The Kamala Harris Vibe Shift

Critics at Large | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

Society & Culture

4.4 • 679 Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2024

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The announcement of Kamala Harris’s Presidential run has set off one of the most pronounced vibe shifts in recent memory. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz make sense of the torrent of memes; the “unholy, immediate alliance” between the Harris campaign and the British pop artist Charli XCX’s album “BRAT”; and the endless comparisons to Armando Iannucci’s political satire “Veep.” This chaotic but mostly cheerful embrace of Harris’s candidacy stands in contrast to the national mood even a few days prior, when a pervasive sense of doom was dominant. How might we reconcile this moment of boosterism with the very real, long-term reasons for despair? “It’s really no use being a fan, because you tie yourself to something you have no control over,” Cunningham says. “Recenter your ideas of the future in things that you can feel and touch. I think that that is the imaginative problem of our time, especially when it comes to doom or not doom.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Dirty Dancing” (1987)
“BRAT,” by Charli XCX
“Veep” (2012-19)
“I Created ‘Veep.’ The Real-Life Version Isn’t So Funny,” by Armando Iannucci (The New York Times)
“Should We Go Extinct?: A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times,” by Todd May
“The Case for Being Unburdened by What Has Been,” by Rebecca Traister (New York Magazine)
“Are We Doomed? Here’s How to Think About It,” by Rivka Galchen (The New Yorker)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Okay. Have we all opened the quiz?
0:03.3	We have opened the quiz. So this is a BuzzFeed quiz, and the assertion in the headline is, this quiz will reveal if you fell out of a coconut tree, or if you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.
0:17.4	Classic Kamala formulation.
0:19.3	Yes. I would say it's been seven years since I've taken a BuzzFeed quiz.
0:23.7	Yeah.
0:24.2	It's important to note that the questions and answers on this quiz are black letters with green
0:30.4	background.
0:31.2	It's the sort of brat color way is sort of encoded in this.
0:36.9	The iconography is present.
0:38.5	That's right.
0:38.8	Okay.
0:39.0	Rapid fire.
0:39.7	Okay.
0:40.2	First things first. What is your love language? See, this is when I first saw the quiz. I was like, I'm prepared to answer acts of service. But no, that's not the answer. So the choices are, then diagrams, when you're in the party, Buba bump in that beat
0:52.2	drinking diet
0:53.9	Mountain Dew
0:54.6	and then in scare quotes
0:56.5	sitting on a couch. So this is a bit leading. That's what I'm saying. You know what the answer is. It's means all the way down. I would say sitting on a couch without the scare quotes because I love to sit on a couch, but I do not love to make love to
1:11.2	a couch. Right. You know that you'd be setting yourself up. I'd be setting myself up. Guys, I think we all know we're supposed to select Venn diagrams, right? Or, or... I'm bumping that beat. Yeah, Vincent's 100% bumping that. That's literally true. All right, Vincent, go with God. You guys choose what you're going to choose.
1:28.2	Okay, I'm going to sit on a couch, even though, and I'm in my head I'm going to take out the scare quotes.
1:33.8	Do that. I'm going to go, okay. Oh, my God. Just go with Venn diagrams. I'm going with Venn diagrams. even though I do think I'm more of a bump-a-bump than that beat kind of person.
1:41.1	But I'm going with Venn diagrams.
	...

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