How Embracing Kamala Harris Memes and Brat is Bringing Optimism to the Election
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Love it! Have expanded my vocabulary! Memification! But captures a new approach to politics
I am not sure I understood much of that, which is probably why I am not in Silicon Valley with Rishi, but I like the infectious optimism.
Perhaps USAmerican corporate politics hasn’t much moved on from the European monarchies that the Republic publicly sought to define itself against. It’s worth reading up on the culture clashes that took place during early colonisation, to see how many democratic strands drew from indigenous culture, while many of the strands of political aristocracy drew on the European hierarchical model. Many cultures on either side of the Atlantic had their own forms of ancestor worship, but the British imperial culture embraced the rightwing Great Man (Occasionally Woman) View of History perhaps more than others, and in a peculiarly racist way.
Style and rhetoric may have moved on (a bit), but we have records of how English monarchs have projected their own images since before the Tudors, and before that, Roman Emperors etc. And despite neat succession charts, we find many of these had elite contenders, just like in the aristocratic presidential contests of today. They’re still calling their system a ‘democracy’, and in significant ways the USA does have more electoral options than the British one.
There were some potentially useful scraps of explainers amid the froth, emoting, posing and self-referencing, but these people (like courtiers vying for favour) appear to be shameless partisan cheerleaders. I preferred the analysis from The Listening Post (with more clips and voices):
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-listening-post/2024/7/27/martyr-biden-saviour-kamala
Asking what policies might change (as opposed to rhetoric and style) if Harris replaced Biden as USAmerican President. And what effect on the world beyond their own imperial capitalist homeland.
On the other hand, I’m wondering if the USAmerican electorate is now the most heavily medicated on the planet. Still, it ends on the important point that changing the political-economic system (which must happen one way or another) could result in an even worse one.