It was like a Big Ten frat party, only on Zoom, with no beer pong or flip cup.
On Monday night, the “White Dudes for Harris” fundraising video call raised close to $3 million for presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and drew some 65,000 attendees (later upped to 123,000; both numbers impossible to confirm), according to organizers.
“You can give until it feels good, and then you should give until it hurts a little bit, and then keep giving until it feels good again,” said one of those organizers, Democratic activist Ross Morales Rocketto, co-founder of Run for Something. At least I think he was talking about fundraising.
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The call was one of several in recent days that sought to capitalize on the energy that followed President Joe Biden’s announcement that he was dropping his bid for re-election, leaving his vice president as the frontrunner to replace him: 44,000 attendees on a Zoom forum sponsored by Win With Black Women, followed by a similar event for Black men.
Last week, white women held a fundraising Zoom call for Harris, featuring celebrities including Connie Britton and Pink. Reportedly, close to 150,000 people joined.
Inevitably, the white guys were going to get in on the act. And so they did, with a lineup that included actors Jeff Bridges, Bradley Whitford and Josh Gad, federal Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Govs. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Tim Walz of Minnesota, and many others.
“It’s not so much a fight, but it’s a surrender to our higher thoughts,” said Bridges, who played the routinely stoned Dude in The Big Lebowski.
That was maybe not the crispest message of the evening. Luckily, Bridges was followed by Buttigieg, dressed in a white shirt and dark tie, reciting prepared lines about the future of American democracy and failing, as ever, to hide his own immodest ambitions. You could see them like stains on his shirt.
Whitford, who played Josh Lyman on The West Wing, the aspirational Aaron Sorkin series, has become increasingly active in Democratic politics in recent years. “This is so far from a sure thing,” he said on Monday night, seemingly seeking to temper the surging enthusiasm for Harris.
On the whole, white dudes—or white men, more precisely—have been the core of the MAGA coalition, though their support for Trump may not be quite as ubiquitous as it may seem. “Masculinity as a trope has been co-opted by the MAGA right," Morales Rocketto said.
It will take more than a single Zoom call to reverse that trend, but Monday evening echoed the tenuous hope of 2008, when Barack Obama seemed to promise a brand new style of politics. That promise was realized by his iconoclastic successor, Donald Trump.
“This too shall pass,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, speaking of the Trumpist politics that have dominated American politics since 2015.
Maybe, dude. Maybe.
