future leader of the free world. You could torture me for days and I wouldn’t be able to tell you her positions on the big issues presidential candidates once held forth on. Iran, say. Or global trade. Or job creation. I’m open to the possibility that this is partly down to my lack of reading, but there’s also more to it than that. The truth is Harris is a wholly new kind of politician. One who’s not meant to be known but felt. It’s less her policies we’re meant to be wowed by than her vibes. Brace yourselves: America might soon be ruled by a meme made flesh.
Getting back on to Google, I was relieved to find I am not alone in my ignorance of Harris’s political beliefs. Even Americans are in the dark. ‘Why Kamala Harris’s Politics Are So Hard to Pin Down’, says a headline in the Atlantic. She’s the ‘mystery commander in chief’, says the Wall Street Journal. She’s basically asking Americans ‘to elect her to find out what she really believes’. She’s such a politics void you can project whatever damn fantasy you like on to her. To the radical left, she’s a ‘cop’. To the Very Online right she’s an unhinged Marxist who will defund the police and hand the streets over to BLM. Guys, she can’t be both.
Since replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket, she has studiously avoided sit-down media interviews. She’s held no news conferences. Her website doesn’t even have an ‘Issues’ page. But of course it has a ‘Biography’ page, where we learn she’s ‘the daughter of parents who brought her to civil-rights marches in a stroller’ and ‘throughout her life she’s broken barriers’. Okay, but what’s her position on, I don’t know, fracking? She once said, ‘There’s no question I’m in favour of banning fracking’, but now she is reportedly taking a more ‘moderate’ line to avoid pissing off voters in fracking states like Pennsylvania. I guess those good folk will have to wait until she’s in the White House to find out if she’s going to kill their jobs.
She’s such an interview shirker that journalists are having to fantasise about what they’d ask her if she ever deigned to talk to them. ‘Questions we’d love to ask Kamala Harris’, says a tragic headline in the Washington Post. If any other candidate for the highest office in America – in the West, in fact – were to blank the media like this, there would be uproar. They’d be accused of haughtiness, of being contemptuous of democracy. Not Harris. She’s playing a clever game, insists the liberal press. Even the Post, for all its feelings of rejection, says ‘we get it’: Harris is going to ‘stay as vague on the issues as possible, for as long as possible, to avoid giving fodder to the opposition or dividing her supporters’. Avoiding democratic accountability? You go, girl!
Apparently, us old squares who expect presidential candidates to outline their agenda and talk to journalists are stuck in the past. We just don’t understand the key role of ‘vibes’ in 2024. ‘Harris is winning the all-important battle – of vibes’, says Fareed Zakaria. Hearing Fareed Zakaria say ‘vibes’ is like hearing your dad say ‘sick’: it’s just wrong. Apparently Harris’s lack of substance isn’t a flaw but a virtue. In being ‘deliberately light on substance and high on feelings’, she might just connect with voters who ‘don’t tend to vote rationally, but rather use voting to express themselves in emotional… ways’, says Zakaria. I’m sorry, is this therapy or politics?
The Guardian seems thrilled that this election is being ‘fought on vibes’. ‘The vibes election is a kind of free-association game that takes place in the recesses of the deep subconscious’, it says. Okay. Kamala, we’re told, is the queen of vibes. The New York Times gushes over ‘The Kamala Harris Vibe Shift’. Journalists marvel at ‘The Brat-ification of Kamala Harris’ following British singer Charli XCX’s declaration that ‘Kamala is brat’. Yes, I Googled it. See what you have reduced me to. Apparently, ‘brat’ is an It Girl vibe. Charli XCX’s latest album is called brat. If you’re wondering what all this has to do with the future of America, you’re a dinosaur. Forget dusty old nonsense like policies and just feel the vibes.
There’s a twisted irony to this feverish beatification of Kamala as the vibe goddess, the mother brat, the ‘Gen Z Meme Queen’ (kill me now). Which is that it’s the handiwork of the kind of sniffy liberals who laugh at rednecks for falling for the ‘Cult of Trump’. It’s being pushed by online leftists who spend the rest of the time wringing their hands over Trump’s ‘demagoguery’, his sinister ensnaring of supposedly dim voters with rhetoric and style. These people urgently need to take a look in a mirror. For their creepy worship of Harris is the very definition of demagoguery. Their excuse-making for her ivory-tower style of campaigning makes the most wide-eyed MAGA people look critically minded in comparison. As to their lying down so that the Kamala vibes might wash over them and provide with them an emotional kick – it’s giving North Korea.
What are ‘vibes’, anyway? All I know, being middle-aged and literal, is that vibes is short for vibrations. It’s a Sixties thing, originally. It’s about pressing pause on all your thinking and worrying and just letting the beat rush through you. That’s fine in a club or art venue. But in politics? In a presidential campaign? Surely we should expect more from our elected representatives than a fleeting therapeutic thrill. It is a testament to the almost total hollowing out of public life, to ‘the fall of public man’, as Richard Sennett described the crisis of modernity nearly 50 years ago, that in an era of economic downturn, social conflict, war and fear, all we’re getting from one of the presidential candidates in the United States of America is vibes. And brat. And memes. And laughing. So much laughing.
The new politics of vibes is even more degraded than the politics of personality. That political style of the 1980s and 90s also spoke to a decline in democratic seriousness, where politicians would seek votes less on the basis of what they believed than on their spin-doctored pose as intimate, authentic ‘good guys’. But at least they tried to connect with us, at least they talked to us. Aloof, inscrutable ‘brat’ Kamala is something far worse – a politician without substance or personality. Bereft of both vision and character, all she has to offer is strange vibrations.
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