“kamala IS brat,” tweeted singer Charli XCX on Sunday, following Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascension to the presidential nominee slot left vacant by President Joe Biden. Despite Charli XCX’s own advanced age of 31, she was speaking in slang immediately obvious to anyone under 30, especially the girls and the gays: brat is the album of the summer, with a distinctive neon green cover, full of references to Dimes Square podcaster-provocateurs, Julia Fox, party-girling hard, and—somehow, simultaneously—the lady anxiety that sets in when you’re on the wrong side of your twenties and have not yet had a child.
Harris’ team eagerly turned what they believed to be a pop star endorsement into a branding strategy; the X account “Kamala HQ” (1.1 million followers) adopted the distinctive color, font, and lowercase style Charli XCX’s brat to craft their own banner image, reading “kamala hq.“ Meanwhile, the gay guys of New York City, who received the news of Biden pulling out whilst in their natural habit (Fire Island), quickly made crop tops in the exact same style of brat. A mashup cut of one of Harris’ cringiest lines—some anecdote about coconut trees—was set to Charli XCX’s song “Von dutch.” It has received over 4 million views.
“The internet is going crazy for Harris’ campaign,” declares The 19th, a gender and politics website. Harris’ “meme stock is bullish,” adds CNN, which devoted a panel to the topic, in which a suit-wearing boomer tried, inartfully, to explain the craze to the rest. “Is Kamala Harris ‘brat’?” asks The Economist, calling 2024 “America’s TikTok election.” “Younger celebs are aiming to help Harris by tying her to their viral and loyal social media brands,” explains the Associated Press rather clinically.
“A brat should exude the je ne sais quoi of the famous-but-not-A-list women,” writes Shirley Li, giving the phenomenon an overly intellectualized treatment typical of The Atlantic. “The brat is a classic feminine archetype, right up there with the jezebel, the crone, the bimbo, the career girl,” writes Kat Rosenfield for The Free Press. “Brats are Cinderella’s stepsisters, lacking both social graces and appropriate gratitude for the privileges they enjoy.”
But what the hungry internet, full of writers looking for takes, and the Harris campaign miss is that being “brat” is not really a compliment.
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