Can "Feels and Vibes" Win an Election?
Can "Feels and Vibes" Win an Election?
Say nothing, be nothing, do nothing, has been the Harris campaign strategy thus far. Is it enough?
There is a trap that is easy to fall into, which is to assume that American politics is serious. The trap is easy to fall into because the issues at stake - whether abortion rights, voting rights, or multiple foreign policy quandaries from Ukraine to Gaza to China - are deeply serious. They require serious people of serious mind for the issues. People that America’s political system and political class seem currently incapable of producing. Instead, for almost two decades, in lieu of politics, we’ve witnessed the one phenomenon America truly is exceptional at: spectacle. Politics as theatrics, a cast including Matt Gaetz, Michelle Bachman, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Hilary Clinton, Jamal Bowman and Ilhan Omar and “the Squad”. Not necessarily all comparable, but ranging from the crass to the cringe to the crazy, a veritable buffet of American junk serving up a feast of supersized bullshit for the public to gorge. In the presidential election year of 2024, this cast ranges from the vapid evasiveness of Kamala Harris and the aw-shucks-pabst-blue-ribbon-football-coach-regular-guy shtick of Tim Waltz to the unprincipled fraud of JD Vance and his pimp in the cartoonish unhinged megalomaniac of Trump.
American politics has always contained spectacle, if only for the simple fact that everything is bigger, louder, larger, and more in-your-face in America than anywhere else. Yet behind it lay at least some substance. Irrespective of whether your politics incline you to agree with the administrations of presidents past, it would be difficult to argue that Truman, Kennedy, LBJ, Reagan, or George H.W. Bush were not seriously minded individuals oriented towards the serious business of politics. Biden, on balance, deserves to be credited with being seriously minded, even if that mind, in the end, was so clearly cognitively impaired. And it was to his detriment in the end; his honest conviction that he was the bulwark against Trump converged with the dishonesty of his party, which kept him propped up until he drooled, confused and scattered, through a presidential debate before the same party put him out to pasture.
The spiral of superficiality likely has no single root cause but reflects a convergence of factors: loss of public trust and faith in institutions of state, ideological capture of institutions of higher education, the impact of the Forever Wars on the American underclass who always bear the brunt of her wars, the economic wasteland of the advanced neoliberal order and its resultant opioid-riddled social detritus, the rise of social media and the stupidifying of a generation reared by algorithms, and the breakdown of any shared sense-making apparatus, whether language or social norms. It is often said that a country gets the politicians it deserves. In this respect, contemporary American politics is a mirror of the nation; two diametrically opposed and irreconcilable electorates living in respective alternate realities and distinctive information ecosystems, simultaneously consequential yet utterly trivial, and infused with a distinctly American cultural Protestantism that pits the entire spectacle as “Good vs. Evil”. Whatever the cause, somewhere in the past two decades, the spectacle of American politics subsumed the substance.
We now have a Democrat campaign defined by buzzwords and phrases like “vibes”, “vibe check”, “joy”, and “weird” the contest for the highest and most powerful political office in the world reduced to a sorority WhatsApp chat. The distinctly feminine-coded language reflects the growing gendered divide and age divide in political leaning, particularly among Gen Z, with women under 30 increasingly to the Left and liberal on social and cultural issues. Of course, this stands in stark contrast to the fear-based language of Trump’s campaigning and the threatened hyper-masculinity obsession of the MAGA-GOP movement. Yet there is a peculiar asymmetry in this divide; the Republicans and their stylistic approach to campaigning is hardly worthy of commentary in the media. But for the past few weeks, the media has been rushing to jump on the Democrats for the apparent vacuity of their campaign; “Where is the policy!” they cry, “Harris hasn't put forward any policies!”. This critique is somewhat perplexing; the GOP can be the complete freak show that it is, but the DNC is somehow expected to be all “policy” and substance.
And while at some point, voters do want to know what candidates stand for and where they stand on various issues, the reality is that elections are about winning, and the Democrats might just be playing a game with what in Ireland is colloquially known as “cop on”, meaning some common sense and awareness. Whether another Democrat administration under Harris turns out to be a bunch of cute hoors on the back of their vapid campaign trail remains to be seen. But there does appear to be some attempt to balance their perception as the party of the overly zealous American Progressive Left. Even AOC’s speech at the DNC in August was devoid of the 2020 “isms” and Progressive grandstanding jargon that made her sound less serious politician, more Columbia “whiteness studies” professor. And if “AOC” is in danger of metamorphosis into Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a serious politician, then the winds may truly be blowing in a different direction within the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris, who is an uncomfortable public speaker, said as little as needed in her speech while striking some rhetorical base hits on issues of broad appeal such as abortion rights, topics the Republicans are determined to dig their own grave on, and skirting topics the Democrats tend to dig their own grave on, like immigration.
This “but policy tho” critique of the Democrats since the shift to Harris is as empty as the campaign it purports to criticise because this strategy, such that it is, may be smart - at least up to now. First and foremost, Harris is the beneficiary of perhaps the most singular important fact of this election: she is not Joe Biden, and she is not Donald Trump. In a two-horse electoral system, being a third option is not an option. Unless, that is, a party replaces a horse mid-race, which is the only way a third option becomes viable. The Biden-Trump contest presented the electorate with two deeply unpopular options; all Kamala Harris has had to be so far is neither Biden nor Trump in order to generate some excitement, which has been obvious since she stepped into the nomination. Since stepping in for Sleepy Joe, the election hasn’t been about who Kamala is; it is about who she is not. So don’t make it about her, at least until it has to be. Particularly when the Orange Man and Just Dumb Vance seem determined to self-destruct, imploding on their respective campaign trails and pissing off everyone from veterans to the Christian fundamentalists that were so pivotal to Trump in 2016.
Keeping Harris relatively quiet magnifies everything the Trump/Vance calamity says and does, which is only to the advantage of the Democrats. While both parties are held hostage by what the Hidden Tribes of America Report termed “the wings” (see the figure below), the Republicans have more to lose by alienating traditional conservatives, which is precisely what the MAGA-GOP freak show is achieving. Increasingly, voices of traditional American conservatism are openly supporting Harris in an "anyone but Trump" scenario. The “exhausted majority” are people largely in favour of abortion rights, which, as a standalone issue, is likely to have an important bearing on the outcome in November. In a damning indictment of how cognitively impaired Biden appeared at the end, one of the real advantages Harris now has is the fact that, with Biden off the stage, we now realise Trump isn’t all that much more cognitively intact. Trump needed Biden as Hubris needs a Nemesis, and with Biden gone, Trump increasingly appears as an incoherent and fulminating old fool. Harris doesn’t need to be anything else when framed against the post-Biden version of Trump; relativity has worked to her advantage. Why put Harris in the public speaking spotlight where she is clearly not that comfortable and prone to W. Bush-esque gaffes?
Also pressing is the realisation of the implications of the recent spate of unprincipled decisions from Trump’s Supreme Court, which have not only upheld presidential immunity should he return to office but have placed the executive above all over institutions of state, paving the way for the kind of top-down electoral autocracy that the U.S. will become under another Trump administration. While the rhetoric of “saving democracy” is a little tired and overplayed and also a little rich coming from a Democratic Party with a presidential candidate who has never even made it to the Iowa Caucus, the stakes in this election are clear to many Americans who have no desire to see their country reduced to somewhere between Putin’s pawn and the Handmaid’s Tale. Why should the Democrats run a campaign on hard policy when the opponent in the contemporary MAGA-GOP is so devoid of coherence and frighteningly unhinged?
Of course, much of the preceding points came with a caveat: “so far”. So far, this substance-free strategy has worked; Harris surged in the polls as a younger, energised face against two unintelligible geriatrics. She and the Democrats also benefit from a client media which has served up fluff and puff pieces, maintaining the Democrats’ chosen rhetoric of “vibes” and “joy”, and have managed to take a widely unpopular vice-president who ran a dire campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2020 and was selected as Biden’s running mate only for her melanin and ovaries, and transform her into a transcendental, deified figure. The client media can be relied on to continue writing puff pieces, ensuring Harris and Waltz will be subject to zero scrutiny for the remainder of the cycle.
Nevertheless, “so far” may not be far enough. While polling in tight elections, particularly in key swing states, must be taken with a fistful of salt, the early surge which saw Harris poll at 49% compared to Trump at 46% may be waning. The recent New York Times/Siena College poll now has Trump leading 48% to 47%, indicative of how tight the margins are likely to be in November. But what is more instructive from that poll was that only ~9% of respondents stated that they didn’t know where Trump stands on important voter issues, while ~28% stated that they needed to know more about where Harris stands. Given that swing states are likely to go down to the wire, this is a lot of voters on the fence about Harris. At some point for the Harris campaign, the rubber will need to hit the road, and that point seems like it is now; the “vibes” and “joy” may have provided a short-term endorphin boost, but it surely cannot sustain the campaign.
The reality is that what Harris stands for remains wholly unclear; in 2020, she gambled on appealing to the Progressive Left and produced a cringe-fest that did not wear well. The supposed hard-ass version of Harris has seldom been seen, with the notable exception of her grilling of the Supreme Court ghoul Brett Kavanaugh during his nomination hearing. In the fluff CNN interview, she informed viewers that her “values are unchanged”, but her policies have changed as it appears she has U-turned on several of the unpopular causes she embraced in 2020. Nothing wrong with changing one’s mind, of course, when cogent and measured reasons are articulated, but in the absence thereof, it appears untrustworthy.
The Democrats have clearly adopted a specific approach to Harris’ exposure, leveraging their client media and relying on the novelty and relief of another option in a stifled political system. Whether it is sufficient to secure another Democrat administration and the first woman president of the United States is, however, a massive gamble. This election is on a knife edge, and “feels and vibes” won’t cut it in the end. When Harris stepped in for Biden, the election was about who she wasn’t; now it is about who she is.
At some point, voters are going to need to know what 2024 Kamala Harris is about and why. Tonight’s debate could be the pivotal movement in shifting people on the fence down off the fence on a side that is either blue or red. The paradox of this post-serious presidential race is that it is so consequential for America and the world in its orbit.