Why the kids are manifesting a Kamala presidency

Chicago

“Something wonderfully magical is in the air, isn’t it?” Michelle Obama told the DNC Tuesday night. “America, hope is making a comeback.” The former first lady’s remarks tied into a theme the party theme of the week: with Kamala Harris, 2024 is 2008 all over again. The chrysalis-like flowering of the Harris campaign happened virtually overnight, out of nowhere, as party bosses who had moved to oust President Biden swiftly fell in line behind the vice president to head of the prospect of a messy contested convention. And it worked: in recent purple-state polls: a round from New York Times/Siena College this weekend gave her the edge over Trump in Arizona and North Carolina.

How Kamala became a viable presidential contender, a something from nothing, may strike her detractors as suspect. It’s certainly surprising to longtime political prognosticators and veteran analysts. But to millennials and zoomers, the generations most delighted by her ascent, who have been vocal in their support of her — online, at least — this is not new territory.

Think about how many members of those generations, as they seek support for their myriad mental health issues, are doing cognitive behavioral therapy, for example. “CBT is a psychological treatment that aims to help the patient change patterns of thought that negatively influence their lives,” licensed therapist Jeren Montgomery tells The Spectator. “Thinking errors, or Cognitive Distortions as they are more commonly known, can contribute to psychological suffering like increased anxiety and depression. ‘All-or-nothing’ thinking and catastrophizing are two that I often see  in my own patients.”

“By noticing these negative, and often irrational, patterns of thought, CBT provides tools to reframe them and replace them with helpful, more productive thoughts — i.e. ‘my girlfriend broke up with me because I’m unlovable’ becomes ‘I just haven’t met the right girl yet.’”

In this instance, the more productive thought is “we have a candidate under the age of sixty who can beat Donald Trump.” Kamala becomes this to her supporters because they need her to become the Trump slayer — regardless of what’s come before in her career.

Equally, and less scientifically, look at the very modern obsession with “manifestation”: when you desire something, you fixate on it, will it to be true. The practice has gained popularity thanks to self-help books such as 2006’s The Secret and 2007’s The Law of Attraction. Kamala is more than a meme stock to its practitioners — her victory is a truth they are trying to speak into existence.

Trumpworld, meanwhile, remains suspicious of the switcheroo the Democratic Party pulled in the last month by crowning Kamala. In a dispatch from Montana last week, the New York Times‘s Shawn McCreesh spent time with that “slice of the electorate, already so skeptical of institutions and what they see as corrupt media” who “have found the extraordinary events of the past few weeks — President Biden’s exit from the campaign and the Democrats’ swift decision to unite instead behind Ms. Harris — disorienting, and somewhat difficult to process.” 

“The way they see it,” McCreesh writes, “the same media that told them Mr. Biden wasn’t a zombie suddenly turned on him for being a zombie and are now pushing his vice president, who was treated as a lightweight by that same media until about fourteen seconds ago.”

This month, Kamala has completed her fifth evolution in under a decade: she went from “lock-’em up” tough-on-crime California AG Kamala; to “truth to power,” FOSTA-SESTA, Kavanaugh-Judiciary-hearing star Senator Kamala; to undocumented immigrant-embracing, “abolish ICE” presidential candidate Kamala, to border-czar-or-is-she wine mom Vice President Kamala. 

And now, Kamala the presumptive nominee is a Rorschach test: you can tie her to any of the previous iterations and see something you like or dislike. The fewer policies she commits to, the harder it is for Trump and the Republicans to run against her — as last week’s “announcing an economic plan” experiment proved. For the young, repeat the mantra: Kamala is a candidate under sixty who can beat Donald Trump.

“One of the criticisms of CBT is that it largely deals with the present and minimizes the past,” Montgomery says. “Its focus is on the here and now. I think that’s why a lot of people are drawn to it: It offers a ‘quick’ solution when compared to more traditional talk-based therapy. But it does so at the risk of ignoring the psychological underpinnings of why we do the things we do and think the way we think.”

With only seventy-six days until the election, young Democrats were desperate for a quick solution to the problems posed by a second Trump presidency. Believing that Kamala Harris is it was the easiest option — and the older generations in the party are happy to fall in step with the kids. But can a positive mentality actually swing votes in the states that matter and deliver Democratic victory in November? And will insistences that “Kamala IS brat,” posts about Tim Walz’s “Midwestern dad” energy and reaffirmations of the sense of “joyful” energy in the United Center prove to be a sufficient salve for undecideds who are looking for a candidate to solve their everyday problems? Those young Democrats had better “hope” so, in order to avoid more mental strife. Kamala is a candidate under sixty…