OPINION: Brat summer prompts voter dissonance

By Ana Vara
Assistant Editor
Published Thursday, Oct. 24, 2024

As the Troye Sivan- and Charlotte “Charli xcx” Aitchison-led Sweat Tour comes to an end and the brat remix album continues to top the charts, we have only just left the peak of brat summer—a phenomenon I can’t quite fathom to have grown quite as big as it has.

I should understand this. My second-ever college class taught us that the last sequence of the existence of social movements in contemporary American society is integration, a folding into the mainstream culture. My mind won’t budge.

Though I can see it. There we are, the American populace, barrelling down from the brat green hill that we decided to stake our Jonathan “Lil Jon” Smith-endorsed Democratic National Convention decision on, lest we lose grasp of term limits entirely. It’s not so surprising to me.

I remember canvassing doors for a Democratic Party congressional candidate during high school with a friend, car speakers blasting xcx’s Lipgloss as we drove down the rows and rows of sad beige houses. There’s a certain kind of cognitive dissonance required to do this kind of work. It’s the kind that is asked of us when voting, when we’re asked to think of the lesser of two evils and submit to the banal cruelty of the two-party system.

This is not one giant advert to vote or not to vote. God knows we’re past it since by the time the physical print of this story is out, we will know whether our country has fallen into one danger-shaped hole or another.

Also, as annoying as it is, a certain brand of gay person and respectable political stances have existed alongside one another for many decades: the “kamala IS brat” of it all, at least according to xcx’s tweet on X, formerly known as Twitter. It’s just that the burdensome cross of capitalism has come to grow heavier and heavier over the years. When its body finally gives way to its mortality, as is signaled to us now, there is little left to do besides watch its fall.

It’s not that I want this to happen so much as I feel that, as humans, we fail to see the starting line of our problems and in that effort, fail to see how debilitatingly close we are to the precipice, even from the very beginning. The belief that this new thing, the latest in a long series of mirrors we hold up to ourselves, will save us or free us is our cognitive dissonance. I am not advocating for one party over another. All I can really say is that our pop culture is indicative of the cultural moment we occupy—we seek escape and in escape, the past.