Why Does "Weird" Work? - Mother Jones
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) taps on a malfunctioning microphone during a campaign event in Reno, Nevada, on Tuesday, July 30, 2024Jae C. Hong/AP
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It began with Tim Walz on Morning Joe.
Auditioning for the Democratic nod for vice president, the Minnesota governor steamed through complaints about the Republican politics of the present. Sen. JD Vance, Walz said, "gets it all wrong" when he talks about small-town values. "It's not about hate. It's not about collapsing in. The golden rule [in rural America] is mind your own damn business."
Walz argued Republican policies had destroyed Vance's imagined idyllic America; conservatives had pushed division through book bans and an isolated world wrought by trickle-down economics. "We do not like what has happened," Walz said, seeming to speak for an unmentioned mass of people, "where we can't even go to Thanksgiving dinner with our uncle because you end in some weird fight that is unnecessary."
The host laughed.
"Well, it's true," Walz responds to the chortle, "these guys are just weird."
Since then, the word has become a catchphrase for Democrats to describe their conservative opponents, infuriating Republicans.
"Weird" has done a particularly good job where other Democratic slogans have failed. I think the main reason is that Walz's attack flips the usual Republican appeal to a silent majority. For years, demagoguery on the right has been a way of telling Americans that their racism and hatred are shared—broadly accepted if not broadcast. In so doing, there is invoked a myth of normalcy; the unspoken-for bigoted masses.
In this way, the right self-victimizes. They say they speak for the "forgotten man," as historian Lawrence Glickman has written, downtrodden by the government and forced to appease; here is "a cross-class group of productive white people [who] are forced to subsidize unproductive and unworthy others." These normal people, conservatives say, are burdened by all this liberal bullshit.
"Weird" reverses and intervenes at the crucial point of transmission of that idea. No, it says, the appeals by the right to supposed family values (anti-trans bigotry; restricting no-fault divorce; slashing public school funding; hatred of immigrants) are not normal. They aren't fundamental American values that the liberal elites have somehow derailed. They are, instead, deeply strange. And "we" (a new silent majority that Walz invokes in his use of "weird") are tired of it.
Democrats have long failed to sound like real people when playing cultural politics. Finally, with "weird," they sound honest. The Minnesota governor said it randomly and doubled-down. It is not a shifting, focus group-tested insult brought back to life from a vaudeville talkie ("morals of an alley cat!"). It is a jibe that sounds human.
So often Democratic hits against Trump, and, importantly, against those who voted for him, have been horrific. Not bad—but terrible. During the 2016 race, Hillary Clinton said half of Trump's voters fit into a "basket of deplorables"; she described a misbegotten group economically blighted into bigotry. Clinton meant this as a way to speak honestly about how many Americans truly believe bad things. But it did not sound that way.
Clinton's comments caused such havoc because they seemed to reveal how she really felt about a huge swath of Americans (more than 30 million, apparently), shining a light on what the worst version of the modern Democratic Party believes. She described a group of forgotten Americans, too—and she said they are to be pitied; these poor souls duped on cultural issues. Oh well, the idiots vote for Trump! What can you do? It was a liberal version of the infamous comment by Sen. Mitt Romney about how "47 percent" of people are just beholden to the Democratic Party because of public benefits.
The "deplorables" comment and the subsequent meandering around America to talk to Trump voters produced this constantly from Democrats. They did not say what they felt because what they felt was disgust. Even the empathy reeked of sanctimony.
Walz's comment, by contrast, implies a new Democratic take. It does not pity. It does not look from the outside at Trump voters. And it does not assume with condescension. Instead, it implies Trump voters are known, even members of your family—specifically, your uncle—whose annoying opinions have been allowed to flow free. And Jesus Christ man now everyone is weird as hell and ruining the holidays.
Deplorables could be adopted as the majority condescended to by out-of-touch liberals. (We're all deplorables!) But "weird" cannot be co-opted to stand for a silent majority. It is something the majority says about the people making your life worse. In this way, it makes Republican family values abnormal and odious. A neat trick.
Vance is a good target for this. His book, Hillbilly Elegy, ironically is the flip side of the same coin as "deplorables." It says, yes, please do understand the Trump voters—I will say they are culturally broken. To understand the Republican nominee for vice president, as I've written before, is less about what has changed about him since 2015 than about what has not changed: Vance has always been someone trying to do some version of Trumpism without Trump—and explain the appeal to the upper classes. Before it was to sell books to liberals; now it's to get people on board for MAGA 2024.
So much of the first Trump era (God it's been almost a decade of this) has forced pundits and opponents to try to understand Trump as a person. Good luck. The entire exercise has felt like an exhausting, stupid psychoanalytic chasing of one's own tail by political journalists and columnists. Vance and Project 2025 have helped shift the focus to Trump's substance in a way that lets Democrats attack his policies without attacking his voters' identities. Vance is the living embodiment of how Trump's America has made a bunch of semi-normal politicians into absolute freaks. So, when you call the MAGA elite weird, you're saying how Trump and his policies forced a strangeness on all of us.
"Weird," as a word, has an interesting valence on this point. Instead of a general mangling of phrases over time in English, you can be rather specific with its etymology. In Shakespeare's Macbeth, there are three witches—the Weyward Sisters. Or, as we know them now, the Weird Sisters. That is where weird basically comes from. These witches are not simply oddballs. Instead, they control, or channel, fate with a particular and twisted sense of morality. That history gives weird a specific connotation: It is not simply eccentricity; it implies a dark and imposing freakishness. The Weird Sisters do strange stuff and it actively makes the world worse.
If you'll allow me to stretch here, I think that's how Republican policies feel when described by Vance. These things he wants, these cultural politics—about sex, love, lust, parents, children, the family—have all been presented as conservatives saying let's get back to normal. And it gives us that normality as the strict straitjacket of the American family. They impose on your private life. And so the reason Walz's comment stuck, I have come to think, is because weird describes that. It shows these forces—like those witches, like Vance's tech bro-inflected cultural extremism—that disrupt the fate of your family and your community without your control or say.
As I watched Walz, I could not help but think of another famous moment. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson released a famous ad called "The Confession of a Republican" against his radical right opponent Sen. Barry Goldwater.
"I've always been a Republican," a man explains, in his suit and glasses. He appears almost, as John Dickerson has noted, to be engaged in a therapy session. The conservative, alone—working through his anxieties. "I mean, when the head of the Ku Klux Klan, when all these weird groups come out in favor of the candidate of my party," the man laments, "either they're not Republicans or I'm not."
That ad gained a second life in 2016, as conservatives kvetched about the ascension of President Donald Trump. That Republican moment has long passed. Trump is the standard bearer of his party. Many on the right do not need absolution anymore, simply permission.
In the story of Vance—his switch from Never Trumper to running mate—we see the answer to what happens when you do not say it is not possible for weird people to support your party. In trying to figure out how to become a Trumpist, he has accidentally revealed the core of the former president's appeals to common sense. How, at the bottom, a lot of what the right thinks is normal—about the family, about the markets, about immigrants, about race—is, when you try to explain it, weird.
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