In her last campaign, undertaken at a time of millenarian expectations on the left, the phrase “Kamala is a cop” probably hurt her. But at a moment when the Democratic Party wants to memory-hole calls to defund the police, some who were once turned off by Harris’s record as a prosecutor are thrilling to her law-and-order case against Trump. Her pop culture fluency is delighting Democrats who’d either never known or forgotten that politics can be fun.

Well before there was serious talk about Biden dropping out, queer influencers had started memeing Harris into icon status; on the Hard Fork podcast, the journalist Casey Newton said a friend had made him a Harris-themed coconut tree T-shirt back in February. That meant that when she became the presumptive nominee, there was already an online repository of affectionate Harris content waiting to be remixed and made viral.

And the more it went viral, the more Democratic voters emerging from a carapace of dread wanted to be part of it.

https://archive.ph/GKYqs

  • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    36·
    4 months ago

    Her pop culture fluency is delighting Democrats who’d either never known or forgotten that politics can be fun.

    The whole reason this coconut tree meme stuff takes off is that it’s not because of Kamala’s “pop culture fluency” (which she doesn’t have), but that it seems to have started as a grassroots thing that had nothing to do with her and her campaign staffers. It’s just her being unhinged and saying weird shit and people memeing about it. No PR ghoul would’ve dared to touch her coconut tree clip with a ten foot pole. That’s exactly why people like it. If the campaing leans into this too hard instead of letting it run its course, if the Dem establishment picks it up and posts about it instead of just amplifying it on social media, they’ll pokemon go to the polls the entire thing.