  Fascinating new phases of matter can emerge from strong electron interactions
in solids. In recent years, a new exotic class of many-body phases, described
by generalized electromagnetism of symmetric rank-2 electric and magnetic
fields and immobile charge excitations dubbed \textit{fractons}, has attracted
wide attention. Besides having interesting properties in their own right, the
models with generalized electromagnetism are also closely related to gapped
fracton quantum orders, new phases of dipole-covering systems, as well as
quantum information and quantum gravity. However, experimental realization of
the rank-2 U(1) gauge theory is still absent and even known practical
experimental routes are scarce. In this work, we propose a scheme of coupled
optical phonons and nematic degrees of freedom, as well as several concrete
experimental platforms for their realizations. We show that these systems can
realize the electrostatics sector of the rank-2 U(1) gauge theory. A great
advantage of the proposed scheme is that it requires only the basic ingredients
of phonon and nematic physics, and hence may be applicable to a wide range of
experimental realizations from liquid crystals to electron orbitals.
