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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Make America Trite Again

Kamala Harris was the fusion of American pop culture and politics—to her detriment.
Kamala Harris

Nothing could make me feel sorry for Kamala Harris but this Washington Examiner headline came close: “Tulsi Gabbard knifed Kamala Harris in July; four months later, she has died from the wounds.” Good God, man! I understand the need to attract eyeballs through graphic headlines, but that one’s in a class all its own. Surely the Examiner could have been a little subtler (“Tulsi Gabbard incarcerated Kamala Harris over a minor offense in July…”).

Whatever the case, Kamala Harris has dropped out of the presidential race, and Tulsi Gabbard has been credited with the KO. And while Gabbard’s outlasting of Harris is certainly an impressive accomplishment, as Jim Antle notes, I’m not so sure their stinging exchange at a presidential debate proved the decisive blow. The real problem was this: what the hell was the point of Kamala Harris? Why was she in the race? I don’t ask those questions out of blind partisanship. Plenty of the other Democrats have carved out roles for themselves. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are testing the contours of big-government populism in a new century. Pete Buttigieg has infused liberal Christianity with a kind of commonsense localism. Tom Steyer is obsessed with climate change. Joe Biden is our nation’s foremost scourge of malarkey.

But Harris?

The only thing that made her stand out was that she was adept at the clapback, at slickly packaged soundbites that sent sass in the general direction of Donald Trump. This is, of course, the currency of our pop culture, which prizes the hasty verbal dismissal over substantive discussion. Harris’s role in the Democratic race was as a kind of emissary from that pop culture; hence her relatively flattering treatment on Saturday Night Live, among other kid gloves. Yet that same culture has also become so pervasive as to seem unbearably trite. It’s everywhere and for that reason it gets on your nerves. Thus Harris’s putdowns of Trump might have sounded saucy during rehearsal but onstage they were cringeworthy. Her “you go girl” swagger—“I’m obviously a top-tier candidate”—came off as smug not cool. And her insinuation that she was losing because America wasn’t ready for a black woman president was so predictable as to make you want to point a nail gun at your own head.

So what a shock to find out that the trips-snaps advocate for the little guy was also helming a campaign that treated its workers badly. Harris wasn’t a candidate so much as a savvy maypole for the legions of shallow online woke. That she went nowhere may be proof that those legions aren’t as formidable as they seem, that our pop culture has become more exhausting than it thinks.

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