“Weird” Is a Rebuke to Republican Dominance Politics

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Are you weird? According to Democrats—who have made “weird” a new term of art for Republicans—you’re weird if you get overexercised about the genitalia of Olympic athletes, think childless people shouldn’t have the right to vote, and generally fixate on controlling women, families, gender, and sexuality for reasons that seem transparently bound up in your own embattled masculinity and deep shame. You’re weird if you yell in public about sharks, or about “Joe Biden’s border bloodbath,” especially while your hands dance to music only you can hear. You’re weird if you want to track strangers’ menstrual cycles but are mad that people know you Googled “dolphin porn.” You’re weird if you campaign vigorously on issues that fly against common sense, such as getting rid of library books, abolishing the Department of Education, and giving the President dictatorial powers. “Weird” is multipurpose, a catchall designation for extreme or intense things that Republicans do or say. Its capaciousness is part of its appeal.

It’s only a bit of an exaggeration to say that, semantically, “weird” doesn’t really mean anything. The Democrats’ disinclination to sharpen their critique telegraphs a desire to get on with it: to speed toward the future rather than linger in 2016. Back then, the liberal line on Trump was that he was “not normal,” and that his conduct as President should not be “normalized”—a rhetorical strategy that failed because “normal” doesn’t really mean anything, either. Eight years ago, “normal” could easily be bent to accommodate the democratically elected occupant of the White House and one of the most powerful men in the world. A President has too much status, and can launch too many warheads, to be prosecuted for strangeness alone. Maybe we’re the strange ones for voting them into office?

The reversal of that dynamic surely accounts for some of the glee that the “weird” brigadiers are spreading. My colleague Jay Caspian Kang proposes that “weird . . . allows liberals to slap back at years of similar aspersions from the right.” Socially progressive parties are more often tagged as outré, Kang observes, and so it’s satisfying to turn the tables, to “normalize [one’s] politics through the imagined average voter.” Democrats do seem relieved by a mounting conviction (among other Democrats, at least) that Republicans are not just cruel but deviant, and they have plenty of evidence to draw on, in the form of outlandish policy proposals and absurd comments. But another redefinition also appears to be taking place. The way liberals are using it, “weird” has less to do with one’s distance from the norm than with one’s desired level of control. With the Weird Sisters, in “Macbeth,” Shakespeare evoked the Fates, classical beings who decided who was born, exactly how long they lived, and how they died. The liberal capture of “weird” subtly registers that older valence, antiquity’s spin on the “control freak.”

When “they go low, we go ‘ew,’ ” Monica Hesse wrote in a smart piece praising “weird” ’s efficacy as a tactic. Hesse focussed on the word’s air of schoolyard contempt, which, she argued, reframed the would-be bad boys of the right as “kids in the corner eating glue off their hands.” But though “weird” is snarky, it’s not an epithet that would gladden bullies’ hearts. It’s not vindictive; it’s not precise. It doesn’t belabor the point, perhaps because displaying such antipathy and rancor toward another person would be, well, weird. Instead, “weird” is dismissive, implying that the specifics aren’t worth getting into: the brisk impatience of a tweet from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when she had to explain the phenomenon to Vivek Ramaswamy, is a far cry from the sadism we’ve come to expect from Trumpworld. (“Trying to watch what LGBTQ+ people do all the time is abnormal. Punishing people who don’t have biological offspring is creepy,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote crisply, as if annoyed to have to spell it out.) There’s an implicit expectation that weird behavior is temporary, a passing fever rather than an inherent trait. This contrasts with the brutal, identity-based attacks that characterize the MAGA movement.

For all the attention paid to how the word “weird” paints Republicans, its real utility seems to lie in the image it projects of Democrats. On the spectrum of insults, “weird” is fairly mild, with just enough sting to mean business—more of a forceful call-in, in contemporary parlance, than a devastating callout. The new rhetoric has helped prominent men in the Party, from Governor Tim Walz to Senator Chris Murphy to Senator Chuck Schumer, present an alternate vision of masculinity: something stoic, down-to-earth, relaxed, and trustworthy. Tellingly, Walz, who has been most closely tied to the attack, was just announced to be the Vice-Presidential nominee. Speaking about his Republican counterpart J. D. Vance, Walz, a former football coach, said, “It’s weird. I don’t want him talking about my family.” A more universal sentiment can hardly be imagined, and it’s especially charming in the mouth of America’s Midwestern Dad. In general, the “weird”-slinger comes off as frustrated but hopeful; under no illusions about his opponent but still fundamentally reasonable; prepared to indulge in some well-warranted ridicule but not to compromise his decency. These are the same old Dems, in other words, but newly willing to bring the fight. It’s no accident that “weird” ’s rise has coincided with Kamala Harris’s ascendency as a candidate, a moment of political renewal that has galvanized listless liberals. Rhetorically, “weird” conveys that unusual times call for unusual measures, and that the Democrats have finally figured out how to go both low and high at once.

There’s even a hint of caregiving in the left’s language. Weird is the sort of word a parent might use to wave away a child’s anxiety—“A monster in the closet would be pretty weird, huh?” It’s a way of acknowledging a fear without assigning it too much power. And it’s a form of containment. There’s a sense of quarantining this baffling political weirdness away from the rest of the country, not in anything so crazy as a physical structure—no need for that—but simply in a word, a gust of air, some sound attached. The wager of “weird” is that Americans of all stripes have been longing for de-escalation, a cooling hand on their brow, and that they’ll welcome a chance to distance themselves from the perceived fringe. Biden’s Presidency may have offered a measure of stability and sanity to those reeling from the unreality of the Trump years, but his reëlection campaign did not. The country seemed to be sleepwalking toward November as Trump’s rhetoric darkened and the Democratic establishment dismissed clear evidence of their candidate’s decline. As in a nightmare, we all had rigor mortis and couldn’t open our mouths to protest when we were told that these two men represented the best our political system had to offer. Harris, when she moved to the top of the ticket, jolted many people back to life. The fear and confusion aren’t gone, but her candidacy diminishes those feelings, makes them seem silly and insignificant. By running Harris, Democrats are signalling that they refuse to dwell in denial; and, therefore, that they refuse to fight MAGA on its own fantastical turf. If she wins, the country has a shot at waking up from an extremely weird dream. ♦

Sourse: newyorker.com