brat green glasses: a theory (part one)

the drearysleepy eyes of american empire look to the club

~this piece grew from a small, casual writeup about my thoughts on the DNC and has grown tremendously as i began to dig into books, articles, lectures, etc. and the ideas accumulated and the word count ballooned from 2,000 to 8,000 to 12,000 until i eventually realized this piece would be much too big for one single post and so instead i’ll be posting it in multiple parts over the course of 3ish weeks~

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IF YOU LOVE IT, IF YOU HATE IT, I DON’T FUCKING CARE WHAT YOU THINK. - CHARLI XCX

As Joshua Hill correctly posited two weeks ago: the 4chan Republicans have finally lost the culture war. It’s been a long eight years since the republican party became a spin-off of the Celebrity Apprentice and gradually hemorrhaged out most of its stodgy old Bushes and McCains and Romneys, becoming, by this point, a handful of very surface level borderline personality disorders running a presidential campaign consisting mostly of podcast appearances.

The republican party is no longer that of Ronald Reagan (may he rot in hell) and i think it has become very clear with time that this may well be a permanent shift. I doubt Reagan would recognize it at all, and i can’t help but wonder how all the white, super-PAC, conservative thinktank types who still wear Reagan-Bush hats around grocery stores feel about the republican party’s current cabal of deeply strange, 4chan-coded wannabe renegades. I think they feel embarrassed,—even if they won’t openly admit it.

So here’s the question: where do the neocons go if they feel (understandably) uncomfortable and embarrassed by the state of their currently anemiated party?

The libertarians and the tea party are not at all viable options for electoral victory, so like , , , where’s the Reaganites’ alternative? What is the alternative to their currently sinking ship, filling up at breakneck speed with some of the most annoying people on the planet?

This bizarre ideological shift towards the petty internet troll of it all has been an ongoing trend for GOP for almost ten years at this point, very much playing out in the open for all to see,—and by this point it’s fair to say that everyone, including the republican voter base, is exhausted by it,—but just two months ago now there was a major catalyst in American politics: a major shakeup in the Democrat’s ticket. The old man had been ousted due to increasing frailty, possible dementia, deep unpopularity within the party, decrepit posture, etc., etc., and Harris has stepped in to galvanize a large portion of the Dems who, naturally, felt like Biden was a losing candidate and nobody wants to be lame.

Most of all, though, there was no way for Biden to possibly live up to the precedent set by the ‘08 Obama campaign, that precedent the DNC has yearned so strongly for since 2016: namely, Obama’s style of crowd work, straight posture, beautiful speeches (often about nothing at all outside the vaguest of platitudes, however). The perfect presidential candidate for the Democrats since Carter’s sweeping failure in 1980 has been something of an empty vessel for voters, a fridge door for whatever magnet you want to put up, a blank space for constituents to project their hopes upon, an nearly empty bottle of handsoap you can continue to water down forever. The perfect democratic politician is an empty vessel for the average voter’s nostalgia for high school americana, and maybe for The West Wing; they’re an empty vessel for whom voters nationwide can reflect themselves off of like a mirror,—”who wouldn’t want to get a beer sometime with Obama!” they say.

As in: yes the millionaire Democratic presidential candidate cares as you do very deeply about every woman’s reproductive rights; yes the millionaire democratic candidate who worked for Mckinsey for fifteen years thinks like you do in that the nationwide childhood hunger rates are abhorrent; yes the millionaire democratic candidate who voted for increased weapons shipments to Israel also worries like you do about the hungry families in Gaza (“as soon as israel nabs those rascally Hamas thugs, then you’ll get your ceasefire you want so much,” they say); yes the millionaire democratic candidate thinks like you do that the other side of the isle are freaks and that’s why you need to vote blue no matter who, there’s only two of us in this room right now, us and them, and there’s simply no alternative to the two parties so why show any dissent and possibly cede sentiment to those freaks over there? Please vote. Pokémon go to the polls.

Kamala’s staff, who seems to have been genuinely waiting in the wings for this very moment to shine, set off in July like a firecracker, slinging out Gen Z and millenial cultural signifiers and flooding meme accounts across cyberspace with coconuts memes, the context, general allegiances to pop music, collaborating with the swiftie contingent of the american electorate, appealing to the club scenes, to poptimism generally, and ensnaring for the Democratic party their most forward momentum since, idk, 2008?

And out of seemingly nowhere, after ten months of slowly losing the youth vote over the Palestine issue, the Democratic party seemingly suddenly reigned it all in at once with Charli’s tweet heard ‘round the world, sounding off like a gunshot, like a wrecking ball, like a pink diamond in the dark, like the long sigh of half a million leftists who realized only gradually what had just happened.

Then the DNC happened. The pro-palestine protests outside the convention hall fell far below expectations, the entire issue feels to swept away and nearly memoryholed by the wash of internet cycles behind Harris’s ascendency,—and to be completely fair, Kamala’s candidacy does legitimately feel fresh in a deep-breath-of-morning-air sort of way: for once it’s not an old stodgy white man and it’s not a war criminal (though that’s not to say Harris won’t easily fit that mold later, being a former prosecutor and all).

But the worst part about it, what i’ve been feeling and what i imagine is likely a potential root cause to all the election malaise from the more dour and ruminating personal-political side of Substack, is that BLM and the protest feeling in America since 2016, all its large scale mobilizations, all its anti-cop sentiment, all the pushes for medicare for all, all its ascendency to the mainstream, feels as if it can be finally let go. It can be let to the wayside for a return to some semblance of normalcy. “What exactly did it accomplish anyway?” is the feeling. Protests feel, for many people, bound up in the period of the last 8 years that we’re collectively and very justifiably sick of. So naturally there’s a lining up behind Kamala Harris, a prosecutor, because maybe it’ll put things to a rest for a bit. And there is a collective exhaustion; we’re exhausted; i’m exhausted;—aren’t you exhausted?

Here Comes the Smarm

It’d be fair to say, i think, that the democrats have won the culture war entirely since July. But not just from the far-right goons that hold the Rebulican party hostage. There’s a sickly sweet, smarm about all this victory,—the Democrat establishment is clearly elated to move past Palestine,—and Kamala’s “I’m speaking” line at her Michigan rally, in response to a handful of free Palestine protestors, has been repackaged into merch. Not a great sign of things to come, certainly. And if there’s been one consistent winner in American politics these past ten years besides the rich and the powerful it’s been t-shirt salespeople.

As is often the case, Ryan Broderick hit the nail on its head when he wrote how smarm is back in force in his recent Garbage Day piece;—and can’t you feel it? Smarm is so back. The classic Gawker piece on smarm describes it as it is: a way for those people in power to damper down all criticism by pulling on a leather jacket with a “hater’s be hatin’” patch stitched on one arm and a #girlboss stitched on the other, next to a rainbow flag and a COEXIST. The smarm allows democrats to completely ignore the left-wing of their party completely,—we will see whether this works in the long run,—and it most importantly keeps any potential dissidents in the party out of the convention, but even moreso it keeps the door open to the extraordinarily wealthy republican donors in case they want to step in.

And just to clarify here: by all means i want Trump to eat shit in november. He would be horrendous for the country, and his election, though floundering now, could pick up steam following next week’s debate, but at the same time it’s important to keep in mind what forces we’re allying ourselves alongside against the (both very real and very simulated by mass media) boogyman of the far-right.

At the same time, it’s likely the neocons of the Republican party have never truly believed in their morally pure Christian nationalism beyond its use in political capture,—it’s a similar vein to the I’m-just-like-you-and-I-truly-believe-in-what-concerns-you of the Democratic party,—but now that the American median demographic has changed, and continues changing, as the Millenial generation becomes poised to inerent the astronomical wealth held previously by the Baby Boomer generation, those Christian fundamentals are no longer nearly as relevant as they were in the 80s or 90s when there was genuine panic over witchcraft in Dungeons & Dragons,—and could you genuinely imagine anything similar to that happening now? No, of course not.

There have been attempts to resurrect that sort of reactionary christian morality that so defined the Republicans since the 80s but it seems to have only really worked electorally in Florida for Desantis,—which, if you know anything about Florida’s electorate, it makes quite a bit of sense. Otherwise it fallen incredibly flat on a national scale. The racist old NRA member living in the boonies of Wisconsin or Michigan simply doesn’t hate gay people anymore, they’ve simply had too many talks with extended family,—so many of the boomer generation have grandchildren or a nephew who are open and out with their sexuality, and while some of the old farts have instead chosen to separate themselves from their families and get into verbal spats over thanksgiving dinner, many of them have changed. It’s much more difficult to use a populist dogwhistle against a minority when so much of the majority white-christian has grandchildren who are a part of that minority. Hearts have softened. That’s not to say in ever way they have, especially in terms of the lingering and intense transphobia that permeates both parties,—though not as openly on the democrat side, theirs is more of a generalized apathy towards trans people—but queer identity fearmongering does seem to have generally simmered out as political strategists increasingly have found it’s not a winning platform for a majority of the electorate.

And having placed almost all their cards in the culture wars that they’ve now clearly lost, there’s no real way out for the republican party forward except a spiraling into the unelectable weirdo trite that they’ve committed themselves to. Like what the hell would they do after Trump loses and continues to maintain a firm weirdo-populist chokehold on the party?

Brat Green Glasses: the theory

Donors and corporate interests, those ghosts of the koch brothers which have always steered the two parties in the United States, are not at all bound down to the republicans or the democrats besides a blind allegiance to their own history, and it’s clear, going forward, that those donors and corporate interests who found refuge in republican policies may not simply recognize their party anymore. The republican party has abandoned the neocon CIA-wall street people in a way,—maybe not all of them, sure, but how long will it take for their embarrassment at the behavior of their party for them to make some sort of change? How long until they realize what’s happened to their grand old party as its spiraled so deeply into the most uncomfortable vibes of the Trump years?

The democratic party has in recent years tried very hard to win over these donors, these corporate interests, these voting demographics,—much moreso than any appeal to leftists beyond a surface level,—and of course a large part of this push towards and roping in conservatives into the Democratic party is a genuine part of a general effort at dissuading voters away from another four years of Donald Trump (understandable),—but who’s to say that if the Democrats take the Super PAC heavy hitters of the the republican party under its Blue-No-Matter-Who schtick that the democratic party won’t simply gradually become their party? What if they stick around and pull what is already a reasonably fiscally conservative party further in that direction? The great wealth of the American empire is in the republican donors’ pockets,—what’s stopping them from buying the Democratic party out from under the guise of the walking dead of “the center”?

My theory on all this (finally) is that the Democrats seem to be moving towards a conservative political capture by summoning up a socially-progressive Reagan-type character, but soaked in buzzfeed smarm and powered by club poptimism instead of Reagan’s christian moralistic smarm and americana country pop walk-on music.

The DNC was so completely drowned in brat green this year that it worked, somewhat, to appease a large enough swath of millenial and gen z voters to blind them to the creeping nationalistic business-minded fervor that’s underlying the Democratic party’s rightward turn. When you look at the DNC through its custom-made brat green tinted glasses, everything “is brat,”— It’s a mode of capturing consent for the ruling class.

Of course i’m not the only one seeing this: there’s already been a general falling in line for Harris as a candidate to potentially carry the torch of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, there have already been numerous news outlets referring to her as the “new Iron Lady,” and opinion pieces gushing about how she reminds so much of Reagan. There’s a general longing for another Reagan-like figure, i think, in the upper escalons of the country, to summon up a return to the american imperial supremacy worldwide in face of a generally ascendant China and growing socialism in the global south if not to to simply restore that status quo following Trump’s bleeding the party of Reagan dry from any of his administration’s influence. And i really don’t think that the color the candidate wears on their sleeve matters as much to them as does returning to that type of purely neoliberal national leadership.

It’s Morning Again in America

As

P.E. Moskowitz

put it in her post on the vibeoracy of the Harris phenomenon:

“Kamala was offering to beleaguered Americans a vision of their country and lives that was more exciting; a bit crazed for sure, but fun and freeing. And most importantly, the campaign pushed the idea of snapping people back to reality. After years of the country falling down the right-wing rabbit hole, Harris began to represent an opportunity to grab a lifeline and pull ourselves to stable ground again, back to comforting coherency.”

Perhaps the 2024 election cycle is in fact as reminiscent of the presidential election of 1980, but in completely flipping of factions: perhaps the Jimmy Carter of this election cycle is not Harris but Trump. That’s not to say, of course, that Trump is anything like Carter,—Carter seemed by all regards to be a very good man, and Trump by all means is not,—but Jimmy Carter represented for a plurality of voters a continuation of the psychedelic leftist utopianism of the 1960s, a continuation of the two decades’ worth of non-stop youth protest movements which dominated the airwaves ad nauseam during the ‘60s and ‘70s and which seemed inextricably linked to the political assassinations and serial killings of the era (Manson represented, for many rural Americans, the prototypical capital-H Hippie), leading to general cross-country exhaustion, leading to a feeling of “can’t we move past this?” that funneled into Reagan’s brand of reactionary Christian conservatism. Doesn’t that ring familiar?

This election cycle, on the other hand, seems to occupy a similar sense of general dread and exhaustion from the past ten tumultuous years of MAGA republicanism, and it’s Kamala’s cry of “we’re not going back”  in reference to the late 2010s that more closely resembles Reagan’s rhetoric in reference to the tumultuous 1970s. And to further draw this comparison: (1) Kamala seems to be presented a symbolic rejuvenation to the Democratic party akin to that of Reagan in the Republican party in 1980, and (2) when Biden dropped out of the race, Trump became the incumbent and as my friend Robert said on our bus ride across chicago to a concert recently, it’s a really bad time to be an incumbent.

Well, ok, sure whatever,—but what does this mean?

Well for starters, it doesn’t mean that Harris is necessarily another Ronald Reagan, for one thing she’s certainly not as purely evil as he was (that would be a very low bar, likely all the way down in hell), but those electoral/cultural forces that summoned Reagan in the first place,—i’m imagining a couple American Psycho coded investment bankers chanting around a pentagram,—still very much exist and guide american political life to this very day, and certainly if Harris is the reactionary candidate of this current election cycle, if she’s the Reagan of the Election ‘80-Election ‘24 comparison and not the Jimmy Carter, it’ll likely that these forces will channel into the demoratic party to ensue a reactionary stance towards to the far-right but also towards the strain of american leftism created out of the ashes of the Bernie Sanders movement, of BLM, of the free palestine movement, of pleas for universal healthcare.

And moreover, as demographics change in the United States more and more away from the Christian moralist reactionism that gave Reagan his electoral dominance, that which allowed him to strip the country for parts and institute a trickle-down economic theory that’s still preserved in legislative practice by both parties to this day, there’s a real potential in the electoral system going forward for a LGBTQ+ and BIPOC friendly though intensely reactionary centrist administration,—the #girlboss paradigm having grown finally to its natural conclusion: that of an outwardly progressive, though objectively hollow, stance on social issues but an intensely conservative approach to the military (with promises to create “the most lethal military in the world”) and to corporate/industrial sectors.

Certainly D.C. craves something like this: as we continue into the twenty-first century and America gradually loses its global hegemony, its power elite will seek whatever way to manufacture consent for economic warfare against the rest of the world. It’s a natural thing to lash out when feeling a decline in power and prestige.

If, in ten years time, Pete Buttigeg becomes the first ever openly gay president of the united states, but is at the very same time aiding and abetting in genocide and pursuing regional proxy wars against China in a full-on second Cold War, would the growing Yass contingent of the American electorate stand behind him complicity because of the mere fact of his sexual orientation? Perhaps, but also perhaps not, but i think that the question does have to be asked and reckoned with if we’re to get ourselves out of this mess of two parties stifling any progress at all. Nothing good happens in america, and the assumption is that things will only get worse, but that’s a false assumption only implanted in us by these incredibly rigid electoral rules that haven’t been updated really since the sixteenth century.

This all reminds me of that horribly aged 2005 film The Iron Lady which presents Margaret Thatcher as a trailblazer who broke the glass ceiling in the U.K. and could get things done despite overcoming the boorish men in parliament,—this being, remember, an incredibly racist bureaucrat who turbocharged the decline of United Kingdom’s politic discourse in a mirror reflection to Reagan’s chokehold on the United States’, the source of the classic line “there’s no alternative” to neoliberalism’s steady long-term wealth transfer to the upper economic echelons of western countries.

The more i consider this long-term shift in the parties, the more i realize how clearly the democratic party will continue to move to the right to shake off any leftist allegations, while throwing in some symbolic support for women’s reproductive rights and the rights of nonbinary people and people of color without making any real institutional changes that will address those issues because that would spook the neocons who have jumped ship from the republican party.

I have little to no idea what the republican party will do next, though, if it even can recover from Trump,—it definitely could!—but there’s a very good chance in my view that if the republican party continues as the party of far-right internet goons who embarrass the big pocketed CIA-adjacent wall-street political class who had once funded the Republican party’s hijinks in the 90s and 00s, that they might not feel too bad hopping ship eventually to the Democratic ticket to pull all of us into complicity with their schemes.

You know it as well as i know it: nobody wants to be lame. All anyone in politics seems to care about in this country is their own egos, and all anyone in power in this country seems to care about is preserving hegemonic cultural, economic, and militaristic control domestically and abroad. And the Republicans are actively losing the cultural wars if they haven’t already. Where do they go next?

I mean, like…

But we haven’t even begun to talk about the brat aesthetic… Next time we’ll get down and dirty because baby we’re going to the club.

~thanks sm for reading my little diatribe here, part two will be dropping (hopefully) on monday so if you liked what you read, felt validated by it,—or if it’s the opposite and you now hate my guts for talking shit about Harris but want to continue to hate read this series in full (lol),—feel free to subscribe! Next time we’ll be getting into the weeds with the ways in which working class music has been subverted by the fashion industry to support the ruling class and the mandated status quo…~

Until next time,

xoxoxoxo,

briffin