Idiotic Design

The featured image in this post is a screenshot from CNN’s YouTube channel, where the title of a video promised “What the data is saying about who Kamala Harris will likely choose as VP.” It includes headshots of the front-runners, with a precise percentage value under each one. When you watch the video, you see that the “data” is gathered not from polls, but from people betting on the outcome.

In other words: nobody knows shit. (And also: 24-hour news channels were a mistake).

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve broken all my pledges to be a mentally-healthier and better-functioning human, and I’ve gone right back to obsessively reading social media.1 The reason is because Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign is nailing it.

They came out swinging with two “channels:” first there’s the campaign, which releases official statements in response to significant events, with thoughtful takes that stay true to the campaign’s message of freedom, unity, and moving forward. Second, there’s “Kamala HQ,” which calls itself the “rapid response” team, and posts memes directly responding to whatever is the hot topic of the moment. It’s legitimately funny and fun to read, building on the unfamiliar sense of optimism that came with Biden’s endorsement and the start of Harris’s campaign, and somehow against all odds making it actually enjoyable to follow a US presidential campaign.

The only reason I’m not even more impressed with Harris’s social media team is because 90% of the time, they just post completely unedited clips and statements from their opponents. Over the past three-and-a-half years of a mostly functioning government, I’d forgotten just how bad the Republicans are at everything, and how much Trump and Vance seem so eager to just completely shit all over themselves on camera.

But again, I think Harris’s campaign has come out strong. And it’s not just because they have a social media team that’s young enough never to have used dial-up internet. It feels like more than any other Democratic campaign in my lifetime, they understand what a Presidential campaign needs to do: tell us what we want to hear and also what we need to hear.

For years, it’s felt like the universe has been malfunctioning. Largely because an impossible thing happened that never should have: Trump went into office instead of Hillary Clinton. There’s no reality in which that makes sense, and yet it’s the one we seem to be living in, and still recovering from. We had a well-known career politician who was running against someone who was so completely, transparently, unfit to serve in any office, not just unqualified but actively incompetent, unlikeable, untrustworthy, and openly deceitful. Clinton should have won the election.

But still… should she, though? No doubt there have been countless books detailing what the Clinton campaign did wrong, books counter-acting those books by calling them “misogynistic,” books about what America did wrong, books about the misunderstood voters of the heartland, etc. etc. And yet, even speaking as someone who voted for Clinton, and who still believes she would’ve been a capable and competent president, I couldn’t tell you a specific aspect of her campaign that I was enthusiastic about. It was only about diverting catastrophe, rather than moving forward. As I recall, all of the policy promises were just more of the same standard Democratic Party platform.

Even the “I’m With Her” slogan had a sense of resignation to it: everybody kind of assumed that of course she’d be the nominee, because she’s one of the highest-profile Democrats, and it was her turn. But we were reminded that this is progress because we were voting for a woman for President of the United States can you even believe it?! It was an odd choice when you consider that the people most loyal to the campaign were also the ones least likely to find it novel or even remarkable to have a woman President. Who was it playing to? Not any Democrats born after 1965.

After the election results, I went onto Facebook, angrily yelling like Jennifer Love Hewitt in I Know What You Did Last Summer?, trying to pick a fight with the people in my home town who I knew had voted for Trump.2 Only one former classmate responded, with a comment that said “maybe they should have run a better campaign.” It made me furious, probably as it was intended to. And I want to make it clear that it’s still bullshit: there’s no defending voting for Trump, just as there’s no defending having him be the candidate for the third time, after such a catastrophic failure of a presidency — especially considering how many people died as a result of his deliberate misinformation about the COVID pandemic. But it’s also true that the Democrats should’ve run a better campaign.

There’s an analogy from David Sedaris, paraphrased: it’s like being on a plane where the flight attendant offers you a choice of a pile of cold shit with shards of broken glass in it, or the chicken, and you ask, “How is the chicken cooked?” That does a good job of summing up where we’ve been for the last three elections. But I’m just now coming around to the idea that it’s perfectly reasonable to ask how the chicken is cooked.

And I feel like that’s where most of my own enthusiasm for Kamala Harris’s campaign is coming from. She’s acknowledging that both of these things are true: No, this shouldn’t even be a contest, but yes, I’m still going to put in the work to make the case to earn your vote.

The first part is for getting us out of whatever Bizarro Dimension we’ve been stuck in for the past 12 years. We’re not crazy when we think that these people are weird. We are allowed to call out obvious lies. We are entitled to expect consequences. We can point out how the media has abandoned journalistic principles in favor of the media attention of a horse race, describing the most inane bullshit as if it were just politics as usual. We can stop thinking of ourselves as eternally-persecuted, marginalized underdogs, and instead realize that the GOP isn’t speaking for the majority of Americans, but just a lunatic fringe that has been allowed to control the messaging for 50 years now.

The second part is for breaking the cycle, where every two years, the Democrats start screaming at us that we have to choose between despair or disaster. Part of that is because they’ve never done a great job of communicating how good government is mostly invisible. The unspoken advantage of a properly-functioning government, run by people who see government as public service, is that stuff just works and we don’t have to think about it. It’s going to be on Harris’s campaign to keep pointing out all the stuff they’ve accomplished to get us out of the tailspin of the previous administration.3 There needs to be an acknowledgement of “this is how government is supposed to work, and this is how you benefit.”

Ultimately, I think the biggest advantage to becoming so thoroughly disillusioned with The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Democratic party, is that I no longer have to be so gullible in the face of political media. I’ve always found politics boring, and I’ve felt a little guilty that I go mostly on vibes, while every other adult seemed to be so much better-informed about the political process. Now that we’re seeing a racist felon running his third presidential campaign, though, and the Times and Post are doing everything they can to undermine his opponent, I think it’s abundantly clear that nobody knows what the hell is going on. This is chaos, and anybody who claims to be able to control it or even predict it should be immediately suspect.

Reading the thinkpieces and social media feeds of the people who I once assumed had it all figured out, I’m now seeing how they’re actually flailing just as much as anybody else. The biggest difference is that they can flail more confidently, because they know the key names and topics of the moment by obsessing over political news.

If you ask me, that’s no way to live. The whole reason we have a representative democracy in the first place is so that we don’t have to spend all of our lives trying to stay on top of the issues. It’s better not to have to know all the names of the Trump administration, just so that you can stay on top of the giant spreadsheet of corruption. I think the people telling us we have to be constantly following the news, lest we become the dreaded “low information voter,” are the ones who are invested in 24-hour news channels and social media. In reality, it’s the campaign’s job to encapsulate, consolidate, and communicate the information you need to cast a vote. They’re paid the big bucks to give me the right vibes.

And again, I’m feeling energized and optimistic because the Harris campaign just seems to get that. They’re not just telling us that “Trump is a demagogue” as if that’s the end of it. They’re keeping the mature, adult part of the conversation on Harris’s accomplishments as AG, senator, and VP, and avoiding mentioning Trump at all except to launch off from his incompetence and irrelevance into a more positive promise.

Meanwhile, the “rapid response” side is paying a lot more attention to Trump and Vance, but to show how they’re weird, unpopular among normal people, and regressive. The media and key Democrats have spent years carrying so much water for these assholes, pumping them up, emphasizing what a huge threat they are, describing them with $10 words Trump doesn’t even understand, and then acting surprised that people could possibly keep supporting them. The Kamala HQ team understands that you just need to point and laugh and watch them slowly deflate.

A few days ago4, Trump had an absolutely disastrous interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, saying… well, basically exactly the same old bullshit you’d expect him to say in front of the National Association of Black Journalists. It was offensive enough that the Harris campaign issued a more formal statement to make it clear that it was inexcusable. They still ran unedited clips, handing the asshole a microphone and giving him space to remind the world, yet again, what a racist old prick he is.

My first reaction was the same as it has been forever: finally people will see how truly despicable he is and reject him! And for a bit on social media, the reactions were of the “oh boy he’s cooked now” variety. But then the very smart and insightful people piped up to warn us that this was just playing into his master plan. He’s keeping everyone talking about him! He’s flaring up his base! He’s sending messages to his supporters! It’s all part of the nth-dimensional strategy he’s devised! The same old bullshit that comes up over and over; I’d just been off social media for long enough to forget how the cycle works.

And I was dismissive of the whole idea until Pete Buttigieg — one of the few people that I believe really does have some insight into what’s going on — said that it was part of the strategy, and that people had focused on outrage instead of the optimism the Harris campaign had been building. The latter part is undoubtedly true; all the time spent being angry at Trump is taking time away from Harris to build on her momentum and communicate her platform. Or just have a healthy, peaceful life, for that matter.

But no offense to Secretary Pete, but I’m still skeptical about the “strategy” part. It’s never sat right with me when anyone attributes any kind of intentionality to the Trump campaign. How can any group of people be so grossly incompetent, and yet capable of doing elaborate end-runs around journalists and politicians who are not only far, far, more intelligent but have decades of experience?

I realized, when listening to the No Such Thing As a Fish podcast, that it’s like their recurring conversations about biological systems that have evolved to be impossibly complex and specific, and how we try to attribute intention to them. How does this parasitic plant “know” to grow its roots towards another plant? How does this virus “know” which specific cells and which specific parts of a cell to attack? When we see a system that works so perfectly, we feel like it must have been intended to work that way.

Or in movie terms: we can understand how a bad guy could orchestrate an elaborate plan over decades, developing counter-measures for every contingency, to become emperor of an entire galaxy. That could be an interesting story.5 It’s harder to understand how a super-powerful invading force from Mars could be poised to take over the entire planet, but then suddenly wiped out by something as common as Earth germs. It feels less satisfying, because it just happened.

So I think of the Trump campaign — and the modern GOP that has shat itself out of relevance by swearing fealty to him — as a kind of fungus. A parasitic rot that happens to have found exactly the right conditions for it to thrive in 21st century American politics. From the outside, it could seem masterful, but only because it took so many aspects of American culture, all combined, to generate such an exquisite turd. And all the hateful and miserable people surrounding him don’t believe in him, or even like him; they just know that somehow, it works, and it’s the best way for them to get whatever anti-American bullshit they want done.

And that, essentially, is why I’m feeling hopeful for the first time in a long time. I’ve been happy during the Biden and Harris administration (again, note the giant red asterisk), and am assuming, based on Harris’s record and Biden’s ties to the legacy of the Democratic party, that it’ll be a slightly more modern and progressive version of that. But mostly I’m just happy and relieved that they’re rejecting all the fear and panic, and instead running a campaign that refuses to take any shit, but still emphasizes joy, humor, freedom, and celebration. Is that nothing more than “vibes?” Maybe, but I’m skeptical anybody else has anything more valuable than that. And I’m happy that the vibes are so good for once.

1
Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram, at least. Twitter is still inexcusable garbage and everyone should delete their account immediately.

2
The media loves to show full-on MAGA types at rallies (especially The Daily Show, which seemed to have changed the format of the show to be nothing more than dunking on them), but I am a lot more creeped out by the normal-presenting people who are polite to your face, but have no trouble going to the polls and secretly voting for trash who actively works against you.

3
As always, any praise I give to the Biden/Harris administration has an enormous red asterisk to emphasize that backing the attacks on Palestinians is inexcusable.

4
I’d initially typed “last week,” without even realizing entire months pass by in a few days nowadays.

5
If told by someone else, maybe.

1 Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram, at least. Twitter is still inexcusable garbage and everyone should delete their account immediately.

2 The media loves to show full-on MAGA types at rallies (especially The Daily Show, which seemed to have changed the format of the show to be nothing more than dunking on them), but I am a lot more creeped out by the normal-presenting people who are polite to your face, but have no trouble going to the polls and secretly voting for trash who actively works against you.

3 As always, any praise I give to the Biden/Harris administration has an enormous red asterisk to emphasize that backing the attacks on Palestinians is inexcusable.

4 I’d initially typed “last week,” without even realizing entire months pass by in a few days nowadays.

5 If told by someone else, maybe.