Distant Vibes

Welcome to the era of the No Information Voter.

There is a photo of my daughter at age one, smiling in her crib, wearing an Obama onesie.

I don’t remember where we got it. When you’re a young mom, you can’t afford to be picky. Hand-me-downs and donations, discount Target three-packs with hidden humiliating slogans (“Daddy’s Princess”, “Mommy’s Little Man”) that you use because you figure your kid is going to spit up on them anyway.

My guess is it was a gift: everyone I knew was voting for Obama. People who had never voted were registering just to vote for Obama. I was voting for Obama. It was the summer of 2008, and a fever was sweeping the United States, a fever that overtook the only political mood I had known as an adult: post-9/11 fury and fear.

I live in St. Louis, where Obama held the largest rally of his entire campaign, drawing over 100,000 people under the Arch. Part of the reason for the excitement was the prospect of a Black president, but it was more than that. It was the end of Bush. The end of war. The beginning of a new America.

The beginning of a better future for my daughter, I had hoped.

When the global economy collapsed in the fall, my daughter and I were building a tower out of alphabet blocks. My husband arrived home, uncharacteristically upset. He said I should turn on the TV.

Back then, I didn’t watch the news during the day. I was a stay-at-home-scholar-of-post-Soviet-authoritarianism mom, which meant that when my daughter was sleeping, I worked on my PhD research. Aside from the inherent absurdity of my life, which rotated between episodes of “Dora the Explorer” and “Karimov the Killer”, I was a typical American: not glued to politics, not interested in party minutiae, just trying to get by.

But “getting by” became aspirational overnight. My husband and I turned on the news and watched our future end. We would watch it end over and over for years, as economic devastation blanketed the Midwest accompanied by false promises of recovery, with the abandonment of our state by one party and the hostile takeover of it by another, with the Tea Party staging rallies under the Arch where Obama once stood.

Our daughter knocked down the tower of blocks and giggled at the mess. All those little letters, signifying nothing. She was wearing her Obama onesie, which had a rattle that said “O Baby” on it.

A death rattle of America, I thought, except I didn’t think that, that’s a total lie, I thought the future was still there, and that a decent man would lead the country out of this new hell. I was wrong.

By the time our son was born, in 2011, and inherited his sister’s Obama onesie, we would laugh at it like it was the concert T-shirt of a one-hit wonder. We laughed in that dark way you pretend is ironic — but in your heart, where the love for your children lives, you feel the hole where the future once was.

Remember ‘hope and change’? I’d laugh. Remember when everyone believed in that?

I had no particular animosity for Obama; I was just an avid proponent of reality. A proponent, and not a fan. A chronicler, and not of lies.

Nowadays I use the Obama onesie as a cleaning rag. It’s good at removing superficial dust. I keep it intact, washable, so it doesn’t fall apart. I don’t want to forget those bygone days.

It is good to remember when you had hope, so you can know better where to place it.

*          *          *

Since Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the nominee, drawing record funding and an early tidal wave of enthusiasm, young people have asked whether this is what it felt like when Obama ran.

I don’t think it possible for anyone who lived through the Obama era to answer that question accurately, given the massive changes in technology and in our own lives. The sheer chaos of it mars memory. Everything in 2008 felt novel: the election of the first Black president, a “social media” company called Facebook that spied on us but let us reconnect with long-lost fiends, the devastating economic crash.

The intersection of these phenomena made it hard to judge Obama’s first term. He arrived at the culmination of crises he neither caused nor remedied, but which would define the perilous years ahead.

At some level, my generation never moved on from 2008.

In 2008, I had a toddler and the economy was collapsing, both of which were novel. Now my children are teenagers, and everything has been collapsing for their entire lives. Nothing feels new, though it still somehow manages to feel unprecedented. All politics feel like a rerun, and so does the Kamala Harris campaign.

It's as if all the desperation and fear of the past sixteen years have exploded, producing energy that consultants and cultists are struggling to bottle and bury before it leads to something good.

Initially the Harris campaign felt like opening a window inside a morgue. For a week or so, millions embraced the sweet shock of change: the shredding of half of the Biden-Trump doom ticket, the hope that the other half was done for as well. They spoke freely, because anything seemed possible.

I wrote of my surprise pleasure at this turn of events and warned that we must avoid the road that would destroy this newfound freedom and steer us to autocracy: political cults.

Political cults have dominated America since the rise of MAGA, structuring American life in a way distinct from past presidential cults built on true popularity, like those of Kennedy, Reagan, and Obama. Modern political cults are funded by billionaires and astroturfed by millions of bots and paid influencers who pose as organic supporters.

Today both the Democratic and Republican parties operate on cult logic, which means they sometimes have the same policies, but wrapped in different rhetoric — because cultists will abide anything so long as their leader is the one pushing it. Policies they would protest if they were carried out by the other side are suddenly deemed acceptable when pushed by their own.

All of the mutually cheered policies have thus far been indefensible.

Biden won slavish devotion from die-hard Democrats despite his Trumpian policies: letting covid spread and hiding public health data, bypassing federal restrictions and environmental regulations to build Trump’s Wall, countenancing sedition and backing Cop Cities, and worst of all, abetting genocide in Gaza.

But among regular voters, Biden was the least popular Democratic president of my lifetime. When he ended his campaign, Harris had nowhere to go but up. And up she went, with relieved voters willing to wait, at the start, for her agenda to be fleshed out.

One would think someone seeking to be president would want to share their ideas and plans. Surely someone who was vice-president for three years would have plenty of time to think about policy — and to learn from the recent past. Voters had made their frustration with Biden’s mistakes clear.

But that has yet to be the case. Perhaps the Democratic National Convention this week will force a formal platform. But the Democrats’ current plan is from 2020, and while Harris has floated some ideas — including retracting old promises; she now favors fracking — she has no official agenda yet.

According to Politico, Democratic officials do not want Harris to reveal her policies until after the election, hoping she will coast to victory on vibes. This would seem improbable but for the fact that Harris does not, in fact, have a policy agenda to counter this claim.

The Democrats have gone from “Vote Blue No Matter Who” to “Vote Blue No Matter What.” They’ve gone from chastising the “low information voter” to creating a new political ideal: the “no information voter”.

Harris cultists responded to the news of a campaign without policies in two ways: denying that it is true or insisting that it is fine, because “all that matters is winning”.

This blind fealty to a political figure, in which even the most basic questions are greeted with hostility, is how authoritarianism is born. The authoritarianism can arrive in two forms: passing right-wing policies under a Democratic veneer (which is what Biden had been doing as his poll numbers tanked) or failing to stave off the autocratic attacks of Trump and his Republican backers.

Trump and his criminal cohort attempted a coup in 2020 that was unpunished, allowing him free to run again. This is the first time this has happened in world history — even Hitler went to prison in between his putsch and presidency — but US social scientists express little interest in the social and political conditions that made this disaster possible.

No officials are telling the US public how their right to vote will be protected: particularly with militias pledging violence, Trump lackeys vowing not to certify Democratic wins, and the decision possibly going to SCOTUS, which has granted Trump immunity and will almost certainly rule in his favor.

It is likely that Harris will win the election — both the popular vote and the electoral college — but that does not mean she will get to be president.

Both Harris and Biden should be asked how they plan to handle this crisis, which is not a crisis that can be solved with “vibes” but is a real and systemic threat. It is also not a crisis of November, but of now; not a crisis of voting, but of violence.

The same is true of Project 2025, the slate of repressive policies that Republicans plan to usher in under Trump, who has long served as their vehicle to run the red. Parts of Project 2025’s extremist agenda has already been implemented. Democratic officials warn against the agenda ceaselessly yet have offered no concrete plan to stop it.

They also have not addressed the fact that the GOP will not abandon their plan if Harris does become president. Contrary to its name, Project 2025 has no expiration date.

*          *          *

After my daughter was born, my mom gave me a box of my own baby clothes. Among the bell-bottoms and turtlenecks was a pink, long-sleeved shirt. It said “Ms.” on it.

The Equal Rights Amendment had been ratified in 35 of the required 38 states when my mom became pregnant. The “Ms.” baby shirt was meant to celebrate the future of gender equality that my generation was promised. But by the time I was old enough to wear it in 1979, the deadline for ratification had passed, and the ERA was effectively dead.

The “Ms.” shirt became a bitter joke, much like the Obama onesie did later. My mom says she doesn’t remember where she got it: from a friend, from a wish. But I know she did not envision a world in which her daughter and granddaughter would have fewer rights than she did at my age.

I walk around St. Louis and see hopeful moms in Kamala gear, pushing strollers with babies in Kamala onesies. I see darkness on the near horizon, with the election promising tyranny or violence, and possibly a brighter world beyond it, if we can get through this time with our integrity and humanity intact.

That means speaking up and refusing to back down. That means demanding of our leaders the world we want for our daughters and our sons.

That means treating Kamala Harris not as a cult figure, or as a fragile vessel who will break when lightly pushed, but as a responsible and capable woman who may soon hold the future of the world in her hands.

We deserve to, at the least, know what Harris is planning for that future. At best, to embrace it; at worst, to figure out how to survive it — for our children’s sake, and our own.

*          *          *

Thank you for reading! This newsletter is funded entirely by voluntary paying subscribers. That allows me to keep it open to everyone, and I don’t want to paywall in times of peril. If you like what I do, please subscribe!