I think "weird" highlights two other keys to the race. First it undermines the narratives of strength and fear that the authoritarian impulse depends on - weirdos aren't strongmen! Second as you point out, it allows the Harris campaign to approach the anti-MAGA attack with joy & playfulness, highlighting a youthful energy that obviously had been lacking. And this will pay dividends because the MAGA leaders lack joy and youthful energy, making their anger & griping seem even more pathetic to outsiders.
Yeah this reminds me of what I had been hoping/expecting to see from Biden at the debate. Trump tries to present as an authoritarian strongman, when he's actually a giant loser still in denial about basic stuff like "you know you lost the last election, right?"
He's thin-skinned, and so are the people surrounding him. "Weird" punctures the bubble. It's fun, and provokes a revealing overreaction.
Of all the many, many (so very many) thinkpieces about the "they're just weird" phenomenon, this one is the first one that gets it right. The "weird" label sticks because we've all been thinking it for a long time now. What's more, because major media outlets have so assiduously sanitized the weirdos' antics to make them seem at least colorable as normal, many of us have spent a lot of that time wondering why we're the only ones that noticed. So, it feels good to hear someone say it out loud. No, it's not just you; these guys are really weird.
I was also glad to see someone understand that there is a world of difference between Clinton's "deplorables", directed at Republican voters, and Harris' "weird", directed at the candidate and his inner circle. It's astonishing how many writers can't seem to grasp this difference. The campaign isn't criticizing voters; it's just asking them, are you sure you want to put up with _this_ for the next four years?
"The Democrats are now the party of Taylor Swift and the NFL and Bud Light. The Republicans are the party of getting banned from regional theater productions of Beetlejuice: The Musical."
How is Dave landing absolute body blows in paragraph seven of a substack post? Who does that?!?
"You couldn’t pin “weird” on the Dole/Kemp ticket in 1996 or the Bush/Cheney ticket in ‘00 or ‘04. (Hell, Jack Kemp was a former NFL quarterback!) You could kind of pin it on Mitt Romney in 2012, but mostly because the guy had been way-too-rich for way-too-long. But the rhetorical strength of the Republican Party of old was that they were anchored in traditionalism."
This is right - and goes for McCain (but not Palin!) too - but the more explanatory piece is that the Congressional GOP from the 1994 midterms forward got VERY WEIRD and every cycle was a game of leapfrog in the primaries to get weirder and weirder. Connie Morella was my first Congressperson, a well-liked Republican representing a deep blue district that has since gone on to elect one of deep-blue Maryland's Senators and now, Jamie Raskin. To say there's no room for Connie Morella in today's GOP is obvious to the point of absurdity - the weirdos of the Class of 1994 are at a minimum, the median Representative these days.
And so the whole party basically pivots around this - the way up is to be weird on a local level, and then at the national level the whole bench is weirdos other than your occasional blue-state governor who's completely unpalatable to a national GOP electorate. So yes it's Trump's party and has bent to his weird will but it also *wanted* to and more importantly, there was just no particular power base to resist it by 2015, because it had already been thoroughtly en-weirdened.
[My theory of the case is the full surrender dates to post-Katrina GW Bush basically giving up while still in office and appointing Michael Steele as RNC Chair rather than a real consigliere - whether this was just giving up the ghost on an inevitable trajectory or just a bored and exhausted shrug of the shoulders, who can say]
Very good point. I think Rick Perlstein would argue this goes back to the 60s or 70s. A couple people on Bluesky noted that the Tea Party also cleared a lot of brush pre-Trump. I generally root it in '94, as do you.
(Also let's not get me started on Connie Morella as a bellweather of party change. I could probably write 2,000 words on the topic while uncaffeinated. Totally with you on that one.)
For sure Perlstein is right that this was bubbling under in the electorate (Ganz also covers this very well in "When the Clock Broke" especially w/r/t Duke and Buchanan) but yeah I think prior to '94 the institutional GOP kind of rode the tiger and then, didn't, and incentives shifted.
Gingrich Gingrich Gingrich. The first Republican party leader who made the 2-minute Hate official policy. Propaganda is another name for messaging, but the demonization Gingrich institutionalized was the Rubicon crossed and the bridge burned.
"he Harris campaign is focusing on the words and actions of specific Republican leaders, not generic Republican voters" I was going to make exactly this point, and you've done it neatly for me
Having said that, it still can backfire. Many weird leaders have had massive followings. Attacking the leader as 'weird' may indeed make their followers think they are attacked. That's why phrasing it as a question "and by the way, don’t you find some of their stuff to just be plain weird?" is psychologically sound (and also key), because what a question may do is people — who might support Trump — their own doubt about that conviction, not just confront them with your conviction (which doesn't work, convictions are essential stability and efficiency measures of our minds). If Clinton would have asked instead of stated, her opposition might not have been able to use it in the way they did.
See another good book "How Minds Change" by David McRaney about how these questions can be phrased even better (but only in one-on-one, so during canvassing).
Weird leaders attract and keep majority followings by pretending the stuff they're doing isn't weird. Serious people treat them seriously, and so regular people shrug and go with it. That's why it's so important to say it out loud. No doubt some Republican die-hards will interpret an attack on their candidate as an attack on them, but those aren't the people who will decide the election. It's the people sitting on the fence who will decide the election, and it's a good bet that many of them have also noticed how weird these people are. Validating those observations might be the nudge that pushes them away from the Republican ticket, but only time will tell.
Tangentially, I think you misdiagnose the Clinton "deplorables" comment. It was clearly directed at a segment of the voting public, and phrasing it as a question wouldn't have changed that. Ironically, she never meant to call anyone deplorable. If you read what she said, the gist of her comment was that many voters leaning Republican didn't fit the "deplorable" stereotype, and they had concerns that we should be listening to. However, she made that contrast by positing that Republican voters were divided half and half between deplorables and people with legitimate concern, and that went over badly for obvious reasons. Her best strategy, given what she was really trying to say, would have been to say that deplorables were a stereotype that doesn't really exist (even though we know that in fact there are a few of them out there), and we need to be listening to the legitimate concerns.
The lesson here is that there really is no percentage in criticizing voters, even the ones who will never, ever vote for you. The persuadable voters are too likely to see it as trying to take away their choice ("Either vote for me, or you're a bad person."), no matter how you try to qualify it. Criticizing candidates, however, works really well, especially when the voters recognize their own doubts about the candidates in it.
"The lesson here is that there really is no percentage in criticizing voters, even the ones who will never, ever vote for you." I agree.
"Weird leaders attract and keep majority followings by pretending the stuff they're doing isn't weird. Serious people treat them seriously, and so regular people shrug and go with it. That's why it's so important to say it out loud." Also true. People's convictions do not come from observations and reasoning (as we tend to think). It is even more the other way around (our convictions steer what observations and reasonings we accept — though this is hard for us to accept, we tend to see ourself as 'rational independent thinkers'). Our convictions are (mostly?) based on what we hear *often* and what we hear from people who are seen as *close* (that 'influencer' feels like a friend directly addressing *you*, the other commenters feel like your 'tribe' so are also close, and algorithms by social media strengthen the effect by giving you more of the same). So, indeed it is important to fight 'normalising' what should not be normal.
Conservative ideology is about CONFORMITY and forcing their patriarchal power to be acceptable, because anyone who doesn’t fit the mold (the marginalized, minorities, women, etc) is supposed to be dismissible and exploitable by those higher on the social tiers of “default” acceptability. To an average voter with Conservative leanings, being grouped in with the “WEIRD” isn’t just insulting— it’s an EXISTENTIAL THREAT.
The shame of being lumped in with weirdos isn’t just shame, but fear that they’ll join the very groups they’re trying their damnedest to ostracize out of society, like queer and trans people or the “unmasculine” or colorful. They’ve spent years trying to normalize their awful behavior because their awful behavior HAS to be made “normal” for the majority of their quiet sympathizers to feel comfortable joining them; that’s why Trump was seen as the second coming of Christ for those desperate to be seen as “normal” for openly being the misogynistic, xenophobic bigots they wanted to be. If it’s instead “WEIRD”, then conformity takes precedence over supporting the Right for the most moderate or on the fence voters, because to those with Conservative sympathies, confirmity is SURVIVAL.
And to a queer leftist or marginalized person, “weird” is practically a compliment, so seeing them cringe from the word only gives US more power. The Left recognizes that EVERYONE is weird, and one can either fear the moniker and suffer under the ideology of exclusion or EMBRACE weirdness and thus embrace the marginalized and outcast. Heads we win, tails they lose.
Love the phrase "mirth and verve." That and your point that "Calling it 'weird' is cathartic, because taking it seriously is so exhausting" capture what is so invigorating about this rhetorical move. I know it only has so long to run. As you say, it isn't a campaign slogan. But it sure is nice to restart the campaign like this.
I only recently discovered Carlo Cipolla's Five Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, and while it's meant to be amusing, it also rings true. If one takes these laws into account Trumps ascension makes a lot more sense.
The former leadership underestimated the amount, and destructive power of, the stupidity they were weaponizing against their opponents starting in the late 70's. They didn't understand the fourth and fifth laws.
Totally agree. There’s one thing we haven’t seen come fully into play yet that absolutely played a role in “deplorables” and that was the step where the people being targeted use conservative media to bleat out some variation on “if they attack any one of us, they attack all of us!!” It’s how “deplorables” became a Sparticus moment for all of them, it’s a time to signal in-group loyalty in the face of reality. They haven’t really tried the whole “if they attack me, Sean Hannity (or whoever), they attack you too” thing in masse yet. It will be interesting to see if it works this time around, like it did in the days of more strait laced Republicans that people could see themselves in vs.”nah man, you’re just weird. I’m not”
There are literally hundreds of pictures of people wearing Kotex on their ears in emulation of Donald at the RNC. IDK about you, but to me, that’s pretty fucking weird. So basically, bring it because Team Donny is a cult and since that might be a bridge too far, sadly, calling them weird works for a lot of his followers too.
Totally. I just hope that this time, when they are like “YES WE ARE ALL CREEPY WEIRDOS” that we just laugh at them as opposed to turning around and lecturing ourselves and our candidate and their and the media’s request.
All the "weird" stuff is the lingua franca of the undercurrent where the core of the Republican base has lived for some 40 years. What has happened is that the class of pundits and consultants whose job it was to sanitize and polish the Republican message are out of a job. They are the never-Trumpers, the Brooks and Douthats, the Bulwark and Lincoln Project. The Trump party has no need for liberal whisperers, because they are a majority and God is on their side, and they have a plan to ratfuck the election that doesn't require a majority of voters. We're just hearing and seeing the unfiltered Id being reported in mainstream media without the traditional spin.
I think there’s a lot to be said for this analysis. I just read a well-argued Substack from a right wing white nationalist arguing that Trump had likely lost the election, which went through each of the 13 “keys” to reach that conclusion. I vehemently disagree with this guy’s politics, but the piece was well-argued. But then I took a look at the comments, and hoo boy the weirdness down there was just extraordinary. Mad conspiracies treated as though they’re commonly accepted fact, violently racist rhetoric (attacking Vance in repulsive terms for marrying an Asian woman, for example), etc. Such people are a huge part of the Republican base now, and they believe they are normal and everyone else is weird. And the most significant change that came as a result of the momentum, was that the media has been willing to pick up the Harris campaign’s “weird” descriptor and start discussing the many many moments when Republicans do behave in a weird way, instead of pretending they weren’t. There’s a PR moment to analyse there.
The really great note that Harris and others are hitting with "you're being weird" is that they have a line of attack that ridicules the GOP and takes them seriously at the same time. One of the things that people miss about the history of Italian and German fascism is how cartoonish and stupid they looked when they appeared on the scene. The melodramatic and histrionic speeches, silly uniforms, crankish belief systems like occultism, hollow earth, Atlantropa, etc. The liberal, conservative, and socialist forces that could have stopped Hitler and Mussolini all underestimated them, and tens of millions of Europeans died as a result.
As with those two, the key factor in the rise of Trump is that powerful people who consider themselves smarter and savvier than him have been willing to ride his train, believing that it will ultimately help them achieve their own goals. This includes Mark Burnett, Les Moonves, Hilary Clinton, Ted Cruz, and nearly everyone on his 2016 campaign staff (no one expected him or really wanted him to win). The fact is that cunning is just a different way of being smart and savvy, and fascists are nothing if not cunning.
Circling back, what is good about this line of attack is what it gets right about fascists: they are incredibly dangerous and destructive, but gross, incompetent, and pathetic at the same time. For some reason, that fact got lost in our historical memory and we ended up with Musssolini making the trains run on time and with hyper-competent evil Nazis in snappy Hugo Boss uniforms.
“Weird” is probably also the best word for how normies view much of what comes out of the progressive/social justice left — e.g., discomfort with identifying women as the people most affected by abortion laws lest doing so be considered anti-trans; vilifying those who don’t make the language shifts cooked up in social justice bubbles; etc.. If you are a normie, the first reaction is probably “WTF?” The difference is that the people running the Democratic Party aren’t deep into that weirdness the way the Republican Party has fully embraced their brand of weirdness from the top down. (It wouldn’t hurt, though, for Democratic leaders to call our the weirdness on the left to re-assure the normie middle that they recognize weirdness broadly and are with the normies whereas Trump, Vance, etc are themselves deep in the weird.)
I've been fascinated by the weird tug-of-war going on in the Republican party. You've got MAGA being MAGA at the convention, for example, then these "Republican leaders" going ixnay on the EiDnay and firing the head of Project 2025. Makes me wonder if one of the reasons Manafort "stepped away" from the campaign was seeing the writing in ketchup on the wall. The pros are having a time keeping the Nazis in the box.
The weird, though. I believe almost all the never-Trump movement is people out of a job in the Trump party, and that job was making the Republicans sound sane. What we're seeing is the Republican Id unleashed and unrestrained, except for a few consultants trying to nail the door to the basement shut. So that tug-of-war is the only window we've got to what must be palace intrigue, since Trump Must Be Oneyed, and his orders are always based on who talks to him last.
I think "weird" highlights two other keys to the race. First it undermines the narratives of strength and fear that the authoritarian impulse depends on - weirdos aren't strongmen! Second as you point out, it allows the Harris campaign to approach the anti-MAGA attack with joy & playfulness, highlighting a youthful energy that obviously had been lacking. And this will pay dividends because the MAGA leaders lack joy and youthful energy, making their anger & griping seem even more pathetic to outsiders.
Yeah this reminds me of what I had been hoping/expecting to see from Biden at the debate. Trump tries to present as an authoritarian strongman, when he's actually a giant loser still in denial about basic stuff like "you know you lost the last election, right?"
He's thin-skinned, and so are the people surrounding him. "Weird" punctures the bubble. It's fun, and provokes a revealing overreaction.
Love it.
They should totally do a series of TV ads framing Trump as "The Biggest Loser." He'd go into a total meltdown.
Of all the many, many (so very many) thinkpieces about the "they're just weird" phenomenon, this one is the first one that gets it right. The "weird" label sticks because we've all been thinking it for a long time now. What's more, because major media outlets have so assiduously sanitized the weirdos' antics to make them seem at least colorable as normal, many of us have spent a lot of that time wondering why we're the only ones that noticed. So, it feels good to hear someone say it out loud. No, it's not just you; these guys are really weird.
I was also glad to see someone understand that there is a world of difference between Clinton's "deplorables", directed at Republican voters, and Harris' "weird", directed at the candidate and his inner circle. It's astonishing how many writers can't seem to grasp this difference. The campaign isn't criticizing voters; it's just asking them, are you sure you want to put up with _this_ for the next four years?
"The Democrats are now the party of Taylor Swift and the NFL and Bud Light. The Republicans are the party of getting banned from regional theater productions of Beetlejuice: The Musical."
How is Dave landing absolute body blows in paragraph seven of a substack post? Who does that?!?
"You couldn’t pin “weird” on the Dole/Kemp ticket in 1996 or the Bush/Cheney ticket in ‘00 or ‘04. (Hell, Jack Kemp was a former NFL quarterback!) You could kind of pin it on Mitt Romney in 2012, but mostly because the guy had been way-too-rich for way-too-long. But the rhetorical strength of the Republican Party of old was that they were anchored in traditionalism."
This is right - and goes for McCain (but not Palin!) too - but the more explanatory piece is that the Congressional GOP from the 1994 midterms forward got VERY WEIRD and every cycle was a game of leapfrog in the primaries to get weirder and weirder. Connie Morella was my first Congressperson, a well-liked Republican representing a deep blue district that has since gone on to elect one of deep-blue Maryland's Senators and now, Jamie Raskin. To say there's no room for Connie Morella in today's GOP is obvious to the point of absurdity - the weirdos of the Class of 1994 are at a minimum, the median Representative these days.
And so the whole party basically pivots around this - the way up is to be weird on a local level, and then at the national level the whole bench is weirdos other than your occasional blue-state governor who's completely unpalatable to a national GOP electorate. So yes it's Trump's party and has bent to his weird will but it also *wanted* to and more importantly, there was just no particular power base to resist it by 2015, because it had already been thoroughtly en-weirdened.
[My theory of the case is the full surrender dates to post-Katrina GW Bush basically giving up while still in office and appointing Michael Steele as RNC Chair rather than a real consigliere - whether this was just giving up the ghost on an inevitable trajectory or just a bored and exhausted shrug of the shoulders, who can say]
Very good point. I think Rick Perlstein would argue this goes back to the 60s or 70s. A couple people on Bluesky noted that the Tea Party also cleared a lot of brush pre-Trump. I generally root it in '94, as do you.
(Also let's not get me started on Connie Morella as a bellweather of party change. I could probably write 2,000 words on the topic while uncaffeinated. Totally with you on that one.)
For sure Perlstein is right that this was bubbling under in the electorate (Ganz also covers this very well in "When the Clock Broke" especially w/r/t Duke and Buchanan) but yeah I think prior to '94 the institutional GOP kind of rode the tiger and then, didn't, and incentives shifted.
Gingrich Gingrich Gingrich. The first Republican party leader who made the 2-minute Hate official policy. Propaganda is another name for messaging, but the demonization Gingrich institutionalized was the Rubicon crossed and the bridge burned.
I have a copy of Ganz's book but haven't had the chance to read it yet. Looking forward to that one...
Just finished, it's a banger.
"he Harris campaign is focusing on the words and actions of specific Republican leaders, not generic Republican voters" I was going to make exactly this point, and you've done it neatly for me
Indeed. Nixonland by Perlstein. Read!
Having said that, it still can backfire. Many weird leaders have had massive followings. Attacking the leader as 'weird' may indeed make their followers think they are attacked. That's why phrasing it as a question "and by the way, don’t you find some of their stuff to just be plain weird?" is psychologically sound (and also key), because what a question may do is people — who might support Trump — their own doubt about that conviction, not just confront them with your conviction (which doesn't work, convictions are essential stability and efficiency measures of our minds). If Clinton would have asked instead of stated, her opposition might not have been able to use it in the way they did.
See another good book "How Minds Change" by David McRaney about how these questions can be phrased even better (but only in one-on-one, so during canvassing).
Weird leaders attract and keep majority followings by pretending the stuff they're doing isn't weird. Serious people treat them seriously, and so regular people shrug and go with it. That's why it's so important to say it out loud. No doubt some Republican die-hards will interpret an attack on their candidate as an attack on them, but those aren't the people who will decide the election. It's the people sitting on the fence who will decide the election, and it's a good bet that many of them have also noticed how weird these people are. Validating those observations might be the nudge that pushes them away from the Republican ticket, but only time will tell.
Tangentially, I think you misdiagnose the Clinton "deplorables" comment. It was clearly directed at a segment of the voting public, and phrasing it as a question wouldn't have changed that. Ironically, she never meant to call anyone deplorable. If you read what she said, the gist of her comment was that many voters leaning Republican didn't fit the "deplorable" stereotype, and they had concerns that we should be listening to. However, she made that contrast by positing that Republican voters were divided half and half between deplorables and people with legitimate concern, and that went over badly for obvious reasons. Her best strategy, given what she was really trying to say, would have been to say that deplorables were a stereotype that doesn't really exist (even though we know that in fact there are a few of them out there), and we need to be listening to the legitimate concerns.
The lesson here is that there really is no percentage in criticizing voters, even the ones who will never, ever vote for you. The persuadable voters are too likely to see it as trying to take away their choice ("Either vote for me, or you're a bad person."), no matter how you try to qualify it. Criticizing candidates, however, works really well, especially when the voters recognize their own doubts about the candidates in it.
"The lesson here is that there really is no percentage in criticizing voters, even the ones who will never, ever vote for you." I agree.
"Weird leaders attract and keep majority followings by pretending the stuff they're doing isn't weird. Serious people treat them seriously, and so regular people shrug and go with it. That's why it's so important to say it out loud." Also true. People's convictions do not come from observations and reasoning (as we tend to think). It is even more the other way around (our convictions steer what observations and reasonings we accept — though this is hard for us to accept, we tend to see ourself as 'rational independent thinkers'). Our convictions are (mostly?) based on what we hear *often* and what we hear from people who are seen as *close* (that 'influencer' feels like a friend directly addressing *you*, the other commenters feel like your 'tribe' so are also close, and algorithms by social media strengthen the effect by giving you more of the same). So, indeed it is important to fight 'normalising' what should not be normal.
Conservative ideology is about CONFORMITY and forcing their patriarchal power to be acceptable, because anyone who doesn’t fit the mold (the marginalized, minorities, women, etc) is supposed to be dismissible and exploitable by those higher on the social tiers of “default” acceptability. To an average voter with Conservative leanings, being grouped in with the “WEIRD” isn’t just insulting— it’s an EXISTENTIAL THREAT.
The shame of being lumped in with weirdos isn’t just shame, but fear that they’ll join the very groups they’re trying their damnedest to ostracize out of society, like queer and trans people or the “unmasculine” or colorful. They’ve spent years trying to normalize their awful behavior because their awful behavior HAS to be made “normal” for the majority of their quiet sympathizers to feel comfortable joining them; that’s why Trump was seen as the second coming of Christ for those desperate to be seen as “normal” for openly being the misogynistic, xenophobic bigots they wanted to be. If it’s instead “WEIRD”, then conformity takes precedence over supporting the Right for the most moderate or on the fence voters, because to those with Conservative sympathies, confirmity is SURVIVAL.
And to a queer leftist or marginalized person, “weird” is practically a compliment, so seeing them cringe from the word only gives US more power. The Left recognizes that EVERYONE is weird, and one can either fear the moniker and suffer under the ideology of exclusion or EMBRACE weirdness and thus embrace the marginalized and outcast. Heads we win, tails they lose.
If Tom Friedman doesn't like it, I'm all in.
Love the phrase "mirth and verve." That and your point that "Calling it 'weird' is cathartic, because taking it seriously is so exhausting" capture what is so invigorating about this rhetorical move. I know it only has so long to run. As you say, it isn't a campaign slogan. But it sure is nice to restart the campaign like this.
I only recently discovered Carlo Cipolla's Five Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, and while it's meant to be amusing, it also rings true. If one takes these laws into account Trumps ascension makes a lot more sense.
The former leadership underestimated the amount, and destructive power of, the stupidity they were weaponizing against their opponents starting in the late 70's. They didn't understand the fourth and fifth laws.
https://principia-scientific.com/the-5-basic-laws-of-human-stupidity-according-to-cipolla/
Totally agree. There’s one thing we haven’t seen come fully into play yet that absolutely played a role in “deplorables” and that was the step where the people being targeted use conservative media to bleat out some variation on “if they attack any one of us, they attack all of us!!” It’s how “deplorables” became a Sparticus moment for all of them, it’s a time to signal in-group loyalty in the face of reality. They haven’t really tried the whole “if they attack me, Sean Hannity (or whoever), they attack you too” thing in masse yet. It will be interesting to see if it works this time around, like it did in the days of more strait laced Republicans that people could see themselves in vs.”nah man, you’re just weird. I’m not”
There are literally hundreds of pictures of people wearing Kotex on their ears in emulation of Donald at the RNC. IDK about you, but to me, that’s pretty fucking weird. So basically, bring it because Team Donny is a cult and since that might be a bridge too far, sadly, calling them weird works for a lot of his followers too.
Totally. I just hope that this time, when they are like “YES WE ARE ALL CREEPY WEIRDOS” that we just laugh at them as opposed to turning around and lecturing ourselves and our candidate and their and the media’s request.
I’d just give them a 👍 and a “so glad we can finally agree on something!” And leave it at that. Idk if it’ll work, but it looks good on paper. ;-)
All the "weird" stuff is the lingua franca of the undercurrent where the core of the Republican base has lived for some 40 years. What has happened is that the class of pundits and consultants whose job it was to sanitize and polish the Republican message are out of a job. They are the never-Trumpers, the Brooks and Douthats, the Bulwark and Lincoln Project. The Trump party has no need for liberal whisperers, because they are a majority and God is on their side, and they have a plan to ratfuck the election that doesn't require a majority of voters. We're just hearing and seeing the unfiltered Id being reported in mainstream media without the traditional spin.
I think there’s a lot to be said for this analysis. I just read a well-argued Substack from a right wing white nationalist arguing that Trump had likely lost the election, which went through each of the 13 “keys” to reach that conclusion. I vehemently disagree with this guy’s politics, but the piece was well-argued. But then I took a look at the comments, and hoo boy the weirdness down there was just extraordinary. Mad conspiracies treated as though they’re commonly accepted fact, violently racist rhetoric (attacking Vance in repulsive terms for marrying an Asian woman, for example), etc. Such people are a huge part of the Republican base now, and they believe they are normal and everyone else is weird. And the most significant change that came as a result of the momentum, was that the media has been willing to pick up the Harris campaign’s “weird” descriptor and start discussing the many many moments when Republicans do behave in a weird way, instead of pretending they weren’t. There’s a PR moment to analyse there.
The really great note that Harris and others are hitting with "you're being weird" is that they have a line of attack that ridicules the GOP and takes them seriously at the same time. One of the things that people miss about the history of Italian and German fascism is how cartoonish and stupid they looked when they appeared on the scene. The melodramatic and histrionic speeches, silly uniforms, crankish belief systems like occultism, hollow earth, Atlantropa, etc. The liberal, conservative, and socialist forces that could have stopped Hitler and Mussolini all underestimated them, and tens of millions of Europeans died as a result.
As with those two, the key factor in the rise of Trump is that powerful people who consider themselves smarter and savvier than him have been willing to ride his train, believing that it will ultimately help them achieve their own goals. This includes Mark Burnett, Les Moonves, Hilary Clinton, Ted Cruz, and nearly everyone on his 2016 campaign staff (no one expected him or really wanted him to win). The fact is that cunning is just a different way of being smart and savvy, and fascists are nothing if not cunning.
Circling back, what is good about this line of attack is what it gets right about fascists: they are incredibly dangerous and destructive, but gross, incompetent, and pathetic at the same time. For some reason, that fact got lost in our historical memory and we ended up with Musssolini making the trains run on time and with hyper-competent evil Nazis in snappy Hugo Boss uniforms.
By saying that conservatives are weird, you've just defined yourselves right out there in public as the side of conformism, mediocrity, and blandness.
I don't think the outcome is going to be good for you.
“Weird” is probably also the best word for how normies view much of what comes out of the progressive/social justice left — e.g., discomfort with identifying women as the people most affected by abortion laws lest doing so be considered anti-trans; vilifying those who don’t make the language shifts cooked up in social justice bubbles; etc.. If you are a normie, the first reaction is probably “WTF?” The difference is that the people running the Democratic Party aren’t deep into that weirdness the way the Republican Party has fully embraced their brand of weirdness from the top down. (It wouldn’t hurt, though, for Democratic leaders to call our the weirdness on the left to re-assure the normie middle that they recognize weirdness broadly and are with the normies whereas Trump, Vance, etc are themselves deep in the weird.)
I've been fascinated by the weird tug-of-war going on in the Republican party. You've got MAGA being MAGA at the convention, for example, then these "Republican leaders" going ixnay on the EiDnay and firing the head of Project 2025. Makes me wonder if one of the reasons Manafort "stepped away" from the campaign was seeing the writing in ketchup on the wall. The pros are having a time keeping the Nazis in the box.
The weird, though. I believe almost all the never-Trump movement is people out of a job in the Trump party, and that job was making the Republicans sound sane. What we're seeing is the Republican Id unleashed and unrestrained, except for a few consultants trying to nail the door to the basement shut. So that tug-of-war is the only window we've got to what must be palace intrigue, since Trump Must Be Oneyed, and his orders are always based on who talks to him last.