Remember what political and cultural discourse was like before everything revolved around figuring out how a cruel dilettante from Queens managed to become president of the United States? I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately with the rise of the presidential campaign of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Finally, we’ve got other stuff to talk about in pop culture and politics besides The Apprentice and The Art of the Deal.
The Harris-Walz ticket has reinvigorated a need for broad cultural literacy. Harris began her presidential campaign with a flex and a throwing down of a proverbial gauntlet: Her team was able to secure approval to use Beyoncé’s “Freedom” as her campaign anthem, in contrast to her opponent, who seems to rack up cease-and-desist letters from disapproving artists the way he used to collect bankruptcies like Pokemon cards. You could practically hear the musicologists getting in formation to explain the significance of Harris’ choice. Additionally, viewership of Veep, the Julia Louis-Dreyfus-led comedy that sees her character ascend to the presidency, jumped a reported 350 percent following the announcement of Harris’ run. New conversations are afoot.
Television is important in this moment because it functions as a laboratory and a playground for the American psyche, allowing us to toy with alternate realities and then discuss them with friends or colleagues or strangers on the internet. Donald Trump understands the power of the medium. It’s the other reason, besides his ego, that he’s obviously rattled by reports of Harris and Walz drawing tens of thousands of people to their rallies. Trump effectively produced himself all the way to the White House, and now, a couple of fresh characters are upstaging “the political version of Fat Elvis.”
The Apprentice was crucial in nudging Americans toward seeing Donald Trump as a serious leader. Critics, but especially James Poniewozik of the New York Times, explained how the show situated Trump in the minds of many Americans using the magic of reality television to create what turned out to be extremely convincing Chief Executive kayfabe. That analysis was later bolstered and confirmed by former producers on The Apprentice like Bill Pruitt, once the non-disclosure agreement he signed to work on the show expired. For the past decade or more, Trump has thrived in the attention economy and its swift-moving currents that optimize narrative, vibes, and appearance over details, facts, and truth. This was not a new phenomenon — back when he was hosting The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert identified this blacksmithing of malleable realities as “truthiness.” The Apprentice was, for Trump, an aggrandizing marriage of truthiness and the centrifugal force of his bottomless narcissism. But The Apprentice was not the only hit television show to affect Americans and how they think about power and the White House. It just, for a period, became the most consequential.
While there’s no comparable reality show centered around the executive boardroom decisions of a Black multiracial woman like Harris, there are two shows from the recent past that have added dimension to the way Black women exist in the American imagination that could prove consequential: Scandal and Watchmen. Meanwhile, Walz, with his irrepressible dad energy and straight-out-of-central-casting biography, seems to be what would result if you threw Coach Taylor of Friday Night Lights, Hank Hill of King of the Hill, and Burt Hummel of Glee into a KitchenAid mixer.
Let’s start with Harris, Scandal, and Watchmen.
Writing about Tina Turner last summer, I described the America she experienced as one “simultaneously fascinated with and repulsed by Black women.” When Harris announced her presidential candidacy, it seemed inevitable that she would face the same type of response. What if it tanked her entire campaign, leaving American women, but especially women of color, even more demoralized and bereft about their place in political life than they were before Biden dropped out?
Facing questions from a panel of women during a conference of the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump proved as predictable as ever, insulting his interlocutors, the audience in attendance, and Harris herself with a fusillade of lies and racist essentialism. Southern Baptist leaders impugned Harris as a “Jezebel.” House Speaker Mike Johnson was forced to advise Republicans to ease up on their use of sexist and racist tropes to attack Harris. Not long after Harris’ ascendance to the top of the Democratic ticket, The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper interviewed a supporter attending his 83rd Trump rally, this one in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Lamenting the sudden irrelevance of his collection of “Let’s Go Brandon” merch, the man told Klepper, “Fuck Joe and the ho.”
All this seemed to prove that it was perfectly sensible to worry that Harris would have to spend the next three months heading off such specious attacks, and that, in doing so, she’d constantly be on the defensive, distracted from making the substantive case for her leadership because she’d have to waste time parrying scurrilous, if effective, diminutions of her character. The attacks came, but the effectiveness? Not so much.
This time, as poll numbers charting Harris’ rise continue to bear out, nakedly sexist, racist, prurient attacks that were meant to take Harris down a peg appear to be doing no such thing. If anything, they are backfiring.
Could it be, in part, because we’ve been down this road before, during the Thursday night primetime reign of Shonda Rhimes and her antihero Olivia Pope, played for seven seasons by Kerry Washington? The popularity of Pope and her messy romantic entanglement with a white Republican president deflated some of the salaciousness and disgust on which Harris’ Republican opposition was hoping to trade. In the 2010s, when Scandal debuted, it faced an ugly backlash from men, and Black men in particular. Ebony published a piece defending Washington, Rhimes, and the assertions that they were somehow dragging down the race by putting a “Negro bed wench” on television. Nevertheless, Scandal and its excellent ratings persisted.
A country that spent seven seasons rooting for a couple who embody the third-railiest fears America holds regarding slavery, sex, race, and power appears to be a populace that’s somewhat inoculated against such obvious bait in 2024. When you’ve been acclimated to scenes of Pope and Fitz engaged in steamy kisses and heavy petting in the Oval Office, and witnessed absurd bad-faith attacks on the patriotism of America’s first Black president for something as innocent as wearing a tan suit, it’s a lot harder for smears such as “Jezebel” and “ho” to take root.
Before Washington, it had been 40-some-odd years since the last time a Black woman led a broadcast network primetime drama. Imagine what could have gotten accomplished in the interim had it not taken so long.
The fevered chemistry of Fitz and Pope disarmed the taboo and mystery of interracial relationships, but especially those between white men and Black women. But that’s not all Scandal did. Just as important to the show was Pope’s singular hypercompetence, her ability to solve problems that bedeviled even her president boyfriend and his shrewd wife, Mellie. Furthermore, Pope led a devoted, multiracial team of “gladiators” who were willing to compromise themselves and their safety in order to achieve whatever goal she set before them. They repeatedly put their trust and faith in Pope’s expertise. Harris and Walz don’t have “gladiators,” but they have reawakened in many the spirit of the “joyful warrior.” That too, unlocks something: a desire to wear the white hat, like Pope’s team of idealistic fixers. Rallying around the leadership of a Black woman on a mission to right wrongs isn’t just a powerful feeling anymore; it’s a familiar one.
While Scandal successfully pierced the noxious bubble surrounding the country’s oldest taboos, Watchmen captured something else: an understandable ambivalence toward vigilantism and empire, wrapped in the story of a Black woman, Angela Abar (played by Regina King), who is the embodiment of all that has come before her, even when she doesn’t wish to know or interrogate it.
In HBO’s iteration of Watchmen, inspired by the comic by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Angela is a police officer in an alternate USA in which descendants of victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 have been awarded long overdue reparations. Dr. Manhattan is the famed atomic weapon of a superhero who ends the Vietnam war with a wave of destruction similar to that wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. He brings Vietnam to heel in such a way that it joins the union as America’s 51st state.
Angela has a complex relationship to law enforcement. As a child, her father, an American soldier stationed in Vietnam, and her mother are killed by a terrorist who resents American imperialism. A young Angela witnesses their murder, and she identifies the suicide bomber’s surviving collaborator to Vietnamese police. There’s no arrest, no detention, no interrogation, no trial. Justice, if you can call it that, is swift. After young Angela fingers the culprit, two Vietnamese police officers execute the collaborator with a gunshot.
As an adult member of the Vietnamese police force, Angela meets and falls in love with Dr. Manhattan. In order for them to live a normal life that’s not defined by Dr. Manhattan’s omnipotence (he basically exists everywhere, everytime, all at once), her blue god of a boyfriend agrees to insert a device into his head that will turn him into a normal human and erase his memory of his identity. They decide to start a new life in Tulsa, where Angela works as a police officer, interrupting a domestic terrorist plot to overthrow the government by a white nationalist cell called the Seventh Kavalry. When the 10-episode series concludes, Angela stands on the precipice of assuming Dr. Manhattan’s absolute power, which he’s encased in an egg she slurps down. The future is undefined, open to imagination. She’s at least as powerful as the president, if not more.
Watchmen doesn’t offer easy, binary solutions to anything, certainly not the ongoing problems that are a legacy of the country’s foundation of white supremacist violence. However, it does encourage its audience to see Angela as a fallible human, influenced by her life experiences and those of her father, her grandfather Will Reeves (he took the surname in tribute to famed Black sheriff Bass Reeves), and her great-grandfather, who fought in World War I only to come home to face the racial terrorism of the 1921 Tulsa attack.
It’s a show that successfully marries Moore’s ambivalence toward absolute power with a complex illustration of the way intergenerational trauma caused by white supremacy shapes people and the decisions they make in their lives, even in ways they do not fully appreciate or understand. This doesn’t make Angela uniquely incapable of wrongdoing; it’s just that when she violates someone’s civil rights, they’re usually a white supremacist.
When Watchmen concluded in 2019, I was not thrilled about Angela’s decision to assume Dr. Manhattan’s powers. It seemed like a losing bargain, to take on responsibility for establishing and maintaining order in a country that still harbors so much hatred and resentment toward Black people. Then again, it’s Angela’s grandfather, Tulsa massacre survivor Will Reeves (Louis Gossett Jr.), who nudges her toward action (“He could have done a lot more,” Will says of Dr. Manhattan).
So Harris’ candidacy has forced me to revisit those ideas, because she does sit on the precipice of assuming all the powers the Constitution awards a president (an expansion of which she can thank six members of the Supreme Court, who have basically made anything the president does as an official act immune from prosecution). And before that, she was a figure of institutional law enforcement as a San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general. And lately, it’s been Black prosecutors, however flawed (see: Fani Willis) who have been successful in holding a lawless Trump to account. It is New York attorney general Letitia James who successfully prosecuted Trump for fraud in the valuations of his properties, and it is Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg who obtained convictions on 34 felony counts for committing fraud to aid himself in the 2016 presidential election. In an era defined by public foundering when it comes to trust in institutions, it is Black prosecutors who have successfully engaged in the work of upholding the “glorious liberty document” as Frederick Douglass called the Constitution.
Until she clearly articulates her own foreign policy, separate from that of her predecessor, especially with regard to Israel-Palestine and the ongoing slaughter and displacement of Palestinians in Gaza, it’s difficult to know or say with any specificity what it will mean for Harris to assume the mantle of “leader of the free world.” Will she continue to pursue American hegemony with the U.S. acting as global cop? Can she successfully chart a path to something different, that doesn’t rely on the output of defense contractors keeping the economy and the world humming along with the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over it? The answers to those questions remain unclear, although it is clear that the Trump campaign plans to attack Harris’ record as a prosecutor in explicitly racist terms. It expressed its plans to The Bulwark to “Willie Horton” her campaign. Much like the end of Watchmen, we’re left choosing to place our hopes in the unprecedented, or turn backward toward white supremacist megalomania and fascism. Americans have never demonstrated much comfort with abstraction, but we do seem to know now that it’s preferable to darker, more violent authoritarian alternatives.
Representation and its power doesn’t work in a linear way that says if you install a fictional Black/female/minority president in the Oval Office, a real life one will soon follow (just ask Geena Davis and Hillary Clinton). But it can broaden imaginations and notions of what is possible in ways that ready the public for moments when life begins to imitate art. That’s what makes it effective. That’s what speaks to politics as the art of the possible. And pop culture hasn’t just broadened the aperture of what’s possible for Black women, but for white guys like Walz, too.
When she introduced her running mate for the first time, Harris alluded to Friday Night Lights to characterize the legend of Walz’s tenure as a high school football coach. Like Friday Night Lights protagonist Eric Taylor, Walz, a former social studies and geography teacher, is married to a fellow teacher, and he seems to lead by teaching an ethic of decency and respect. The fact that Walz helped take a winless team to the state championship was icing on the cake. Walz, who retired from the National Guard to run for Congress, seemed easy enough to place. A dutiful, folksy repository of useful dad knowledge who rocks Carharrts and knows his way around a hunting rifle, Walz calls back to the small-town, sensible masculinity of King of the Hill’s Hank Hill or Glee’s Burt Hummel.
In the Trump years, Hill seemed like a relic creators Mike Judge and Greg Daniels birthed in a pool of primordial naivete: a pre-MAGA patriot who didn’t seriously countenance conspiracy theories, and who regarded both former Texas governors George W. Bush and Ann Richards with respect. His wife Peggy was a volunteer poll worker, and Hill took his duty of citizenship so seriously that in one episode, he speeds home from the Texas border escorted by a sheriff’s deputy just so he can make it home in time to vote. Pundits and pollsters such as the New York Times’ Nate Cohn puzzled over Harris’ decision to choose Walz rather than Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and the practical guarantee of his state’s 19 electoral college votes. Walz, however, delivers something different: a model reminder of the kind of typical rural, small-town white guy that existed prior to the national metastasization of Trumpism. Remember the episode when Hank and Peggy bought a motorcycle and rode it to Sturgis?
By picking Walz, Harris seemed to be appointing an antidote to the toxic masculinities of J.D. Vance and his band of woman-resenting supporters like Peter Thiel, Donald Trump Jr., Blake Masters, Curtis Yarvin, and the broader internet manosphere. You can practically hear Hill taking the measure of those guys and pronouncing them “asinine.” Like Burt Hummel (Mike O’Malley), father of Kurt (Chris Colfer), Walz typifies a straight Midwestern father who becomes an advocate and defender of queer kids rather than a bully. If anything, Walz, who signed up to be the faculty advisor for his school’s gay-straight alliance in 1999, appears to be a bit ahead of the curve. In Glee, Hummel had to work through his own grief to be the kind of father his son needed (such are the demands of character development) when Kurt was being getting slushied and stuffed into dumpsters because he was gay.
That’s significant, given the manner of Trumpism’s appeal to disaffected, lonely, angry, straight young men and its role in radicalizing them. Such men are a type, one that predates Trump’s rise. Richard V. Reeves, a Brookings Institution fellow and chronicler of America’s “masculinity crisis,” has not only written about this type, but effective paths to deradicalizing them in Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. Walz is an embodiment of Reeves’ prescriptions: a welcoming, do-right everyman who leads, much like Hill and Taylor, with a kind of unassuming decency that until recently appeared to have gone the way of the dodo bird. He wasn’t plucked from central casting, but Walz is exactly the guy you pick to remind the country that with clear eyes and full hearts, it can’t lose.
For many, the Trump years were more than just chaotic or dispiriting. They were terrifying, and those fears proved legitimate, whether because of the horrifying violence of January 6, 2021, or the more intimate violences occurring as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health — a decision made possible by the justices Trump appointed, forming a conservative supermajority on the Court. When Congress failed to convict him after two impeachments, Trump seemed inescapable. Harris has given voters something they clearly craved: a shot to be peaceful gladiators who may snatch their power back at the ballot box, a leader who emboldens them to think beyond the confines of fear. With Walz at her side, she’s offering Americans a chance to reclaim the good that preceded the Trump years, so it can finally turn its full attention to what can be, unburdened by what has been. That’s worth a heck of a lot more than just 19 electoral college votes; that’s a real opportunity to make a new America, not a reality-based simulacrum that extends only as far as key lights, cameras, and blocking tape allow.
Soraya Nadia McDonald writes about pop culture, the arts, and politics. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism and a winner of the George Jean Nathan prize for dramatic criticism.
From Rolling Stone US
