Let It Be Cringe

Most voters are normie dorks. Embrace the cheese.

Photo by Alice Donovan Rouse on Unsplash

There’s a ton of energy around Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, and at least some of what’s happening, is, to borrow from the kids, cringe. It’s cheesy or awkward or goofy or earnest. It’s thoroughly uncool. It’s things like a family band singing about JD Vance to the tune of an ABBA song. It’s an affinity-group call for white women where donations are solicited by imploring participants to “use your privilege for good.” It’s homemade coconut glasses at Harris rallies.

Some of it is entirely bonkers, and a lot is extremely silly. Some of it is just imperfect (see, e.g., JD Vance saying that people without kids shouldn’t be able to vote, and then people who have faced fertility struggles speaking about how painful it is to hear that, and then people correcting them that actually it’s bad to restrict votes from non-parents no matter what the reason). It is only going to get cringier.

But here is the task: If we want to beat Trump, it has to be all hands on deck — and hands off the cynicism and cool-teen posturing and one-upmanship that so often characterizes Democratic infighting, and made Democratic politics so insufferable and toxic in 2016.

Because you know who is extremely cringe and very not cool? The average American voter.