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Kamala’s Campaign Blasts Off with an Explosion of Snark

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By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Here’s a fine example of snark:

For those who came in late, the claim — which I know I could be amplifying by repeating, but I hope that you, dear readers, what the strength of character to resist it — is that J.D. Vance, in one of the editions of his book Hillbilly Elegy, wrote that he performed an analog of sexual congress involving a couch and a latex glove. Hence the couch images above. Get it? The claim is false (WaPo; Vanity Fair; Rolling Stone). Snopes has the most tellin detail, in (sorry) “No, JD Vance Did Not Say He Had Sex with Couch Cushions“:

This rumor was false. Vance’s memoir contained no such passage, including in the first edition, as we later reported in a second article. Further, as KnowYourMeme.com reported, [the originator] @rickrudescalves — who later protected his account so only followers could see his posts — ‘signaled that he was joking when he followed up the tweet with the Go on the Internet and Tell Lies meme.

This Democrat false claim is minor league stuff, not to be compared with liberal icon Barney Frank‘s boyfriend running a brothel in the apartment they shared, or whatever has been recorded on the curiously undisclosed tapes from thoroughly bipartisan Jeffrey Epstein’s townhouse and tropical island. Nevertheless, it was all over my Twitter feed for days, even though those who were one degree of separation away from @rickrudescalves’s original Tweet knew it was false. And so, for days, that was all anybody who was anybody talked about when they talked about J.D. Vance. They most certainly did not talk about the populist message — pseudo or not — of Hillbilly Elegy. That was how the Kamala campaign introduced Vance to the American public. So, all in all, their initial salvo of snark was a great success, and I expect we will see more snark in the future. In fact, after I had done the research for this post, the following appeared in HuffPo: “Kamala Harris Is Giving Us Snark — And It’s The Energy We’ve Been Waiting For” (the whole liberalgasm discourse is redolent of “energy,” “waiting,” and of course “we”):

But on Thursday morning, when Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign sent reporters an email with the subject line: “Statement on a 78-Year-Old Criminal’s Fox News Appearance,” it was such a contrast from the usual stream of dry and generic emails that inundate our inboxes that it didn’t even seem real at first.

“After watching Fox News this morning we only have one question, is Donald Trump ok?” the press release began, before laying out a bulleted list of “takeaways” from the former president’s appearance Thursday on his favorite program “Fox & Friends,” where he often goes on rants and makes baseless claims.

Among the Harris campaign’s list of bullet points: “Trump is old and quite weird?” Naturally, that line quickly got the internet’s attention.

Seems like the Clinton 2.0 campaign is taking the “deplorables” tack again, except with a more youthful vibe. Something to look forward to!

There’s been a good deal of work done on snark, some of it scholarly, but as a former dedicated and long-time practitioner, I will feel free to make assertions, rather than document everything (or rather, my assertions are the documentation). In this post, I will first give define the characteristics of snark, then give a cursory history (including my own practice). I will then provide an exhibit of a Democrat’s rapturous embrace of the practice, along with a few remarks about the implications of their jouissance (which is not too strong a word.

* * *

I define the haracteristics of snark as follows, my scope being limited to extremely online electoral politics (a field in which, I might add, I have been blogging more or less daily for twenty-odd years). Snark is:

1) Reactive. From George Tsiveriotis’s Masters thesis at MIT (2017): “Blogging lends itself to snark first because it is reactive. Many bloggers [not NC!] really don’t write much at all. They are more like impresarios, curators, or editors, picking and choosing things they find on line, occasionally slapping on a funny headline or adding a snarky (read: snotty and catty) comment…. Some days, the only original writing you se on a blog is the equivalent of “Read this…. Take a look…. But, seriously this is lame…. Can you believe this?” As with blogging, so with Twitter. @EBHeater (quoted above) was reacting to @rickrudescalves’s original Tweet. @rickrudescalves was reacting to Vance’s nomination (and his book).

2) Gleefully mocking. An anthropologist, says Tsiveriotis, would consider snark a “degradation ceremony.” He writes: “[Snark is] our first tactic for desensitizing ourselves, for making it clear that the person we’re attacking isn’t human–and that since it began as a joke, we can’t be held accountable for where others take the conversation

3) Knowing. You’ve got to be in on the joke (for example, couch images in @EBHeater’s tweet). From David Denby’s Snark (2009): “This is an essay about a strain of nasty, knowing abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation—a tone of snarking insult provoked and encouraged by the new hybrid of print, television, radio and the Internet.”

4) Virulent. Well-designed and -executed snark spreads virulently, like gossip, or an earworm (or a meme), as did the Vance/Couch conjuncture. As with blogging, and the Twitter, so with TikTok. (We’ll see how “old and quite weird” does. I’m starting to see “weird” a lot already.)

5) A form of character assassination As of, for example, J.D. Vance.

6) A team sport. Many, many accounts besides @EBHeater followed @rickrudescalves, some (no doubt) from campaign assets, others artisanal. In all cases, however, the accounts amplifying and refining the snark are engaged in a collective (“strength of weak ties“) effort. They are “friends” (and not enemies).

* * *

Search being what it is, I can’t produce anything like a timeline for the term “snark.” Certainly publications like New York Spy (1986 to 1998) paved the way for the form, if not the term: What, after all, is “short-fingered vulgarian” — coined at that venue[1] — but reactive, gleefully mocking, knowing, virulent, and a form of character assassination (however justified)? The only characteristic missing is “a team sport,” not easy in print. The first usage example I can find is from 2003, by New York Times writer Laura Miller, who applied it to book reviews: “I learned that you had to be careful in assigning books by young, celebrated authors to young, uncelebrated reviewers; the results were likely to be either starry-eyed hero-worship or (in the case of the more talented writers) a snide fury out of all due proportion to the subject at hand: snarkiness.” By that time, the liberal Democrat blogosphere was well underway, with Philadelphia, where I then, happily albeit unemployedly, then lived, as its epicenter; Atrios (my blogfather) is quoted at then-important political blog site Daily Kos as having hit a “New Snarkitude High” in 2005.

My own personal best in snarkitude took place in 2004, after Bush the Younger’s re-election. Flushed with victory, Republican talking heads simulatanously began chattering about a “Bush mandate” (“I have political capital. I intend to spend it“). In reaction, I “Google-bombed” “Bush mandate,” so that a search for that term led to the website for Mandate magazine, which featured, as I recall, the image of a fetching young gentleman in a sailor’s cap on the cover. This exploit, sadly, illustrates another characteristic of snark:

7) Lack of principles. After all, it’s not wrong to be gay, any more than it’s wrong to wear a sailor’s cap. The New York Times shows exactly the same characteristic here:

(This was too much even more Mother Jones: “There Are Better Ways to Mock Trump Than Joking That He’s Putin’s Gay Lover“).

However, snark’s unprincipled nature wasn’t the reason I gave it up (even if snark greatly influenced my style, my tone and locution). I didn’t like what it did to me personally: Always being galvanized into displays of mocking wit by events, instead of taking the time to being analytical; always outraged, and generating outrage; basically stabby. Further, the blogosphere had by then bifurcated into the Exra Kleins and Matt Yglesias’s of this world and us small fry; it was time to refocus. It was fun while it lasted, until it was not fun. No doubt the young people now discovering snark will go through a similar cycle, grid willing.[2]

* * *

I was moved to write about snark because of this thread from David Roberts (@drvolts; 221.3K Follower), late of Vox, who now has a Substack devoted to “energy and politics.” I’ll quote several Tweets from his account, where he’s reacting to @rickrudescalves:

Should be an exciting 100 days (I sympathize with the dislike of “civility”; back in the day, the late David Broder [genuflects] called us “vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers of the left [sic]” because we shared that dislike. Politically, it was utterly ineffective, except possibly at building an in-group). The assumption that Kamala is not “self-consciously morally superior” is interesting. More:

#2, Gleefully mocking: “kicking sand” is a degradation ceremony.

Let me now add:

8) Bullshit. “Not about exchanging semantic information” — as in, for example, that the couch claim is false — means, precisely, that snark is bullshit in Harry Frankfurt’s sense (“strategic indifference to the veracity of one’s assertion“).

More:

A liberalgasm. More:

“Bullshit” = “muscle” is a weird flex, but OK. More:

Well, at least we’ve only got “blood” and not soil. First, this is exactly same logic that led to the madness of RussiaGate. Second, it’s the same logic that will lead to Democrats denying Trump office, in the case of victory, by any means necessary (including, as we see, outright lying as a basic tactic[3], but going on from there). Third and finally, if liberal Democrats really want to play “dominance politics”, I think FAFO is in order as a reminder. And finally:

Well, I’m happy to see the “our democracy” put to bed because it was obvious nonsense. But if Clinton 2.0 thinks that running against “creepy, weird fuckers” (unlike, say, the totally not creepy convicted felon Anthony Weiner, whose Clintonian staffer, Huma Abedin, is now engaged to the totally not weird Alex Soros) instead of against “deplorables,” good luck to them.

If this is the reaction of a level-headed energy geek like Roberts, Lord only knows how more volatile liberal Democrats are reacting.

* * *

There remains the question of whether snark is effective (unaddressed and assumed by Roberts, presumably too enthralled by his calls for blood).

Twenty years ago, I don’t think snark was effective; Democrats took back the House in 2006 not because bloggers were foul-mouthed and snarky, but on two policy issues: The Katrina debacle, and Social Security, which Bush had threatened to spend some of his political capital cutting. (I believe that insiders familiar with that effort will argue that Pelosi was swayed by various online presences not to compromise with Bush, but I am very dubious that snarkitude had anything to do with it.) These were, in any case, policy issues. God knows we snarked on Bush for his stupidity, his religion, his towel-snapping, his Bushisms, for being a dry drunk, for his frat boy person, and on “Mission Accomplished,” and on and on and on, but none of it took. Policy did.

It may be that today, things are different. The Internet (social media, search) scales out to millions instantly in a way that the blogosphere did not. Arguably, Fetterman’s god-tier social media team kept his campaign alive and brought him to victory despite the stroke that disabled him (and I would be very interested to see if any of them are working for Kamala; something to research). For example:

TV: There were so many headline-worthy social media moments in the campaign. What was your favorite?

[Sophie Ota]: One of them has to be the crudité moment.[4] It really utilized every single part of my team. We got out a video and photos and I literally had my staffer run and get a veggie platter on her way to film time. And that photo was our most engaged-with post. We raised half a million dollars within 24 hours just off a sticker someone on my team designed. Then we were able to use that moment to get more people to volunteer with us and sign up for our relational organizing training and canvass-your-friends-on-social-media training. It went viral on Twitter, but it was also a big moment for every corner.

Of course, the the crudité moment was true; but as we have seen with the couch example, the truth is no longer needed.

If were a Republican, and still in the snark business, felt that the fate of the nation was at stake, and was convinced like Roberts that “dominance politics” is the order of the day, well… Two can play the game[5]. The phrase “la grande horizontale” comes to mind (along with “plausible deniability”). Not that there’s anything wrong with either of those two things. The next hundred days should be a wonderfully clarifying spectacle for voters and non-voters alike.

NOTES

[1] Fittingly, the phrase appears in a parody advertisement:

[2] Time presses, so I pass over the 2005 example of “Box Turtle Ben” (still virulent after nineteen years!), and sightings from 2020, and 2024 (very much everything old is new again).

[3] As, for example, Kamala did, along with every other Democrat who said that Biden was “sharp as a rack” (sorry, “tack.” MR SUBLIMINAL See how easy?)

[4] The moment, from Teen Vogue:

In a video originally posted in the spring, the heart surgeon, who was propelled to fame by Oprah Winfrey, walks through a grocery store. Things are rocky from the start: In the first five seconds of the video, he calls the store “Wegner’s,” and it turns out he was actually shopping at a store called Redner’s. “My wife wants some vegetables for crudités,” Oz says before picking up broccoli, asparagus, and carrots in turn and stating their prices. He goes on to include guacamole and salsa, commenting that it would cost “$20 for crudités, and this doesn’t include the tequila. I mean, that’s outrageous. And we got Joe Biden to thank for this.”

A 22-year-old Twitter user who goes by the handle @umichvoter and asked to remain anonymous to protect his privacy (and now has a Twitter following of over 27,000), shared the video with a simple message: “Who thought this was a good idea.” The tweet quickly went viral, with Fetterman sharing the original video from April with the message: “In PA, we call this a veggie tray.”

Notice that ‘Who thought this was a good idea” is almost identical to George Tsiveriotis’s example: “Can you believe this?”

[5] From a master of the art:

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About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

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25 comments

  1. sporble

    Am currently reading, got to what I expected to be footnote #1 and scrolled down and… no footnotes to be found. Maybe the internet ate them? In any case, so far, so good, even without the footnotes…

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      1. Vandemonian

        You’re too modest, Lambert. The footnotes are always the best part. I’m all in for afterthoughts!

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  2. steppenwolf fetchit

    When I compare the Democrats’ snark to Mr. Trump’s concentrated raw radioactive sewage, I dislike Mr. Trump’s raw radioactive sewage more.

    One hopes the Democrats will find something better to do than run against “deplorables”. But ” deplorables” is a ClintoMeme, just as ” bitter clingers” is an ObamaMeme. Perhaps the Democrats should put a poster of the Clintons and the Obamas on their wall and listen a few thousand times to the country song ” I got along fine before I met you, I’ll get along fine when you’re gone.”
    ( This is the closest web referrence I can find to something like it . . .
    https://archive.org/details/78_i-got-along-before-i-met-you-and-ill-get-along-after-youre-gone-he-sabido-sali_gbia0168190a )

    There’s a few things Democrats could run on, including listing some of the ugliest agenda items from the Project 2025 family of documents and saying ” Elect us and we won’t do that”.

    Lambert Strether hasn’t mentioned the Ratchet and the Pawl for at least several years now, but for those who consider another turn of the Ratchet to be a Turn Too Far, perhaps 4 More Years of the Pawl You Know might be enough to get their vote.

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    1. Screwball

      There’s a few things Democrats could run on, including listing some of the ugliest agenda items from the Project 2025 family of documents and saying ” Elect us and we won’t do that”.

      Yes, because they can’t run on their record. 7.5 billion to build 8 charging stations. 42 billion on unspent high speed internet funds while not renewing the Affordable Connectivity Act giving seniors a 30 dollar a month discount. Not passing a Roe v Wade bill while having all of congress. No medicare for all in the middle of a pandemic, while mandating experimental shots that do little. Not forgetting the Ukraine debacle, and of course the funding of genocide in Gaza, and the sabre rattling against the rest of who knows who. And Joe Biden still owes me $600.

      But we’re not Trump is all they have, and how do I know they won’t do that? I don’t believe anything that comes out of their mouth (how long did they hide slow Joe).

      Yea, we need more promises from these grifters. FJB, KH, the horse they rode in on and the men that sent them.

      FCC commissioner hits Biden admin for $42 billion in unspent high speed internet funds

      $7.5 Billion in Federal Funds Yield Only 8 EV Charging Stations

      Reply ↓
    2. Lambert Strether Post author

      This comment refers to The Ratchet Effect, a brilliant post from the old-school blog “Stop Me Before I Vote Again,” from 2005.

      I am not sure we are looking at a linear process (going round the ratchet) any more. As I have argued, both parties are gorging themselves at the fascist smorgasbord. For example, I don’t like Trump’s immigration proposals very much. OTOH, Democrat failed hope Gavin Newsom is actually throwing the homeless out of their encampments right now, and there are a lot of homeless people in California. I don’t like Trump’s vaccination policies for schools (as I have heard them restated) very much. But Biden is already responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people through his policy of mass infection without mitigation. Further, members of both parties were pulling on the ratchet at all phases of the ratchet’s movement; it’s not a simple binary.

      Obviously, it’s always possible to make things worse. I’m not an accelerationist; I don’t want things to be worse (“And worse I may be yet: the worst is not So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.'”). But it’s not at all clear to me which candidate is worse. For example, in 2016, we put off the Blob’s war in Ukraine by four years, and got project OWS.

      Reply ↓
      1. steppenwolf fetchit

        The question is . . . is one sides “worse” better or worse than the other side’s “worse”? Or are the two different “worses” merely different? If neither “worse” is actually worse than the other “worse”, then all kinds of choices become possible for all kinds of reasons.

        But if one worse is actually worse than the other worse, and if the worse worse is actually so much worse as to be potentially non-survivable, then the less-worse worse is the one to vote for.
        For decellerationist survivalist-possibility-enhancing reasons.

        I have decided that I am a decelerationist. Or would like to be, if there is a way to be.

        It has also been suggested that the only way out is through. But if one takes one way through as against another way through, one ends up at either one otherside or another otherside. And if one otherside is worse than another otherside, do we want to take the least-worse way through so as to get to the least worse otherside? In this stupidest of all timelines?

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    3. Benny Profane

      “There’s a few things Democrats could run on, including listing some of the ugliest agenda items from the Project 2025 family of documents and saying ” Elect us and we won’t do that”.”

      Yes they will. Haven’t you been paying attention? It’s worse. We destroyed a European country with another forever war. Really destroyed it. When they finally throw 18 year olds into battle, there will be nobody left. Then we’ve been funding and arming an ethnic cleansing genocide in the Middle East with a literal bear hug. You think this stupid Project 2025, which has been in the heads of libertarians since Ronnie, is worse than that? Then we’ve watched our hallowed “democracy” made a mockery of with the coronation of a candidate who is actually much less popular than Hillary, with zero voter input, and our entire bought and paid for press is acting like the mean cool kids at lunch, mocking anybody who isn’t a cool kid while they cheer on the doofy girl for student council president. All this after they REALLY TRIED TO KILL TRUMP. With a bullet to the head, not shrapnel.
      Dude, all this is what you have to fear. Not Steve Bannon’s blog.

      Reply ↓
      1. steppenwolf fetchit

        Are you inviting me to believe that it is the Democrats who tried to kill Trump? Can you offer me any reason to consider believing it?

        Project 2025 is a real thing just like global warming is a real thing. Project 2025 denial is as fantasy based as global warming denial.

        Now . . . which side ( if either side) offers more of those real things? That’s for individual citizen-voters to decide as best they can.

        Reply ↓
  3. JBird4049

    Let us distract you from the wars, genocides, omnipresent corruption, and ongoing ecological collapse, plus the increasing American poverty, homelessness, and hunger, not with epic attempts at dealing with it, but with snark.

    Nice post, but honestly, I just do not care about this partisan snarking and if they were unemployed, impeached, or in the docks at The Hague and I never heard nor saw them again in my lifetime, that would be fine.

    I just want them to all go far, far away.

    Actually, m

    Reply ↓
  4. Vandemonian

    So I assume that when the inter tubes start to fill up with snark about some Indian-Jamaican lass who slept her way to the top (but didn’t know what to do when she got there) @rickrudescalves, @drvolts and co. will be totally fine with that…

    Reply ↓
    1. Lambert Strether Post author

      > who slept her way to the top

      I don’t think that’s true, although I think she slept her way into two positions on boards for the State of California that were in Willie Brown’s gift. That’s corrupt, like much of Democrat-dominated California (see under CalPERS), but not “the top.” So don’t advocate for that view here.

      But if I were running The Snark Tank for the Republicans, that’s precisely the framing I’d use, and I’d start asking Willie Brown if he has tapes. If this is so obvious a humble blogger can see it, what is Susie Wiles waiting for? It will drive the Hillbots nuts, but they’re a lost cause anyhow, and not every suburban woman is a Hillbot; some of them are also, surely, believers in meritocracy.

      Reply ↓
      1. Vandemonian

        I’m not advocating for that view at all, Lambert, sorry if I gave that impression. I don’t go in for scuttlebutt and innuendo much myself. I was just musing about the sorts of things that snark from the other side might start to focus on.

        (The two paragraphs in your comments seemed to appear in two stages. I responded to the first without seeing the second).

        Reply ↓
      2. wendigo

        Wouldn’t focussing on the Willie Brown sex open up focussing on the Karen McDougall sex or the Stormy Daniels sex again?

        Not a good look for either.

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        1. Acacia

          Ah, but Stormy Daniels is not a politician who then arranged a high-paying public job for DJT.

          Important difference there.

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  5. chuck roast

    Geez…Lambert…I am so out of touch. Here I am sitting on my (ahem) couch with a well-fed cat in my lap, and you are delivering all this massive, normie, angst-in-my-pants, high-anxiety. What’s a geezer to do? Here is the original Snark. Apparently that didn’t work too well. I can only hope (thank you Pandora) that all of the thoughtful commentary in the next few months leading up to the validation of the usual a$$holes on Z/twit-face doesn’t doesn’t send you to the loony bin. You have the constitution of Joshua Slocum.

    BTW…is Taylor Swift any good?

    Reply ↓
    1. lambert strether

      Off topic, but I have heard from a member of my generation–who may choose to amplify their remarks–that Swift’s music is utterly forgettable. Perhaps that’s the appeal.

      Reply ↓
  6. jsn

    “Saving actual lives, preventing actual suffering, is more morally significant than discourse that flatters your identity.”

    Totally, like, yeah, this is so what Gaza & Ukraine are all about, saving lives and preventing suffering, yep.

    Zero self awareness.

    Reply ↓
  7. Socal Rhino

    Ms. Harris’s messaging so far reminds me of commercial TV ads calling a new entry the most popular new show of the year!, days before new programming begins to roll out. The anti-Vance snarky stuff I suspect will be liked by the kind of people who like that sort of thing, presumably laughing over brunch in Brooklyn. Just me, but snark that paints him as a loser is less effective than would be painting him as a Yale educated hedge fund running phony who profits when your family farm is sold to private equity. Call him a young Mitt Romney with a beard, or something.

    On substance, Vance is starting to draw a distinction with Harris on immigration policy, and he’s linking her policy with Elizabeth Warren, another person who probably is more highly regarded by PMC people on the coasts than working people in the rust belt.

    Reply ↓
  9. cgregory

    When did the Trumpies ever win on policy? They have always won by appealing to the limbic system. When Michelle Obama said, “When they go low, we go high,” it’s quite likely that she was referring to snark’s position relative to Trumpian libidinal assaults.

    Reply ↓
    1. lambert strether

      Trump’s 2016 position on trade was certainly policy. What’s more, he delivered on it immediately, by pulling us out of the odious, sovereignty-destroying, and never revivified TPP.

      Reply ↓

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