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From ‘brat summer’ to ‘demure Kamala’: how Gen Z are tearing up the rules of mainstream politics

Kamala Harris has been criticised for being light on policy, strong on vibes. But that fits with the current mood of visual and online culture – and, increasingly, with what Gen Z want from politics

Supporters in ‘Kamala IS brat’ T-shirts cheer for Kamala Harris at a campaign rally. Photograph: Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Rachel O'Dwyer
Sun Sept 22 2024 - 07:00

Brat summer? Picture walking through the blazing debris of a Spice Girls reunion concert that’s been ravaged by the zombie apocalypse. Got it? Okay. That was brat summer. It was the spectral return of the girl power vibes of Brit Pop and New Labour. It was acid green. In the words of musician CharliXCX, whose summer hit Brat spawned the whole trend, the vibe was “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra”. It was having fun, even if you’re a bit of a mess and things feel grim and uncertain. It was raising two fingers to the clean girl aesthetic prevalent on TikTok. It was dancing in the trash fire of your broken future.

And now it’s part of the Kamala Harris online campaign. On July 3rd, X user @ryanlong03 posted a clip of Harris set to a remix of a CharliXCX track Von Dutch. Harris stands before a podium: “My mother used to – she would give us a hard time sometimes and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.’ Everything is in context.”

“Kamala is BRAT,” CharliXCX tweeted on July 21st to her 3.7 million followers.

The accolade was welcomed by the Harris campaign, which swiftly rebranded the X and Instagram @Kamalahq page in acid green to match. The campaign, most likely spearheaded by brilliant 25-year-olds, cleverly toes the line between, as one media analyst put it, “looking to embed themselves in the culture rather than intrude upon it”. Taylor Swift’s endorsement after the debate with Trump was yet another social media coup. As Hillary learned to her detriment in 2016, with those mortifying references to Pokémon GO, it’s all about the context.

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Now it’s the TikTok season of mellow fruits, mindfulness and er… #Demure Autumn, yet another online moment which seems, at first blush, to be what happens when Gossip Girl meets the Tradwife trend meets what happens when Gen Z get their hands on a word that was coined to describe female decorum in the 16th century. Harris, with her silk blouses and chic blow dry, is nothing if not – in trad’s now infamous words – “very demure, very mindful”.

Lebron, a trans makeup artist with 2.2 million followers, coined the phrase while demonstrating an understated work look, a little braid, a subtle eye. While some have taken the term at face value to mean embracing minimalism and old school etiquette, Lebron’s tongue-in-cheek delivery gives Demure Autumn a sly spin that pokes fun at feminine wiles.

That’s the backstory behind the social media trends. But what does Kamala Harris being alternately #Brat or #Demure tell us about the state of mainstream politics today?

To date, the Harris campaign has been criticised for being heavy on vibes – joy, patriotism, No going back America! – and light on detailed policy. But vibes are what the extremely online generation are all about. According to the philosopher Robin James, who studies them, “a vibe” is an ambience, a feeling that lacks intuitive explanation. Social media platforms thrive on vibes; sound and moving images trump text.

The internet is no longer a place for those looking for a coherent narrative for the state of our times or even the truth so much as somewhere we go to seek what Kyle Chayka calls “moments of audio-visual eloquence” — for a vague, undefined feeling of rightness, or even profound wrongness. Think of that Trump assassination photo: American flag flying, fist in the air, blood streaming from his ear. Or a tradwife dressed in head to toe cottagecore, or Demure Kamala. Right now, our visual and online culture – and, as a result, our politics – are shaped by vibes.

The sinister side of the tradwife movement

Listen | 40:57

DCU professor of gender and digital culture, Debbie Ging, unpacks the tradwife trend which has exploded on TikTok and gone mainstream in 2024. Produced and presented by Aideen Finnegan

Trump has long understood this (the man is basically a meme in a wig). So has Elon Musk, an ardent Trump supporter who is famous for his ability to move markets on nothing but vibes and vapourware. “Nobody is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” he posted to X the morning after the alleged golf course shooting, before hastily deleting the message from his profile.

But the Harris campaign gets vibes too. Whole YouTube supercuts are dedicated to her zealous use of the phrase “What can be, unburdened by what has been” (or, as the Spice Girls might have put it at the very height of Girl Power “if you want my future, forget my past”). Analysts of Harris’s oratorical style have remarked on her new-age vernacular that, like Oprah and her affinity for manifestation gurus, draws heavily on Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. Tolle asks his readers to be “very mindful” and in true American style, not to be held back by the past or by personal circumstances.

The presidential candidate’s speeches check all the right vibes but often risk coming across as an anodyne exercise in centre progressive politics: down with crime, up with housing for first-time home buyers, protect the middle class. To quote The Simpsons (as an elder millennial, this and not TikTok will forever be my core cultural reference point), “Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!”

Hillary Clinton’s campaign failed in 2016 not only because it didn’t get the youth vote, or didn’t get the internet, but maybe because it didn’t get the memo on a cultural shift between rhetoric and vibe. Yes, it was the failure of the right candidate to win the election, but it was also the death of a particular kind of slow, policy-oriented, incremental politics.

Images of Hillary supporters’ ugly crying in the street on the morning after the 2016 election were not just displays of grief at a lost election. They were a waking up to the fact that politics itself was now a harsh vibe where the old rules no longer applied.

Rachel O’Dwyer is a writer and a lecturer in digital cultures in the National College of Art and Design, Dublin