All Vibes No Talk

We know who Trump is—but who is Harris?

White House former chief of staff John Kelly went on the record with The New York Times last week warning voters that Trump “fits the general definition of a fascist,” and “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.” A timely intervention into the presidential election discourse just two weeks out, Kerry’s interview has made headlines. But what interests me is not so much Kerry ‘calling it what it is’, so to speak, but the nontrivial way he went about it: “In response to a question about whether he thought Mr. Trump was a fascist, Mr. Kelly first read aloud a definition of fascism that he had found online.”

It is essential to recognize here the novelty of what’s happening: one of the highest ranking former members of the US cabinet just read aloud a definition of a word to The New York Times. Kerry didn’t offer his own perspective before offering an absolute truth, and then aligned Trump to that truth. It is his commitment to definition, an inarguable last resort as the world’s crises can no longer support ambiguity, that raises the necessary alarm bells as voters head to the polling stations. It is a big deal that Kelly said these things in this way.

But there is a second subtle side to this: As Kelly goes back to the dictionary to compare Trump to a fascist, who is doing the same for Harris? And even if someone did try to define her, what is her definition?

This photograph of Kamala Harris’s grandniece Amara Ajagu looking up as her great aunt delivers the keynote address at the 2024 DNC (Credit: NYT Staff Photographer Todd Heisler) could be a starting point. Two weeks out from Election Day, the frame captures everything that the Harris campaign seeks to convey to voters: the promise of representation, the hope of the next generation, Harris’ strong and humble middle class roots. “More so than most little girls, Ajagu can say that Harris could be the first president who looks like her,” says CNN. 

But curiously, there are no faces. Ajagu, foregrounded, is faceless and blurred, and Harris’ head is so small, her features so faint as they peak over the royal podium, that at a glance she could be any female politician of color. In the photo, Harris is a figurehead, orating from her pedestal, flanked by the symmetry of two American flags. Her niece, almost half the photograph, is tuned to the lowest aperture. 

Harris (Maya Rudolph) said it best on SNL: “My campaign is like the Sabrina Carpenter song “Espresso:” the lyrics are vague but the vibe slaps.” It is the broader ethos of the Harris campaign, and perhaps a larger shift in modern-day politics, to run not on policy, but on vibes. We don’t need to see Ajagu or Harris’ face clearly because their individuality is not what is important, or what Harris offers specifically as a political candidate, but instead the profound, generational importance of Harris even as a candidate. When young women of color see someone who looks like them run for president, they will be empowered to strive for political leadership themselves. “Looks like her” alludes not to Harris’ political blueprint for the next four years, but the sheer power of what we call “representation.” 

The word operates on two planes. Representation can be to speak on behalf of somebody (legal or political representation, for example) or the depiction of someone or a group of people in a certain quantity or state (the way Oppenheimer was represented in his biopic, the way African-Americans are represented in the military). When we talk about politics, for a very long time we have been talking about the former. Before the how, there was a what. Representation had to exist before it could be subject to analysis. This country was established on acts of violence, greed, and erasure, and so for most of history, achieving any degree of representation for marginalized groups was the difference between life or death, visibility and dissolution.

The “what” slowly gained momentum. Civil rights leaders and organizers and politicians and ordinary citizens pushed for change that became visible. Language adjusted in suit. It is now in good fashion to condemn racism and prejudice at the corporate and professional level, and discourse around inclusion is somewhat mainstream. People of all different looks and backgrounds now have power and money— and some still certainly don’t—but life for a broader set of demographics presents more choices. And choice, politically, looks a lot like freedom. Then 2016 shocked half of the country, and there were other people who wanted representation, too, and they elected a candidate who threatened the architecture of all of this progress. Like a parent who realizes their child is a bad person, liberals looked inward: How could we let this happen? As history seemed to repeat itself, liberal counterparties fought the only way they knew how.

The dismissal of so many lives triggered a wonderful outpouring of voices. The rise of memoir and personal narrative and auto-fiction, the infusion of social conversations into television and film and podcasts and music, the production of art in favor of individual experience. With every story shared and voice amplified, with every augmentation of representations’ “how,” there is a notion that things are better because of it. Representation became a movement. The DNC photo, then, becomes an emblem of not just representation but of how far the movement has taken us. A culturally aware, enlightened body politic to last for all future generations. An applaud for progress, a beacon of hope. Harris’ image, the core of her campaign, her definition, right?

Yet, as we head into the 2024 Presidential election, four Ivy League college presidents—all women, one Black woman—resigned from their posts this year due to the damaging consequences of institutional neutrality amidst ideological conflict. Despite a lead presidential nominee being a woman—and a quarter of Congress female—women will die, and are dying, because of lack of reproductive care. Affirmative Action a legal fossil, the post-2016 boom in public social consciousness led to dwindling corporate diversity recruitment efforts and swallowed DEI departments. What about all of these stories, these voices, this representation that was supposed to save us? What is left of representation is what always tends to be left of social movements at the end of the day: its value proposition. Content still churns out salaries for “storytelling.” Companies purchase it for good PR and yearly reports. Universities plaster it on their glossy brochures but then condemn it when it becomes uncomfortable, courts rule it illicit. Publishing houses purchase it for accolades, film studios for brownie points. Political campaigns—for votes. 

But wait. On the margin of this argument is an interesting question, one more urgent than the debated moral value of representation. Can we group politics in with the rest of the world? Hollywood, for example, is another industry predicated on the value proposition of representation. Actors are hired to represent characters, sometimes fictional and sometimes based on real people. When actors of diverse backgrounds are cast to play characters, which oftentimes means that the stories are about diverse characters, we consider this a morally good thing. The world is diverse, so our movie sets should be too. 

But politics is not Hollywood. Art-making, whether it’s a novelist or a standup comedian, promises a degree (however small) of separation between content and creator. The boundary blurs, of course, but the two remain distinct. What makes politics tricky—but fundamentally different from art—is that the candidate is both the content and the creator, the writer and the story, the filmmaker and the blockbuster. Actors are good because they can convince the audience they are someone else, writers are good because they tell good stories. But we vote for Harris or Trump because of who they are. 

The distinction is subtle and complicated. We live in the political architecture of a representative democracy, which existed long before art was so integrated into the global economy. Now, this representative democracy can no longer exist as is without the industry of “representation” itself, each pillar of culture holding the other up. The voter has been conditioned by the inundation of content from other media platforms to consume politics like it is art. Politics, like art, has become open to meaning and interpretation. Mainstream rhetoric hooks its claws into Heisler’s frame with this same logic: politicians of color are actors who represent the kind of person who will, in an unspecified way, serve the greater good. It’s the dependence we have on both the modern value proposition of representation (the “how”) and the foundational principles of representation as a function of our state’s governing body (the “what”)—and, importantly, the dependence they have on each other— that is dulling the most consequential yet plainly obvious point in the upcoming election. Harris is the better choice because she is a better politician. 

Kelly called out Trump for fitting the definition of a dictator, so we should do the same with Harris. Harris fits the definition of a promising presidential candidate, a competent leader, and respects democratic processes. We say Harris will inspire generations of young women of color, and that this is possibly the paramount purpose of her campaign and the best thing about it. But it’s not. Ajagu may be inspired by her great-aunt, but many young black girls, or young people, don’t look up to Harris. Just because she is a woman doesn’t mean she will be perfect, either. Harris may be the product, but she stands for no one but herself. Politicians do not represent ideals, or imagination, or the future. Their campaigns may, their ads may, their speeches may. But they are people, not stories, and their faces can’t hide when the camera is up close. This is real life where war and bodies are at stake, and the world is getting too serious to think about what either candidate represents. Harris may be running on vibes, but she is also the real flesh and blood.