“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” This coconut tree meme epitomizes the duality of modern American social life: to some, it represents simple silliness; to others, it is subtly insightful. For the latter, this notion of understanding our life within our social and historical context has near-universal applications (see the brilliant book The Social Construction of Reality by Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann), one of which is the here and now of her presidential campaign.
As America begins to scrutinize presidential candidate Kamala Harris, she will not be judged simply by who she is, she will be judged through our matrix of misapprehensions. Somehow, over half of America believes we are in a recession, despite consistently strong GDP growth, including 2.8% in 2Q 2024. Likewise, most Americans believe Republican presidents are better for the economy, even after adding 15 million jobs under Biden-Harris, losing 3 million under Trump, gaining 11 million under Obama, and gaining only 1 million under Bush Jr. --in fact, since World War II, the economy has grown over 50% faster under Democratic presidents than Republican (see Blinder & Watson, 2016). Even more surprisingly, 46% of Americans (and 77% of Republicans) still believe that climate change is not a major threat, despite unprecedented heat waves, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires. Man-made climate change reached the “gold standard” of certainty in 2019, yet the official Republican party platform is to drill, baby, drill, at the risk of rendering the planet uninhabitable. Such common misconceptions will skew our interpretation of this race, discounting the economic and environmental achievements of Biden-Harris, and minimizing the economic and environmental threats of undoing their work.
Such misapprehensions did not simply fall from a coconut tree; they arose from a well-funded, well-organized misinformation machine. Since President Reagan rescinded the Fairness Doctrine that required news to be presented fairly, pundits have made millions making claims they know to be untrue. These lies are largely crafted and promulgated by the billionaires who benefit from them (see Blinded by the Right by David Brock). Charles Koch, the biggest polluter on the planet, spent hundreds of millions to convince Americans that climate change is natural and good. Similarly, health insurance companies underwrote campaigns against “socialized medicine” in order to cannibalize the more efficient Medicare system and protect their billions in bonuses. And the whole “tax cuts will pay for themselves” subterfuge was clearly untrue, but it helped the billionaires get another tax break, while saddling the country with trillions more in debt. In this context, Kamala Harris is not campaigning in an environment of pure policy and fact-based debates, she is running against a misinformation machine that was built to cloud reality and benefit the rich.
In addition, the Harris campaign must contend with “what came before” her, namely America’s history of divisive, fear-mongering politics. Reagan’s old “welfare queen” trope helped his election, even though he never met such a queen, and his campaign aide Lee Atwater later confessed that the whole point was dog-whistle racism. Recently, JD Vance blew that same whistle when he said Harris has been collecting a government paycheck for decades. (Obviously, all government officials do, but he never said that about the others.) Likewise, Reagan’s association of African-Americans with drugs and crime has stuck in the nation’s consciousness (see The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander), and has been an effective campaign tactic ever since. Just as the “Make America Great Again” slogan was taken from Reagan, so, too, has this trope, with the substitution of immigrants for African-Americans. The wild idea of illegal immigrants rampaging across the border with their drugs and crime is clearly the theme of her opponent’s campaign. Such xenophobic imagery resonates with voters, belying the facts that immigrants are safer than American citizens, violent crime is at a 50-year low, border crossings are plummeting, and most illegal immigrants today are not “streaming across the border,” but simply overstayed their visa. Facts have never stood in the way of dog-whistle racism’s effectiveness. Thus, we can expect more of the same dirty politics throughout the campaign, and we should understand them within this historical context. Put pejoratively, modern political discourse is not written on a tabula rasa, the page is already covered in scribbles, and someone broke the pen.
All told, we exist in a warped vision of reality propagated by a misinformation machine that was designed to obscure reality to the benefit of a few billionaires and their human tools. Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign stands at the nexus of all these strands. Her task is to navigate the vortex of nonsense and articulate a clear, compelling vision for the future. She must be strong enough to avoid the “weak woman” stereotype, but not so strong that she triggers the “hysterical woman” stereotype. Assisting her are those who believe in democratic norms and women’s rights, and are mobilizing to protect these rights from “official acts” of tyranny and the dystopia of Project 2025. Given these stakes, 2024 might be the most consequential election in history.
And, so, superficially, this candidate and her meme might be misconstrued as silliness. But Kamala Harris and her coconut tree story did not simply drop from a coconut tree; we should understand them in the context of here and now and all that has come before, of all our misapprehensions and all those who benefit from them. And, viewed within that context, this idea can offer the insight we all need to uncover and neutralize these alternate social realities and keep the nation and the world moving forward.
