The politics of weirdness

“Be more chill” is good advice, I hope Democrats fake it til they make it

For the last few weeks, Democrats (inspired by Tim Walz) have been spending a lot of time calling Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and MAGA Republicans in general “weird.”

This has taken off as a meme on the center-left, which in turn has inspired takes and thinkpieces on why this critique is so good, even though there isn’t really much evidence that it is good. That said, I do believe it’s pretty good, despite this lack of evidence.

What I think is good about it, though, is mostly that it’s new. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the longstanding Democratic critique of Trump as a threat to democracy, it had just become stale with repetition, the way anything said constantly for eight years would become stale. I have no idea whether “weird” is anything close to an optimal critique, but it’s good come up with something fresh to say. I also think it’s handy to be able to call attention to odd Trumpian racial provocations, like claiming Kamala Harris only adopted a Black political identity recently, without getting into a back-and-forth where liberals call him racist and then conservatives object that liberals are too quick to call people racist.

It is a weird thing to say.

But what I actually think is most provocative and interesting about weird as a critique is this: Relatively little politically messaging actually breaks through to swing voters, but it signals to other Democrats what they as good Democrats should think about Republicans. And the suggestion that what’s bad about Republicans is that they are “weird” implies that Democrats should strive to be “normal.” Which in factional terms is exactly what a lot of moderate Democrats have been dreaming of for years — let’s be the normal party!

Who’s afraid of normalcy?

Bernie Sanders, a shrewd political thinker even when I disagree with him, gets at the issue here, which is that positioning yourself in opposition to weirdness undermines calls for political revolution, even though he concedes that Trump is, in fact, quite weird.

The twin pillars of contemporary left politics are that the economic status quo in the United States is a broad-based catastrophe (Sanders recently published a book titled “It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism”) and that humanity is teetering on the brink of an “existential threat” from climate change. When Brian Beutler and I were talking on Politix about the “weird” critique, he was eager to point out that it helps shore up Democrats’ defenses on certain topics where issue polling seems to give the GOP an edge. And I agree with that, to an extent. But I think Bernie’s weirdness-aversion captures the fundamental dynamics better. The politics of “they are weirdos, we are normal” certainly supports classic progressive values of tolerance and humane instincts, but it cuts very strongly against demands for radical social upheaval.

To me, that’s fine. I respect a lot of what Sanders has done over the years. But the idea that 60 percent of the public is “living paycheck to paycheck” is false by any reasonable measurement. It comes from a random survey allegedly conducted by a random company that doesn’t even reveal exactly what question they asked. The median American household has a net worth of nearly $200,000, with about $8,000 in cash in the bank. Sixty-one percent of Americans own stock, and the homeownership rate is sixty-five percent.

Climate change continues to be a genuine problem, but the worst-case scenarios that motivated the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric that Sanders invokes have been averted.

None of this is to say that life in America is perfect. We should continue to seek cost-effective means of reducing emissions, find plausible ideas for increasing economic growth, and try to improve the social safety net. But Americans are, reasonably, somewhat risk-averse about politics and policy. Wanting to make multiple large simultaneous departures from the status quo is per se weird, and a politics of anti-weirdness has a small-c conservative bias.

Weirdness can be good

Meanwhile, as a writer, I of course, have my own mixed feelings about anti-weirdness.

A writer who was never weird would be boring and borderline useless to read. Vance — in his book, in his Frum Forum blog posts, in his articles from around the time the memoir was published, and in many of his podcast appearances as he moved toward the MAGA right — is a very interesting thinker. If I had to pick a member of the senate GOP caucus to become president, I’d go for a sensible, boring moderate like Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski, and if you made me pick someone more rightwing, I’d look at boring workhorses like Todd Young and Shelly Moore Capito. But I’d still rather read Vance’s book.

People sometimes ask me how I can be the One Billion Americans guy and also the advocate of a tedious, hyper-cautious approach to politics. The answer is that ideas should be interesting.

I’m trying to take some banal ideas — America is good, rivalry with China is important, population size matters for national power — and link them together in a way that is provocative and interesting and that frames a discussion about earnest public policy specifics related to housing, transportation, immigration, the welfare state, a non-doomer approach to climate change, and other things that I care about. Ideally, if your books have persuasive elements, you end up normalizing certain ideas. “The Rent Is Too Damn High” was very weird when I published it, but today there’s enough conventional wisdom around supply-side housing reform that it’s the subject of a lot of small-bore bipartisan legislation written by earnest workhorse politicians.

My sense of the media landscape is that things have gotten a lot better than they were five years ago, but we’re still in a place where there is too much conformity and not enough weirdness. Of course, it’s important to try to formulate ideas that are correct, not just interesting. But as a reader, you should be challenging yourself to study non-conformist thinkers, to explore ideas, to think new questions through on the merits. Editors should be protecting weirdness, encouraging writers to go out on limbs and try stuff out. Social media has turned too many people into defensive writers who live to serve a tribal niche.

In the arts, weirdness is even more important. As a comic book kid, I enjoyed the Marvel movies when they started coming out. But the years of MCU domination forced a kind of flat averageness onto mass culture. The best thing about Top Gun: Maverick being succeeded as box office king by Barbie (which has been superseded by Inside Out 2) is that these movies are very different from each other. We need weirdness in life…. just not necessarily in our two-party electoral politics.

Nobody likes the busybody party

Trump is weird in the sense of being an all-around strange guy.

But the “weird” critique really took off with Vance, because Vance has a habit of expressing strong opinions about what other people (particularly women) should be doing with their personal lives. Americans are an individualistic people who don’t like busybodies. Even topics as banal as motherhood and apple pie can turn rancid and politically catastrophic when you start casting aspersions on other people’s choices. Republicans try to counter that critique by painting Democrats as the party of drag queens and whatever else, but it doesn’t really work. The vast majority of prominent Democratic Party politicians are very conventional bourgeois family types.

The difference is that Democrats are also open and tolerant of the idea that people may want to live their lives in different ways. Gretchen Whitmer is a married mother of two, but she’s not trying to legislate how you dress or who you’re allowed to sleep with.

Which is great, and it’s why “don’t be weird” is a good theme for most Democrats. But beyond the anti-radicalism implications, mainstream Democrats should think a little bit harder about the busybody elements of their own coalition. A few years ago, lots of liberal jurisdictions were banning plastic straws. Everyone seems to have decided that’s dumb now, but instead we have places cranking up regulatory mandates to use electric cars or plug-in hybrids. Or we have the federal government saying everyone’s appliances need to be more water-efficient. Democrats never talk about this stuff on the campaign trail, because they know it makes them sound like weirdos. And they get annoyed when Fox News runs segments about it, because they know it makes them sound like weirdos. And Democrats really do have a good shot at being seen as the non-weird party, because they are disciplined enough to downplay these issues, and none of them come across as genuinely obsessed with micro-managing your washing machine.

But I do often wonder if they’ve ever considered just not doing that stuff.

The case for the Biden electric car rule is that it will reduce pollution externalities. So why not reduce pollution externalities with a gasoline tax? It would have the same environmental benefits, while preserving more consumer flexibility and also raising revenue that reduces the budget deficit and brings down interest rates with broad economic benefits. Well, because Democrats know that would be unpopular, because voters don’t care very much about climate change. Fair enough! But how does trying to achieve the same goal that voters don’t care about in a way that has a worse cost-benefit profile help?

On some level it’s simple — if you have a strong enough conviction that it’s the right thing to do, then you just do it and don’t mind that you may pay a political price. Which is fine, but that’s the weirdo mindset.

That’s what Bernie gets about this that people yukking it up on Twitter maybe don’t. Democrats do, in fact, do a pretty good job of coming across as normal and non-weird. But this basically just amounts to coming across as moderate. And so when you dive deep into the realm of weird vs non-weird vibes, you’re basically just reinventing the old wisdom that most voters are moderate (including most Black voters) and that because conservatives outnumber liberals, Democrats need big majorities of moderates to win. That means moderate policy, it means moderate framing of conventional policy, and it means downplaying progressive values in favor of case-by-case arguments and empiricism.

Trump really is very weird, and the fact that he won in 2016 created, I think, a sense that if he can win, then Democrats can let their freak flags fly. And to an extent that’s true; he’s a very unpopular guy and his presence on the ticket lets Democrats get away with more policy hijinks than they could if the GOP ran better candidates. But I think it would be better for Democrats to walk the walk on non-weirdness to an even greater extent than they do. So I hope Democrats get really into making fun of Republicans for being weird, and I hope that they start internalizing an ethic of non-weirdness and that the next time someone suggests they incorporate academic jargon into their public messaging or try to change which consumer products people are allowed to buy, they think twice — are we the ones being weird here? Because there is a time and a place for weirdness, but electoral politics is not it.