The Democrats are in a bind. To gain crucial swing states they must forge a level of identification with the rural working class. And it has to be stronger than the one already forged by JD Vance, who grew up in Appalachia and wrote a book called Hillbilly Elegy. Enter the Harris-Walz campaign’s newest merchandise offering: a trucker cap in camouflage print. It costs $40 and has “Harris-Walz” in orange block capitals. “The most iconic political hat in America,” boasts the copy on the website.
Harris and Walz have accidentally drawn attention to a hard truth: Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” baseball cap remains the most iconic political hat in the world. It is “iconic” in the same way that particular photographs of Woodstock or Andy Warhol’s Factory are. One glance gives you a near-complete idea of the affiliated socio-political movement, from its nostalgic idealism and brashness (the Serif font and bright-red, all-caps design) to its targeted class affinity (the hat itself, which comes straight from the blue-collar sports field).
The Harris-Walz trucker hat fails to tap into any of this. Instead it draws attention to their anxiety about the urban-rural divide, and their appeal – or lack of – to the middle-American working class. High gas prices were a major point of public contention during Biden’s presidency, and unrest in the Middle East may force a further rise in costs by the November election. Everyone sees the knock-on effect in the price of transported goods, but the truck-driver, for example, is confronted regularly with the actual price at the pump. Meanwhile, America’s political and media elite are clustered in urban Democrat strongholds – cities with comparatively strong public transport systems, like New York or Washington DC. Some of this population are perfectly capable of maintaining their livelihood without ever driving a car. One of these groups are natural Democrats and the other, well, they are who the hat is aimed at. But without any detail about how the Harris-Walz ticket plans to rectify the numbers at the gas station, the hat will be no more than an identitarian sticking plaster, and an inauthentic one at that.
The 2016 presidential race relied on wholesale, accidental authenticity. Sometimes this caused deleterious second-hand embarrassment, like when Hillary Clinton told everyone to “Pokémon go to the polls.” Sometimes it worked on a large scale, as with the Trump hat. But in 2024 we are done with being sincere, we are in an era of no-holds-barred reflexivity, a hyper-speed ecosystem of memes that are used and discarded before a mass audience even notices. Kamala is brat – no wait, Trump is brat?
Then there is the case of the ironic-cultural-reference hat, a subversive development in merchandising which has become common enough to loop back to cliché territory. An early example came in 2021, when Sally Rooney’s publisher branded bucket hats with the title of her new novel. They were shipped to book influencers, who were meant to wear them on TikTok and Instagram. The brand Minor Canon now sells baseball caps featuring the names of dead authors who “advanced a critical, meta-literary approach to writing”, including Simone Weil, Italo Calvino, and Doris Lessing. This isn’t cultural appropriation as much as cultural negation: blue-collar pastimes are evoked just to play up a contrast with the intellectual exclusivity of literary publishing. One could buy the Daunt Books tote bag, a more traditional signifier of middlebrow literary interest, or they could wear a baseball cap whose main selling point is the absence of a baseball team. The message makes fun of the medium.
This helps to explain why the Harris-Walz hat fails. In making the early assertion that truckers will specifically want to boast of voting Democrat, campaign staffers actually advance the idea that most of them will reject the ticket and vote for Trump – that the Democrats subvert essential trucker interests. Now sincerity has jumped the gun, words on clothes generally pre-empt their opposite sentiments. If you looked into the cab of a truck in rural America and saw the Harris-Walz logo instead of the Maga slogan, you’d affect an informed modicum of surprise – just as you would if you saw a loud-and-proud Simone Weil fan in the stands at a baseball game.
Harris’s marketing team are clearly well-versed in internet trends, and this is likely the intended mechanism of the trucker hat: it’s fodder for lucrative viral marketing. But the West was not won with insincerity. Somewhere in the 20th century, the wide, open highway became an integral part of America’s national image. Western films exploded after the Second World War: the free-roaming cowboy appealed to audiences who were starting to familiarise themselves with the bounds of an expanding empire.
Yesterday’s pioneering cowboys are today’s truckers, and the geographic sprawl they inhabit comes with untapped symbolic potential. The Democrats must beat JD Vance in taking it seriously. But their campaign team have come too late to the party. The chattering classes have ironed over all their useful symbols and identifiers. If they want genuine rural appeal, they should make like Kerouac and ramble across America.
[See also: Britain’s exam delusion]
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