As it is and always will be, politicians and campaigns love to get in on the joke, and then the joke's over.

That became clear again when pop artist Charli XCX posted on X endorsing presidential candidate Kamala Harris with “Kamala IS brat”, referring to the brat meme phenomenon kickstarted by the singer’s latest album cover.

Then the official account for the Harris campaign changed its profile banner to the meme’s highly recognisable slime green aesthetic, placing the seeds for the candidate to attach the gravitas of youth culture to her campaign. Compilations of Harris’s most awkward public moments, from over-enthusiastic dancing to her recently viral ‘coconut tree’ speech, began to spread wildly online, packaged in a brash green filter and soundtracked by the singer’s song ‘Apple’.


Pundits are assured that this type of virality will create enthusiasm in young people. Harris can understand them in a way Joe Biden could not. She understands the irony, the absurd, the camp, and the communication style of the digital space that occupies the mind of the disillusioned Gen Z or millennial. Or so it goes.

But while it’s a major boon to Harris in promoting her image among young voters, it’s a sign of a tired joke on its last legs, used and then discarded to patch the void of a stale political landscape. The brat meme has been absorbed into the mainstream zeitgeist, and the main drivers of its popularity, those who feel that they’re on the inside of a joke with kindred spirits, will swiftly move on as it falls into being a meaningless signifier with its own motives and intentions. It’s a pattern that plays out repeatedly in the intersection of our popular and political cultures.

The brat phenomenon is very well-informed and strategic marketing on the part of Charli XCX, a singer who fully understands the irreverent Web 3.0 world that her fanbase dwells in and cultivates. The stans are, after all, the main foot soldiers in the war of competing online trends. The cover for Brat was wholly conceived with this social aspect in mind.

Brat’s cover is abrasive, intentionally ugly, and haphazard in its simplicity. The piercing slime green coupled with its improperly stretched low-resolution font is highly distinct and replicable. When Brat’s cover was revealed, many fans were disappointed at how lazy and tacky the effort was, but negative reaction only produced the attention needed for mimetic engineering to take place. Those who turned their noses initially became the biggest advocates of the joke.

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It's no surprise that politicians are quick to latch onto this kind of easy social influence. It’s one of the few tools politicians have in their appeal to young people. It’s a shortcut where their material concerns can be ignored. Where progressive and new ideas, ones that comprehend the type of world that young people are inheriting, can remain in the back of the closet. Adopting popular culture into the political arena only helps to maintain this stalemate, and that’s only to the benefit of establishment politics which sees its strong foot slip as generations progress.

Give a politician a cultural inch, and they’ll take a campaign mile. One of the few organic viral jokes to come from President Biden was Dark Brandon, a far more radical anti-hero persona that contrasted with the milquetoast folksy demeanour of the elder statesman. Its humour, much more in the vein of ‘shitposting’ than traditional memes, lay in making Biden widely contrast with exactly who he isn’t.


It was a joke embraced across the political spectrum, purely because it was funny. But once the Biden team embraced the attention, the charm faded. His team tested the waters first by directing the error page of his campaign website to a menacing image of Dark Brandon. People were amused, the joke had reached its zenith. But what followed was a range of official Dark Brandon merchandise and the alter-ego being used in campaigning and party materials. No time was wasted in killing the humour. It was left as just another digital artefact co-opted for its own motives and intentions.

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The confluence of Harris’s bid for the presidency and the memes and trends that follow her is far from over. It’s not cynical to think that her campaign will lean into her charming but awkward public speaking tangents, her random out-of-context soundbites, or her willingness to observe that popular culture exists. Her campaign knows that such things can alter the perception of her candidacy to an entire demographic, and it’s a method less complicated than policy.

But we should be wary of letting politicians use aspects of culture to hide from what’s real and what is actually expected of them. Politicians don’t have to be cool, and they don’t have to ruin the joke with their input. Many were excited about having a brat summer, but unfortunately, we're all starting to cringe.