Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, have made much of the sense of Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, as “outsiders.” It’s a brilliant construct, taking a word that has been thrown at those considered outsiders in America—by race, gender, or kinship—and attaching it forcefully to right-leaning white men.
It's also an excellent move from someone who belongs to my generation, Generation X – reclaiming the power of the weird and exposing those who claim to be normal as the weirdos they really are.
If elected, Kamala Harris would be the first Gen X president, and she would be imbued with contradiction and coldness. Technically, she is the latest baby boomer—born in late 1964, just a month away from officially becoming a Gen Xer. But Harris is Gen X in her personal style and in the ways her critics read—or misread—her. Embracing her Gen X identity is her best bet to connect with a broad range of voters, especially young people.
How so? As a Gen Xer, I speak from a position of irony. The memes her detractors use to ridicule are actually appealing to our generation, born between 1965 and 1979. Gen Xers’ sarcastic, sentimental connection to subculture and cultism—the internet before the internet, as it were—is part of what was so appealing to younger voters who are now fascinated by her “coconut tree” meme, calling her a “sassy kid,” mocking her record store visit for vinyl (and relishing the fact that she loves vinyl), and loving TikToks with NSync’s Lance Bass. While Harris has been accused of being fake, unrelatable, and even falsely authentic—the right has mocked her for her raucous laughter, her youthful romanticism, and her offbeat catchphrases (“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” among others)—her success so far proves them wrong. While critics are clearly motivated by a desire to discredit her candidacy (and resort to racism and sexism in the process), they are also channeling what we might call “negative generationalism.”
Harris exudes a certain kind of realism that borders on Gen X. See: her unconscious dancing or discussing how to cook a turkey in exquisite buttery detail. While politicians have been trying to show that they are “real people” for hundreds of years, Harris’s attempts at realism seem more “real” in that, for example, she dances because she looks like she really wants to dance, rather than just thinking, “I should dance!” It’s no coincidence that videos of her doing these things go viral. While her critics have relentlessly mocked her for looking nervous, she really only comes across as contrived when she’s trying to be a typical politician. When she tries to look conventional and arrogant, it’s clear that she’s inhabiting a character. In other words, she doesn’t become that character (the latter is a typical baby boomer thing, see Clinton, Bill) but she tries to do it because of her obvious inadequacy. Let’s take her difficulty in playing the role—and her ease in dancing or cooking authentically—as points in her favor, not against her.
Harris’s generational identity—political disloyalty is a hallmark of Gen X—resonates with today’s alienated voters. As Michael Sandel recently noted, 85 percent of Americans believe they lack a real voice in the political forces shaping their lives, and that politicians don’t care what they think. Moreover, a large group of Americans—40 percent—sometimes or often avoid the news, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found. As historian Kim Phillips Fein has observed, Gen Xers are also known for their “hostility to the political establishment and their shrinking from all pretense.” We grew up in an era when we expected the world to not work properly. Growing up in the post-Watergate era, we lacked the sense of possibility of the 1960s, living in the wake of failed attempts at radical living, with divorce—or parents who should have divorced—commonplace. We felt unlikely to change anything even if we tried. Again, recalling this ancient context and emphasizing the similarities between then and now is helpful, when we are dealing with voters who are disconnected from presidential politics.
There is a guidebook for this. For years, the right has exploited this chaos by backing Gen X politicians from the Make America Great Again movement like Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who have unleashed their anger. I call them “Bad Generation X,” produced not just by Trump and the alt-right, but also by the Reagan 1980s and the political animosity that prevailed then and in the 1990s. Democrats have failed to produce a particularly successful Gen X politician—but it’s time.
Harris also demonstrates the “dual” relationship between Generation X and her identity—childless and “mother” to her stepchildren; both black and Asian American; and both prosecutors and liberals. She represents the latest salvo in the promise of early identity politics, the growing opportunity, and the interest in hybridity that really took off in the 1990s. In postcolonial thought at the time, hybridity began to be used to describe this blending of cross-cultural elements to achieve greater power.
So far, I’ve looked at Harris’s understanding of the Gen X/Gen Z turmoil, her unbalanced authenticity, and even her hybrid identity as strong selling points. However, there are also more distinctive Gen X traits that could help her candidacy among younger voters, if she were to lean into them.
For example, Harris can draw on firsthand experience of the economic hardships after college or graduate school that many in my generation have experienced. In the three years after Kamala graduated from law school in 1989, unemployment soared to 12%, and it didn’t fully recover for seven years. I discovered this firsthand in my 20s, when I worked a variety of temporary jobs—librarians, fact-checkers, personal assistants—throughout the early 1990s, when I, like many others, couldn’t find steady work. Recalling those times might resonate with a generation that is now often unable to afford to buy their own homes, for example.
On a related point, Harris's focus on the foreclosure debacle when she became California's attorney general, and getting money to homeowners hurt by the mortgage meltdown, may resonate with these voters.
Likewise, Harris’s rhetoric on reproductive rights, which has been described as “unapologetic,” reflects Generations X and Z. After all, Generation X was a generation of women who volunteered at clinics as chaperones while simultaneously experiencing the first and second waves of anti-abortion terrorism by the right-to-life movement. There are parallels with today’s Generation Z, who rightly fear that their rights to bodily autonomy are being wiped away.
More than 30 years after writer Douglas Coupland coined it, the phrase “Generation X” still has a lot of meaning. Democrats—and Harris herself—need to embrace that association, along with her period dance moves, Converse sneakers, and surreal expressions. As two Generation X icons—RuPaul and Mary J. Blige—might say, she needs to “work at it.”
This story was supported by the nonprofit journalism organization Economic Hardship Reporting ProjectAlyssa Cowart is the author of the latest book. mayberecently released in paperback, and an excerpt from it Rolling Stone In 2023.
