If you can’t trust a McKinsey consultant, whom can you trust?
Mask up quickly, liberals! You have two weeks to Stop the Spread: The Harris-24 pandemic is now in full bloom, with Kamala Fever sweeping the nation like the world’s most devlishly engineered superflu — one designed to target only progressives and the mainstream media and send them into foamily rabid paroxysms of slavering fandom for America’s accidental presidential candidate. And make no mistake, the comparison to what the Chinese probably ginned up in a lab in Wuhan a few years back is apt; the origins of this equally infectious disease seem to be pretty artificial as well, even if the spread is organic enough.
Needless to say, that doesn’t make it any less dangerous as a malady — there have already been several documented cases of sufferers slipping a disk from unnaturally straining to find ways to defame J. D. Vance as a pervert. And from what I can tell, catching this bug really will do a number on your spinal column: Everywhere you turn over the past week, you find Democrats who once openly avowed that Kamala was unelectable now alternately rolling over supine and exposing their bellies, or prostrating themselves before their new golden goddess with an enthusiasm so over-performative as to betray palpable anxiety, as well as sore joints.
Now, while we wait for Harris to pick a vice-presidential consort, the anticipation of a royal coronation in August has Democrats eager to reflect on their sins. How could this strong black woman have been overlooked for so long? Why must racism and misogyny always hide such superstars in the shadows of decrepit old white males? And while we’re at it, why are white males in general not feeling the new good vibes? Maybe they just need a chance to gently acknowledge their privilege, and then they’ll be welcomed into the fold. The Harris campaign understands well the importance of outreach like this to doubters, and so it has decided to set the tone in the only way Democrats know how to anymore: hamfistedly crude and alienating racial segmentation.
It’s well known that Harris as well as the Democratic Party writ large currently suffer in the polls with the despised demographic of “white men.” And despite the delirious jubilation of the present moment, everybody on the left is still worried about this, because they can read an electoral map. Some even wistfully theorize about superior replacement forms of Kamala-friendly masculinity, to take the place of the atavistic version currently prevalent among the Great Honky Unwashed. Thus, the existence of White Dudes for Harris: a “space of trust where White Dudes can support each other and work to elect Kamala Harris the next President of the United States.” Founder Ross Morales says that “as white men, we recognize all too clearly the culture of toxic entitlement surrounding Donald Trump. We need to be honest with ourselves and each other about the role we’ve played in our nation’s history — good and bad. We’re creating a space of honesty and trust, where we can support each other and work for a new, brighter future.”
The Harris campaign is sending notable white man Pete Buttigieg as their campaign ambassador to a big online Zoom meeting scheduled to rally the troops tonight — if you can’t trust a McKinsey consultant, whom can you trust? — and as a late addition, it was announced on Sunday night that they’re adding an additional big gun: Mark Hamill, a man every bit as relevant to the current national discourse as the desiccated husk of the Star Wars franchise.
I want to be careful to do justice not only to how agonizingly cringe this is, but also how deeply stupid it is as well. These people feel like, in the words of Freddie de Boer, they are “running for president online, again.” It’s 2016 all over again, only more so, and there are no new tricks in the Democratic quiver: Vote for Kamala because “girl power”; vote for Kamala because white men need to soberly reckon with their privilege. Vote for Kamala because Beyoncé allowed her to use a song as her theme music. (Ah, I too remember the days of “Fight Song.”) Post memes online. Seize the zeitgeist on Twitter — the votes will naturally follow. (From Vulture: “Kamala Harris Must Mobilize ‘Stan’ Armies.”) It’s a formula for failure, and seemingly the only response the Left reflexively reaches for when presented with a candidate that tickles all of their deeply rooted “youth” and “diversity” erogenous zones. (By way of proof: This sort of condescendingly guilt-based racial appeal is by no means limited just to white men. Believe me, you don’t want to know what kinds of humiliations “Karens for Kamala” has been inflicting upon itself this week, but Mary Katharine Ham accurately summarizes here.)
It will work well enough for a crowd of the converted. And yet the people Kamala Harris needs to persuade — in the Sun Belt, in the post-industrial working class areas of Michigan, or even in the beer-sodden northern wastes of darkest Wisconsin for that matter — do not live online. They are not affluent young urban professionals who regularly sit silently on Zoom calls hyping political candidates. Online “enthusiasm” as transparently astroturfed as this by the media-activist class does not reach the lady at your checkout counter or the guy working the building site. Efforts like these probably do succeed at juicing base enthusiasm — but only among the most pre-committed of the base. That has value at the margins. It doesn’t cure a two-percentage-point deficit in Pennsylvania.
So I don’t know about the rest of you losers and squares, but I know what I’ll be doing tonight at 8:00 p.m.: logging into this big “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom confab and expressing my joy to anyone who will listen that the event even exists. I think I’ll fit in perfectly: I am a white dude, after all, and as long as the Harris campaign keeps employing clumsy, self-defeating racial appeals targeted at the McKinsey class rather than the Michael Moore demographic? Well, in that case I’m definitely all for her as well. I love watching a well-deserved catastrophe unfold.