GRADUALLY, THEN SUDDENLY: How Harris Lost the ‘Weird’ War.
When CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reported on Harris’s 2019 comments, anchor Erin Burnett responded: “taxpayer-funded gender transition surgery for detained migrants—she actually said she supported that?” Burnett later added, “these are things that—it would be hard to think that you would come up with taxpayer-funded gender transitions for detained migrants.”
In other words, as an individual policy, it’s perhaps not terribly meaningful. But it’s weird.
In a new essay for New York magazine, Simon van Zuylen-Wood writes about “the Democratic Party’s break with reality,” as seen through the lens of Donald Trump’s increased voter support in New York City, of all places. He recalls that he had thought Harris might be in trouble earlier in the campaign when he started seeing the surging popularity in Brooklyn of the camouflage trucker hats sold by the Harris-Walz campaign. It was one of the cartoonish ways in which the Harris campaign tried to appeal to “normal” voters.
“Scanning as working class, the hats seemed to be worn exclusively by people who didn’t match that description,” van Zuylen-Wood notices. “They reminded me of the Big Buck Hunter arcade game at a bar near the campus of my elite college, which lent wry ‘authenticity’ to the setting and whose plastic rifles were the only kind most of us had any interest in handling. I wondered if some of the hat wearers were in on the joke or simply liked the aesthetic. But some of these people looked sincere, as though they felt the hats really reflected the campaign’s resonance with regular folks.”
Sure enough, it turned out that the people who bought the hats and voted for Harris were all just guessing at what normal people were like. The whole attempt at simulating normalcy was weird.
Back in August, Bari Weiss’ Free Press had a short post on Kamala’s camouflaged caps: No, the Harris-Walz Camo Cap Is Not for Rednecks. It’s an appeal to girls and gays:
[T]he camo hats—which sold out earlier this month, netting nearly $1 million for the Harris campaign—were made for girls and gays, not deer-hunting rednecks in Alabama. They are actually a nod to pop singer Chappell Roan, a lesbian and self-proclaimed “drag queen” who sells a nearly identical hat on her own website, except the slogan is “Midwest Princess,” in reference to her hit album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.
Kamala’s camo hat is meant to appeal to people who know what Chappell Roan merch looks like—almost definitionally people who would have voted for Kamala Harris anyway. It follows the Harris campaign’s embrace of the “Brat” aesthetic, inspired by British musician Charli XCX’s album of the same name. As a member of the target audience for this sort of thing, I must ask: How many gay guys do Democrats think there are in this country?!
Much less than the straight guys that camp Kamala completely ignored – or dismissed over their “toxic masculinity” or compared to National Socialists – only to suddenly wonder why men are listening to (or watching on YouTube) Joe Rogan’s podcasts and voting for the candidate he endorsed, while Democrats Bud Lighted their brand.