Would Kamala Harris be our first Gen X president?

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Would Kamala Harris be our first Gen X president?

Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris wearing white, greets the crowd as she arrives on stage at a campaign rally at the Enmarket Arena August 29, 2024 in Savannah, Georgia.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, her vice presidential pick, have gotten a lot of mileage out of labeling Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance “weird.” It’s a brilliant construction, as it’s taken the word hurled at those considered outsiders in America—by race, gender, or affinity—and attached it firmly to white men of the right-wing persuasion.

It’s also a primo move of someone who is a member of Generation X—taking back the power of the outsider and exposing those who claim normalcy as the freaks they really are.

Harris is arguably the first Generation X presidental nominee, fittingly laced with both ambivalence and cool. As the Economic Hardship Reporting Project notes, she is technically the very latest boomer—born at the tail end of 1964, a month away from being officially Gen X. But Harris is Gen X in her personal style and in the ways in which she is read—and misread—by her naysayers. Embracing her Gen X self is her best bet for connecting with a wide range of voters, especially young ones.

How so? The memes that her critics use for ridicule are actually quite appealing to Gen Xers, born between 1965 and 1979. Gen X’s ironic yet passionate relationship to sub-cultural and cultish pop culture—the internet before the internet, as it were—is part of what has been so appealing to younger voters who are now taken with her “coconut tree” meme, call her “brat,” riff on her visit to a record store to get vinyl (and dig the fact that she likes vinyl), and love her TikTok with NSYNC’s Lance Bass. While Harris has been accused of being fake, not relatable, and even falsely authentic—the Right trolled her for her raucous laughter, her youthful romances, and her unusual phrases (“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” among others)—her success so far proves them wrong. While the critics are clearly motivated by a desire to discredit her candidacy (and resorting to racism and sexism in the process) they are also channeling what we might call “negative generationalism.”

Harris radiates certain kinds of Gen X adjacent realness. See: her dancing unselfconsciously or discussing how to cook a turkey in great buttery detail. While politicians have been trying to show they’re “real people” for hundreds of years, Harris’ attempts at realness appear more “real” in that, say, she’s actually dancing because she seems as if she really wants to dance, rather than simply thinking, “I should dance!” It’s not for nothing that videos of her doing these things have gone crazy viral. While her critics have mocked her relentlessly for seeming strained, in truth she only seems artificial when she is trying to be a typical politician. When she does try to sound conventional and stentorian, she is clearly inhabiting a persona. She doesn’t, in other words, become that persona (the latter is a Boomer habit, see: Clinton, Bill) but tries it on for ill-fitting size, very obviously. Let’s take her awkwardness at playing this role—and her ease with authentically dancing or cooking—as points in her favor rather than against her.

And Harris’ generational identity—political disaffection is a Gen X hallmark—vibes with today’s alienated electorate. As Michael Sandel recently noted, 85 percent of Americans believe they lack a real say in defining the political powers that shape their lives and also don’t believe politicians care what they think. In addition, a large group of Americans—40 percent—sometimes or often avoid the news, as the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has found. As the historian Kim Phillips-Fein has noted, Gen X, too, is known “for an antagonism toward the political establishment and a deflation of pretension of all sorts.” Gen X came of age in an era in which it expected the world to not work properly. Having grown up around or after Watergate, the generation missed the 1960s sense of possibility, living in the curdled aftermath of failed attempts at radical living, with widespread divorce—or parents who should have been divorced. Gen X had a sense that it was unlikely to change anything if it tried. Again, recalling this older context and emphasizing the parallels between then and now is useful, when dealing with voters disconnected from presidential politics.

There is a playbook for this. For years, the Right has capitalized on this anomie by supporting MAGA Gen X politicians like Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, lashing out in anger. They could be thought of as “Bad Gen X,” produced by not only Trump and the alt-right but also the Reagan 1980s and the atmosphere of political animus that swirled then and in the 1990s. Democrats have failed to produce such a widely recognized Gen X politician, until now.

Harris also exhibits that Gen X postmodern “both-and” relationship to her identity—both childless and a “Momala” to her step-kids; both Black and Asian American; both a prosecutor and a liberal. She represents that latest installment in the promise of early identity politics and of the increased opportunity and interest in hybridity that really took off in the 1990s. In postcolonial thought back then, hybridity was starting to be used to describe this mixture of transcultural elements to achieve greater power.

So far, Harris’ understanding of Gen X/Gen Z anomie, her off-kilter authenticity, and even her hybrid identity have been checked off as strong selling points. There are, however, also more meat-and-potatoes Gen X markers that could help make the case for her to a younger electorate, if she were to lean into them.

Harris could, for instance, deploy a first-hand experience of economic difficulties after graduating from college or grad school that so many Gen Xers had. In the three years after Harris graduated law school in 1989, unemployment rose to a high of 12 percent, not to fully recover for seven years. So many could not find consistent employment. Recalling those times, and forwarding sharp policies related to people’s “economic freedom”—as well as freedom in general—would be crucial for a generation that is now often unable to, say, buy a home.

Similarly, Harris’ discourse about reproductive rights, which has been dubbed “unapologetic,” reflects both Gen X and Gen Z. Gen X, after all, was a generation of women that volunteered at clinics as escorts while at the same time experiencing the first and second waves of anti-abortion terrorism from the Right to Life movement. There are parallels to today’s Gen Zers, who fear, correctly, that their rights to bodily autonomy may be ending.

“Generation X,” more than 30 years after the author Douglas Coupland first coined the phrase, still means something. Democrats—and Harris herself—could embrace the association, along with her period-specific dance moves, Converse sneakers, and surreal locutions. As two icons of Gen X might say—RuPaul and Mary J. Blige—she needs to “work that.”