It was former President George W. Bush who first said, after listening to Trump's "American Carnage" Inauguration Speech, "Now that was some weird shit."
Yes yes and I was thinking of his assessment recently but didn't really emphasize the word weird! How else do you describe a president who failed his way into the job through repeated bankruptcies and businesses from casinos, to football teams to Trump this and Trump that. It's at least moderately weird that he would attempt to deny that he had anything to do with project 2025 when it is covered with the orange stains of his fingerprints and is like a photographic negative of our constitution.
No, KGB (FSB) or GRU hacked the DNC, specifically their ad-buying data in the battleground states. And of course all the shabby treatment meted out to the Sanders campaign. And leaked it to the Trump campaign via Wikileaks.
FOX was already fully onboard with Trump after he won the primary.
Russia hacked the DNC in 2016, but they hacked Fox News two years earlier to interfere with the GOP primary: initially just to stop an anti-Russia hawk like Marco Rubio getting the nomination, but their support for Trump turned out to be pushing at an open door.
1. They engineered a sex scandal (by manipulating Roger Ailes into stopping the hush money payments to the women he'd harassed) which cleared the way for Kremlin stooges Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity to become leading anchors at the channel, and
2. They assisted Trump to win the GOP primary by providing him with inside information on the campaign strategies of his rival Republicans.
MAGA wants Democrats to go back to talking about policy, because they know that's boring. They want all the snark and jokes coming from them.
It's a tragedy that swing voters are not interested in policy, but that is a fact. It is a tragedy that the 2024 election has come down to sandbox insults, but that is a fact.
I have been thinking for several weeks that Dems need to flood the zone with **** a la Steve Bannon. Just generate so many insults that it is impossible for the other side to answer. Although I love Joe Biden and prefer him to Harris, he just was incapable of such mindless insults.
So, to contribute to the cause I have composed my own mindless insult in the voice of Adam Sandler.
Where de weirdos?
Dere de weirdos!
Scare de weirdos!
Warn de weirdos!
Tell them they are way, way out on a bell-shaped-curve.
I've been posting a number of columns of yours over at the conservative The Dispatch.
Nick Cattagio referred to you this morning.
“To Republicans, being called ‘weird’ is a bitter demonstration of their defeats in the culture wars of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s,” the economist Noah Smith wrote astutely on Wednesday."
Hi, DougAZ. I used to post on the Dispatch as Neelthakrebew. I got thrown off for using the word the N-word one time, when there was no announced rule. Obviously, I was using it ironically. No warning, just banishment.
Surely it's the other way around. I think they want Democrats to talk about policy because policy is what's supposed to be important and what people are theoretically voting for. The phrase "MAGA" is itself a kind of policy statement, a statement of goals, even if vague. Trump talks about policy all the time and this is a big part of his support - lots of Republicans out there dislike Trump the man but like his policies. They "hold their nose" and vote for him because they want what he promises to do, as the trope goes.
Noah claims that this insult is getting under Republican's skin because it's somehow insightful or true. But the evidence presented for it getting under anyone's skin is wafer thin: there's a tweet in which someone points out that this is how teenage girls talk and they should be treating the presidential race like serious adults, and then there's a link saying Fox has "scrambled to prove" that JD Vance isn't weird, which goes to a video description that "Watters just made a supercut that did nothing to push back on the talking point". But the video is maliciously edited. Watters starts by illustrating that this is what the Democrats are now saying, and is clearly about to respond when the clip suddenly ends, well before the natural end of the segment. We don't get to hear his pushback. Presumably that means New Republic felt it was too on-point to show their own readers. Instead they claim there wasn't any, an absurd thing to say! couldn't find a copy of the original clip on YouTube to see what really came after, but such segments always have the same format: supercut of the other side saying the same thing over and over, then mockery of it.
This sort of behavior by the American left is by itself weird and unsettling. They seem to have decided that their new form of politics is going to be "post-policy". Harris' website doesn't mention any goals other than beating Trump, which to me as an outsider is both astonishing and deeply strange. She had plenty of time to prepare for this as she clearly knew Biden was senile, yet, she hasn't laid any policy groundwork. What does she want? Why is she even running at all?
Democratic politics in the rest of the world doesn't yet have any equivalent of this phenomenon - politics is still deeply about party policies. Hopefully this trend doesn't migrate outside the US.
Frankly I don't think you realize how weird and far out _you_ seem to be here. Trump is crude but he's not weird. Guys like that are ten a penny. He knows what he wants to do and talks the language of the bar, which is like most men. Meanwhile the whole world has seen disturbingly crazy stuff in the past month, like the discovery that most of you didn't know the US President is senile, something that's been common knowledge around here outside the states for years! How is that possible? And then the split-second shifts in which everyone on that side suddenly starts repeating the same talking points out of nowhere in a way that's obviously coordinated, whilst also claiming to be fully independent of each other? It gives off very strong Matrix vibes, like nothing is quite real.
Not gonna lie, I think writing substack articles on using mean squared prediction error to “identify the wokeness levels of employees” is pretty fucking weird bro.
I'd argue that the "weird" accusation is just a way of pointing to all the things that make voters a bit uncomfortable about Trump and Vance that doesn't overclaim.
What keeps happening to the democrats is they see Trump saying something that indicates he doesn't respect traditional norms -- eg his various suggestions he is going to be a dictator for a day or use various agencies in unusual ways or his rude comments about women -- and they call him a fascist or a sexist or rapist and that backfires because now all Trump has to do is convince people he's not Hitler and the democrats look unhinged.
This is just there way of pointing to all those things that make people uncomfortable without characterizing it in a way that looks paniced or overblown.
Strong yes to Alistair's post here, which opens up the perspective. From where I sit, this "weird" meme/moment is mostly media generated and reinforced (including, sadly, our own Mr. Smith). We're watching media introduce, reinforce, and amplify it, which is just another instance of ("mainstream/"corporate/legacy, what have you) media operating as the PR dep't of the Democratic party. Media (again, very broadly) isn't reporting the news; it's making it. It's running part of the campaign.
Noah always surprises me when he writes about the political players in such broad terms--"conservatives," "liberals" (at least he qualifies with "progressive" here). The landscape is significantly more complicated. The analysis, too, seems to depend on tropes.
Another commenter brings up gaslighting... If "weird" lands at all, it's bc it's yet another example of "Left" control of messaging (through media and other cultural hegemonic heights, as Noah notes), which allows for this imposition of reality contra to reality. Noah lists the weirdness of the 2010s as a Trump phenomenon, when for most of us normies out here--old school liberals (not traditional conservatives)--we watched schools begin to impose certain moral framings on children, to hide it from parents, to use state power to act without regard for parental wishes or unique, particular family culture...
I wish Noah'd do the old trick of flipping the players and running the analysis upside-down. It isn't lost cultural hegemony. It's the careless and maybe even gleeful wielding of Power like a cudgel. The casting of a slur, and calling it virtue. The Hypocrisy that points at Hierarchy. Someone, somewhere called it "the iron law of projection." Here it is, again. Who is it that's weird?
Project 2025 isn't mentioned there at all. It's a different platform with it's own name (agenda 47, apparently).
I'm a non American libertarian so what I want won't affect you, but yes fully privatised education would be great. Like food production, there's no need for the government to run that.
Sadly for America, privatisation of the school system isn't in Trump's platform nor is anything even close to that. Nor is there anything about taxes except abolishing taxes on tips. But I find it fascinating how in a discussion about policy you first assumed he didn't have any, then assumed you knew what they were without even clicking the link, and were wrong on both counts. This isn't changing the impression that the left has lost interest in policy in the US.
Well, no, Alistair , I knew his platform is going to be project 2025/Agenda 47, but given how fast he's been running away from it, I didn't think any of you would be stupid enough to bring it up.
I guess you're a few days behind the curve.
Tips by the way is going to include C Suite bonuses. That was discussed in P2025.
Okay. Please tell me which modern economy has a fully privatized school system? The deVos family has been pushing that one since she was Secretary of Education.
And exactly how do you intend to prevent adulteration and food poisoning in a fully privatized food system? Because my understanding is we can't export food to the European market because our safety standards aren't in sync but you must have a solution for that, right?
I'm sure it's easy to be a libertarian in the UK. You're protected from the consequences of your own bad ideas usually. . . Hey, how is brexit going?
What they're saying is that America has moved on from Trump AND his people. They're anachronisms, or "weird", and so is he. It's a deliberate use of teenager talk. Everyone's supposed to understand what's meant by the exclusion-ing language.
I don't think Trump has policies. He is transactional and that is why businessmen like him, they think with the right stimulus he can be led. As for weird, listen to his stump speeches. The MAGA people are attracted to his pro wrestling and reality TV aura - he talks that language and what he says is clearly understood. I don't think calling him and Vance weird is particularly effective except it stops them from saying he is a threat to democracy.
Joe is too much of a gentleman to engage like that. He won in 2020 because the almost stoic endurance of Trump's attacks (except when Hunter was the subject, that really got Mr Biden).
Kamala is tackling Trump's torrents of insults in an appropriately balanced way: "If you've got something to say, say it to my face."
There's fearlessness, adequate amounts of street--and all without bitchiness or assholery. Instead of playing the grownup who endures the petulant and ill-raised six year-old, as Pelosi did; VP Harris is the kid who confidently calls the bully's bluff during lunch recess.
If he was a few years younger I'm convinced we could do it again. The "when they go low we go high" kinda self-righteous strategy could work again but no point speculating about that.
"I have been thinking for several weeks that Dems need to flood the zone with **** a la Steve Bannon. Just generate so many insults that it is impossible for the other side to answer."
You don't even realise that you have become the thing you hate the most. You have become the left wing MAGA.
I completely and thoroughly realized that I have descended to the level of the MAGAs. Hopefully, this will be temporary. If I didn't think it was of paramount importance to defeat Trump, I wouldn't go here. I just said that I prefer Biden to Harris, in large part because Biden can't campaign this way.
It is not as if elected Democrats are accusing Republicans of being pederasts, human traffickers and murderers. I mean, really who exactly are the people who have lost their minds and sense of professional and collegial propriety?
This is the lowest form: "I have been thinking for several weeks that Dems need to flood the zone with **** a la Steve Bannon. Just generate so many insults that it is impossible for the other side to answer."
I agree that we are in a pit. And I'm not sure how we can get out of it. We definitely need a candidate who can voice decency MORE effectively than Joe Biden. My pick was always Amy Klobuchar. I worked for her in 2020. But the most important fact is that we cannot have a second Trump presidency. As a historian, it is entirely possible to imagine that a new voice will emerge to lead us back to decency. But it's not gonna happen in 2024.
I don't necessarily share the over-dramatic response to a second Trump presidency but I agree we need a return to decency from both camps. This race to the bottom has divided American so much that there are people genuinely speaking of civil war. People have lost their minds.
I am in total agreement with you. But history happens in steps. We cannot accomplish the goal that you and I share before November 5 2024.
Hostilities can be reversed—I'm thinking of the unbelievably racist cartoons that appeared in WWI and WWII depicting our enemies— those feelings largely vanished after the wars.
Indeed, I believe that Progressives have consistently been the aggressors against the US traditionalists for more than a century. One of my prime examples is Hee Haw— country folk can be on network TV only if they are presented as idiots.
Here is a comment I posted on a progressive site and got a lot of pushback on it.
My personal issue is that liberal Americans just can't let conservative Americans have their own communities where their own values prevail. Quite frankly, I think it is liberal aggression against conservative culture that has dragged our country down into the near civil war that we are suffering from today. Liberals may not use the word subhuman—instead they use words like low information, uneducated, unthinking. You yourself have used the term hateful repeatedly!
Of course, since liberals want to dominate the country, conservatives think it's just fine to impose their views in return.
As I have pointed out, I plan to go to Pennsylvania this fall and work for Harris. I don't want to see project 2025 implemented, and I do not want to see the conservative way of life bullied out of the states and towns that wish to embrace it.
What strikes me is very strange is that I can imagine you because I have met the average lib over and over and over again. Apparently, you cannot imagine me who wants both sides to flourish without seeking to eliminate each other. I think it's you who needs to broaden your mind.
If drag queen story hour is such an innocuous practice, why does it need to be defended and pushed so strenuously?
If you're not worried that a second Trump presidency will mean the end of democracy as we know it (and I agree with you, btw) then it would seem that calling Trump/Vance "weird" is a massive improvement in civility over calling them fascist authoritarian Nazis or whatever.
Not to mention that when MAGA has it reinforced to them that they terrify liberals (Biden: "MAGA extremists") then that's not good for conservative sensibilities either because it encourages them to lean into being hostile or triggering ("let's hand out Mass Deportation Now signs at the RNC, that'll really freak out the libs"). I'd rather have them feel pressure to prove they're normal/non-weird than to have it be in their strategic interest to double down on rhetoric that scares people.
It's a little bit difficult when your candidate, Harris, is pretty much an empty vessel when it comes to political philosophy, and policy. "They're weird, eww!" is a lot of what her candidacy has.
Trump just won the election based on this. It is basically Hillary's "deplorables" comment without event the context. Do you think mid-western swing voters are going to be swayed by this...I am a West Coast moderate who has not voted for a Republican in like 20 years and was a never-trump based on his unpresidential behavior...and I am reconsidering my vote (actually, I still won't vote for Trump, but for a second, I thought about it).
Trump scares me because he is unhinged, but at least there were institutions like the media and our overall government structure to contain him. When I see Dems devolving back into the 2020 mob mentality, I get even more scared because the institutions that would check Trump seem to just want to go along for the ride when the Dems get destructive.
Actually yes I do mean both sets of behavior...and your inability to see the similarities between the events is disappointing...You are looking at this like a team sport, Dems and Reps in a tit for tat race to bottom, where the other sides idiocy somehow makes your sides idiocy acceptable.
New flash, none of this is acceptable behavior in a democracy. Republicans frequently engage in horrible behavior. Does that make it ok for Dems to behave the same?
To my initial comment, I think a significant difference between the two is that when conservative nut jobs act up, a good 70% plus of us (including the broad media ecosphere) condemn the behavior. In 2020 we saw political killings (look at Portland), an armed takeover of portions of Seattle and Portland where residents were deprived of their rights and authorities allowed armed gunmen to take control away from civil authorities. We also saw hundreds of politically motivated arsons, where the police were ordered to just watch protestors start fires and could not intervene until after the buildings were burning (check out Portland and in particular the protestors repeated burning down of the police officers' union), people blockading the exits to buildings and lighting them on fire (again it happened in Portland multiple times)...and the media and PMC called it a mostly peaceful protest. This is not because these protests where not violent...it is because people are tribal and have a difficult time acknowledging their own sides hypocrisy.
I equally condemn Trump and him being an idiot. The difference is that when conservatives act like idiots most the population is able to avoid the kind of motivated, tit for tat reasoning that makes you want to argue that because conservatives act like idiots, it is somehow ok when far left types engage in the same behavior. Both are wrong.
Quite frankly, this is the same kind of motivated reasoning that is making people (who already largely agree with Harris' platform) convince themselves that calling people names (a very Trumpian tactic) will somehow sway voters. Guess what....the people swayed by name calling already support Trump and aren't going to change. A novel idea would be to adopt the Michelle Obama attitude of "when they go low, we go high."
Maybe you are correct; however, this is not a return to boring politics but just the opposite...it is a repeat of Hillary's deplorables. Even your comment that we are putting the "weirdness of the 2010s politics behind us..." is kind of the point. Do you hope to set aside the divisive name-calling of that era by engaging in more divisive name-calling?
Just my thoughts but I suspect this resonates with elite educated voters who are inherently anti-Trump but will fail spectacularly with other demographics.
What they're selling is a return to normal politics. Vote for them and politics stays weird, vote for us and we'll return it to normal.
Whether you buy that or not is a different story.
I think you're picking up a longterm shift in party alignments. I think this messaging is targeted at boring suburban voters who find Trump more than a little distasteful, but were worried about Biden's age. I think there’s likely a bunch of voters like that out there that this will resonate with.
The difference between this and the deplorable comment is that comment was targeted at the voters, this is targeted at the politicians. I think its a key difference, but I might be wrong.
I disagree. It would take more than insults to truly become MAGA. MAGA is trollishness wrapped around Trumpian authoritarianism.
One of the things I hate the most about MAGA is that Trump promised he’d only accept election results “If I win” in October 2016. And some people insisted that we should laugh things like this off.
And then, on Jan 6 2021, Trump sicced a mob on his own Vice President, Mike Pence, for refusing to overturn the vote certification for Trump. Pence still refuses to endorse Trump, and says Trump asked him to choose Trump over the constitution.
In follow-up polling after Jan 6, most Republicans polled blamed Biden for the uprising.
And then Trump referred to the Jan 6 rioters as “patriots” and said he would pardon them.
And if you point these things out, Trump’s supporters and anti-anti-supporters, as well as many self-styled centrists, will say you have “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
It’s all weird, but also disturbing. It’s not just a matter of “Trump says mean things.”
It is not a matter of belief. Itis a description of what happens when politics becomes exclusively about the feels and not the facts. The reason why this has happened is the Democrats have become your father's, grandfather's or great-grandfather's (depending on your age) Republican party.
The Progressive Left are still around, the commie hippies and radicals of fifty years ago are now the "woke leftists." The rest of the Democratic party are Republicans, first the Eisenhower-Nixon-Rockefeller Republicans who entered the party and now make by the liberal faction. They have been followed by Reaganite movement conservatives who joined Democratic converts to Reaganism to make up the neoliberal faction of the Democratic party.
So today the choice is between the Republican party and the Birchers. The Reagan folks knew their product would not sell and they lied about it from the start. Now that the Democrats are offering the same product, they need to lie (and do) while the new Trump Republicans have taken lying to new levels. This is why it has become a race to the bottom.
When you look at past campaigns you do find plenty of civil ones, but you also find plenty of unhinged ones. Insults are pretty commonplace in politics.
In my post I mentioned the bell curve and referred them to Wikipedia for an illustration that will help them understand why democracy works, if it is allowed to work, by holding free and fair, unsuppressed and unjerrymandered elections, so that the laws of probability can work. I know the principles of statistics aren't laws, but if you have a population of 200 million voters, it gets Dangerously close to it. And as a backup we have free and fair elections to get rid of the mistakes, like say Agent Orange.
How could you not know Joe Biden after all of his years in politics, fat? You must be DOA. I should take you out back and challenge you to some pushups 😂 for hanging out with the racist Romney crowd who wants to put you in chains.
Neither Biden nor Harris have an intellectual bone in their body nor have ever come up with any original ideas, so name calling is a great strategy (all pols use it).I much prefer Harris’ approach to Joe ‘s mean old coot schtick. She hopefully won’t be trying to re-enact a Reichstag speech as Joe did- laughter is better medicine than hate.
Problem is everyone already has their own impressions of Trump- this will work for Vance , though, who is unknown.
Of course, I can see the irony. To win this important election, I am willing to fight fire with fire. My preference would be to keep Biden as the candidate, but it is obvious that the American public thinks he is too old. I do not share that opinion, but to win an election you have to work with the electorate as it exists.
You missed the fact that I'm not aiming for Trump supporters, but for two or three percent of undecideds or folks who don't usually vote. In 2020 I managed to talk five people into voting who had never voted before.
I'm hoping that a politician will emerge in the future who can communicate so effectively that they can engage the average population in a somewhat higher level of political discourse. Lincoln and FDR were figures of that kind, and so was LBJ.
Give the other side a taste of their own medicine and in return you get why are so mean to us, is the strategy de jour apparently. MAGA is weird by definition as they claim conservative values of the moral high ground while clinging to an amoral criminal would-be despot.
Whereas traditional Republicans are leaving the cult shamefaced over what they had voted for in recognition of the assault on democracy by MAGA on Jan 6. I get they would never vote for Hillary and bought Trump owning the libs as their guy.
The evidence denying and whataboutism is not working like it had been as they now face the reaction to the political world they helped create.
I'm not sure if many Republicans are actually ashamed. There's been such a stress for so many decades that politics are dirty, stupid, and ugly, that many people think it just has to be that way.
I used to subscribe to the Dispatch, a publication by and for never-Trump Republicans and many commenters there said they couldn't possibly vote either for Trump or any Democrat.
I'm not sure about the whole article but yeah, we crave normalcy. Even tho I consider myself politically involved, I'm as tired as everyone else of the weird fascist doomerist rethoric. I really hope chill politics take over at least for a decade.
Biden can be considered a moderate. But he was getting slaughtered. Until society figures out how to present and amplify moderate voices in the age of social-media, short-form videos & memes, we are stuck with extreme candidates
You're absolutely right on Biden. The problem is that we know he wasn't leading.
You're also absolutely right on the social media aspect. Sensationalism sells hard. Politicians are appealing to the worst in people. We need a social media cleanse.
What may help is that many of us disengaged from social media. Between Facebook becoming a battleground over politics for a while that literally caused permanent rifts in friendships and families, to the algorithms of Instagram and TikTok sending us influencer content rather than our friends’ and families’ content, a lot of folks I know ages 35+ just don’t use those sites so much anymore. Facebook also serves up far less “news” content, at least for me. The memefication may still reign in the young, but they are unreliable voters. The danger is the “memeragement” still amongst the senior population - I have no idea how much of that still goes on. My parents also disengaged from Facebook but I don’t know how common that is.
Facebook has definitely become boomerville and is a hotbed for political misinformation but imo Twitter is the worst of the lot. Twitter really brings the worst of the worst out, is highly divisive (no matter how right wing lefties want to say it is) and it rewards sensationalism through monetization.
Twitter is a far more dangerous social media than any other. Which is a shame because it can be a brilliant place to be.
The good thing about X/Twitter is that a LOT of folks left. Also, journalists aren’t treating “today’s main character on Twitter,” as newsworthy as they used to. I used to see tons of articles on supposedly journalism sites that were basically, “here’s what blew up Twitter today,” whereas now I think it’s just treated as a right-wing cesspit, unworthy of their attention.
Call me crazy, but I think Musk did us a favor, unintentionally of course, by burning what Twitter was to the ground.
Biden wasn’t leading, yet. The campaign hadn’t really started. Biden would have won. Here is why: Since Reagan, it's been a turnout election. If there is a high turnout, the Dem wins. Low, the Republican wins. Biden has never been a great orator but, he had a lot of money, a fantastic record, built a great field operation, and was clearly preferred by normal people. Trump is clearly not and this JD Vance thing is a Godsend. Biden would have won. Now Harris will win because Trump and a good Harris campaign will cause a high turnout. It will still be close.
In the Trump era, high turnout is good for republicans and low turnout is good for democrats. The stable suburban educated upper middle class is now the Democratic base, while the disaffected disgruntled marginalized people are the Republican base.
How about a "Truth in Media" law; whereby deviating from the journalistic practice of airing/publishing material only if it is corroborated by >2 sources is penalized?
Where do you get >2 sources if no one is publishing things until they already have >2 sources? Many sources won’t come out until there’s already some public discussion.
Responsible media entities like WaPo, NYT, Miami Herald, etc. publish stories only when they're sure of the facts. Which almost always means getting corroboration from >1 independent source. Or providing external data that strongly corroborates a single source.
FOX News and the rest of the RW media ecosystem has collectively slimed the 4th Estate--and possibly fatally wounded our democracy--by serially publishing uncorroborated falsehoods, like "Democrats abort babies after they're born." By normalizing using "People are saying that..." instead of actual human sources, the media is being harmed, not helped.
I think the recent polling shows that the moderateness/Biden-ness wasn't the problem, it was the coldness. Replace with Kamala and mostly the same platform gets better polling.
The issue was that Biden was too old and most ppl don't know that the administration does most of the day-to-day work of the presidency (or didn't like the idea of rule-by-administrators w/ a Biden figurehead). To be honest, I don't like the latter either, but Biden was & is clearly not fully-functioning mentally.
I don’t think being a moderate was Biden’s weakness. He’s been a good president but was a weak candidate this time around, as exemplified by his debate performance.
This has been my big takeaway about why "weird" hits so well. It subtly centers the idea that this election is about the return of the normies. I think Noah is spot on when he talked about exhaustion. The polls back up my personal experience... and my family skews conservative. The idea that we're all just tired of angry people screaming about weird things is fairly bipartisan.
Interestingly, my drive home there was a talk show discussing Trump's latest interview. The man can't go outside his bubble. Reality bites hard. The juxtaposition of the questions.. then his answers and the follow ups of what basically distills into "what the hell are you talking about?" shows the distance of reality and the Trump delulu world. Weird doesn't even cover it. It was as if he was a demented person... and needed a care home where he could be safe from his paranoia.
This. After all the stuff, people are just tired of being scolded from any direction. Because it's fucking weird to scold people over their politics that you do not know or have no connection with. These days, anyone too into a thing just seems to give me The Ick. Like why does this weirdo think anyone cares about their opinion of the olympic ceremony.
I think this gives short shrift to the weirdness the Dem coalition is themselves responsible for (which Noah gestures at). The stronger Harris comes out against the Hamas ppl storming DC and the "Whites for..." cringe, the better she'll play in swing states.
I'm not sure why there's all so much softness still towards the protest left, Dems aren't in any danger of losing Cali or NY and clearly voters peg them as a cause of the 2010s unrest as much as Trump was.
The cognitive dissonance of the Trump camp, with the endless lying, fabricating and 'alternative facts' is what's maxxed the stress levels. Sure, all politicians lie or exaggerate to some extent; but the GOP under Trump has gone full tilt pathological in the lying department. Mainly because Right Wing media rarely ever calls them on it.
I'll be honest, I don't listen to any Trump news (or really any news) and I don't follow any of the day to day soundbites.
I know that the left lies about IQ, COVID, and Gender amongst other things. I can point to impactful policies based on those lies that have negatively impacted me and my family.
I have a hard time coming up with a lie Trump has told that has resulted in a policy that has negatively impacted me or my family.
I'm just not seeing how the party obviously associated with things like this isn't the "weird" party:
I’m sure you can see how Trump lying about the elections results and pressuring Mike Pence not to reject electoral votes causes people stress. Just as apparently the gender thing causes you stress.
If you see the Democrats as weird, that’s okay. To me, the weird parts of the Democrats are on the fringes of the party whereas the weirdness of the Republicans are front and center.
I was told I couldn't leave my house. They shut down businesses and schools. They ordered everyone to wear face coverings everywhere even on toddlers. The same people that did all that rioted in every major city. My work held racial hatred struggle sessions run by mentally ill women. They spent trillions of dollars paying people to stay home and order Uber eats rather than work and caused double digit inflation. I could go on and on and on.
The Trump years were great. Covid/BLM/GreatAwokening/Trans years were awful.
Trump didn't do anything I just mentioned in 2020. My Democrat Governor and Democrat protestors did all those things. And they kept going long after 2020.
The end note about what happened to Austin sounds like it was written about San Francisco, now light-years removed from the city of my youth. The coastal cities becoming “knowledge-worker enclaves” may have empowered and affirmed one category of out-group ‘weirdos’, and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. But it also stamped the life out of the different kinds of weirdos that lived in the cities before.
SF can have such weirdness once again if they ever decide to build a plural amount of apartment buildings per year. Though this is a problem in pretty much all coastal metropolises, not just SF.
This is a great analysis. I've been considering why this resonates with me so much when I, too, have always reveled in being "weird." One of my friends described it as, "Not quirky weird. Cover your drink weird." Weird like the guy in the van you don't take candy from. The Trumplicans make me feel profoundly unsafe--and I think, for good reason--but if I point out that Trump is literally trying to make himself a facist dictator, I'll be a hysterical (liberal) woman. Weird and creepy, though? Yes, people will hear that. It sticks.
Kamala is slinging a particularly female version of that moniker, as "weird" as applied to an aggressive and amoral man also denotes "creepy". A someone that normal people will avoid. Kamala is aptly mobilizing the female and youth vote for November.
Kamala was so good in Atlanta last night, taunting & challenging Trump with a big smile before a raucous crowd. I don't expect he'll react calmly to a Black woman laughing at him.
You might not want to see Trump appearing before the National Association of Black Journalists convention today.
It was like the scene in "Bulworth" where Warren Beatty's title character berates a Black congregation by leaning into racism, only Trump played it straight.
It’s the insecurity of Vance and his MRA colleagues that stands out to me.
I’m a straight dude, I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the brief period where saying “kill all men” was cool in progressive online spaces and I was considered lame and not in on the joke if I complained, but I’m mature enough and secure enough in myself to not have my entire politics and personality formed by that experience. Vance and the alienated young men he’s supposed to activate aren’t able to respond proportionately and appropriately to progressive overreach of the last decade and it makes them seem like weak losers to most other men.
The problem is that culture is a palimpsest, so by staying quiet a lot of that stuff is now just part of the left/progressive/urban culture. I'm making it a point to draw the line now, but it's been 10 years or so since that horse has left the barn, as it were. Not saying there was another way (actually Trump losing in 2016 would have taken a lot of air out of progressive weirdness), but I guess I'm resigned to saying for the rest of my life "nope, that's not how it went down".
I’m torn. An unspoken agreement to never speak of the things we did or said during a period of mass hysteria is oftentimes a necessary condition of the mass hysterias end.
There's an asymmetry between "normal" and "weird." In my view, someone is "normal" by conforming to societal norms, but someone is "weird" by substantially breaking them. This asymmetry means that (in some sense) there are many more ways to be "weird" than to be "normal." It can be misleading when a single word covers the well-liked quirky folks, the tolerated outcasts, and the truly dangerous people.
You can expect two "normal" people to be relatively similar to each other, but two "weird" people may be more distinct from each other than they are from any "normal" person.
Yeah…you might be overthinking it — it annoys them because it comes across like gas lighting . The po faced middle American marine/big state school grad/ “boot strapped to Harvard” guy is “weird”, according to to the party of (insert whatever progressive wackiness you like), according to the strange dorks that make up much of the press!
Anyway, making “weirdness” an issue in this election is exactly the kind of move one expects from a top flight campaigner like Harris.
How about we restrict voting to those who pay payroll taxes - not income taxes, but the payroll tax that goes to Social Security. Also anyone that receives Social Security, since by and large they paid into the system. Even the lowest wage part time jobs cause you to pay payroll taxes. A 14 year old could vote if they paid payroll taxes, but a basement dweller couldn’t.
The advantage that Universal Suffrage has over such schemes is defense against certain forms of oppression. What if a plurality passes a law that effectively makes it impossible for me to get a job? Then I'm disenfranchised forever and they can maintain power forever!
Isn’t that the standard punishment for most felonies? Having a felony on your record makes it very hard to get lots of jobs. (It also permanently disenfranchises you in some states.)
Since I am one of those Boomer parents you referred to, I have some expertise in “weird.”
Within the counterculture movement that went along with the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a lot of weirdness. People who hid themselves and their weirdness were more or less able to come out and be part of that group.
Women are now seen as equals, gay people can be gay. A victory for both of those groups. Black Americans have far more agency these days than their population weight would actually carry.
It is an observation and I have no empirical data to back it up but I’ll just give some examples.
Yesterday on CNN, a panel of 4 black political commentators and one white dude. While multi-ethnic marriages are exploding, melanin concerns all sorts of problems in identity causation. You would think that every white woman is married to a black dude in TV commercials. Corporations poured money into DEI and DEI positions. The FOX News Morning show had to add a black dude to the show.
I found most of this amusing. I have long thought that black Americans deserved reparations. Not for slavery but for Jim Crow. The promise of equality was never given. Not in money but in education.
Of the most difficult of issues is how do you instill a culture of education in a community?
I digress. The point I would like to make is this. The result of those wars are most if not all of the institutions that helped raise American children have been trashed. Whether or not they deserved it, it has left parents virtually alone. Neighbors or the local barber no longer yell at kids to stop misbehaving. Schools no longer punish kids for misbehaving. There are no groups like the Boy Scouts or Boys and Girls Clubs teaching moral or ethical behavior.
Let your freak flag fly and keep on trucking was the mantra. Anything goes, which, of course, led to moral relativism. Hey, it was no problem that Bill Clinton was a serial sexual assaulter. He played sax on TV, he was cool.
So today we have a set of young men who have no idea what relationships are or what they mean. Sex is taught by Porn Hub to anyone with a smart phone. We are part of the great reduction in marriage and children leading to a birth rate crisis that has profound implications for the American economy.
Sure, the weirdos feel more comfortable being weird. They can be a witch doctor or part of a group from Suicide Squad. What is left is the dystopian society we currently find ourselves. The weirdos are in charge. Social Media is destroying young women, it has made young men into incels. It has devalued love and marriage. Our politicians have no restraint; they hate everybody equally. If you asked normies what makes America a great country, if you were on the quad at Harvard, you’d get some weird answers, likely starting with, “No, America is not a great country”.
You and I have won a pyrrhic victory. We have thrown the baby out with the bath water. Can we find ourselves back? Only with good parenting. Sadly, that is in short supply.
Yeah and your boomer policies created this. You guys destroyed the family with your relativism and now you’re mad about the grandkids not being normal. You don’t get to do that. Why do you think barber doesn’t police things any more? Why do you think good parenting is in short supply? Maybe because you destroyed the family for the fake delusional of “equality” which btw is never possible on this earth because that was your false god that was always fake and delusional. Now while you guys enjoyed being raised by families and a normal society, I have to raise my child in a society that will tell him he can be a girl if he wants to and anyone who judges him is “creepy.” Maybe do some self reflection and think all those “wins” for all those that were “oppressed” were actually terrible things for the primary unit, the family and all those evil guys like Nixon were actually right.
I am a public school kid, as one of the few/only Asian-American eldest child of immigrants in a mostly white neighborhood. My teachers were great role models, and my father took me and my two siblings to the library. I interacted with kind neighbors and strangers, and learned most things about the world through them and started serving as intermediary for my parents and society. I count my lucky stars that that childhood left me with a love for reading and learning and critical thinking and a sense of being part of this great American experiment. That I grew up reading Washington's farewell speech, and Frederick Douglass, and in awe of how this country that doesn't bow to god or king but to common American values can exist, however flawed in practice. My family moved to a Muslim enclave inside a bigger, more diverse and liberal city in the middle of high school and my siblings found it easier to find community with the black-and-white worldview and morality of orthodox muslims rather than decipher the weirdness of the diversity. The weirdness of cheerleading, and social media, and what they felt was toxic feminism and leftism being forced on them without expecting in in public schools. They got overwhelmed. They started speaking about Americans are this or that, using language that doesn't include themselves as "American". Of course, racists/White cultural milieu can leave you feeling othered, but one ought not give in to it, and give up their American card.
I have a back-and-forth with myself because I am incredibly weird and progressive, but have seen how when those values come into the public schools, and public space then Muslims get scared and pull their kids out of schools. (I am happy that instead of pulling me from public school, my parents just pulled me from Sex Ed class. Then in college I learned and experimented on my own time...) Now older muslim cousins check what the younger kids are reading and draft emails for parents to send to "protect" the minds of their younger siblings. I would rather have them at the table, feeling like an American and hide aspects of my weirdness and progressiveness. As a counterpoint, maybe even if public schools didn't change from late 2000s this still could have happened as Muslim numbers grew, but IDK. There is a robust online community of orthodox muslim preachers and people sharing and showing how religious they are, and it's easy to score social points for showing you are not assimilated.
I do not find anything incompatible with having a moral structure you are comfortable with and democracy.
The idea is that man can decide his issues without a King or a dictator. I don’t think you need God to solve man made problems but it does t hurt. We in America have a deep seated belief that you can manage your life. Free to make the decisions that benefit you.
We try and fail to have respect for diversity and sometimes we fail.
Nice commentary but no. Trump and Vance are weird. Liz Cheney is as white bread conservative as the day is long. Liz is not weird. Most conservatives are not weird. The Republican Party has been taken over by Tea Party misfits and weirdos, not conservatives.
I have been finding, running and electing people office for 50 years. I don’t need legacy media. I can see, hear and read primary sources such as actual legislation all by myself.
The "weird" bit is even stronger than just "outgroup". The conservative Christian right wasn't all that crazy in the 1970s through 2000 or so. (Well, it really was, but they thought of themselves as the center and were sort of getting away with it.) But the current policies (no abortion, no contraception, no divorce, no trans (and, yes, that's really what they intend to do)) really are seriously crazy wacko city. Pence and Mike Johnson are seriously sick wackos on sexual morality. And they're the sane ones.
So the weird bit is a heavy duty "the truth hurts" insult. Hurtful because it's true. Effective because it's true. These sick policies are policies the majority of Americans aren't interested in living under.
The trans issue is a tough one for non-progressives (and many progressives ie. TERFs) because it's arguments ultimately boil down to 'don't believe your eyes, let us smart, educated folk tell you the real truth of the world, and shame on you for thinking the majority of public opinion could possibly understand'
Conservatives love their conspiracies, but I'd argue progressives tilled the ground it sprouted in. Using 'science' (code now to conservatives as 'elite and disconnected) , especially social sciences, as a bludgeon but then denying it for social issues causes dissonance. I'm not arguing the validity of the arguments, but by explicitly denying the validity of the historical, commonly understood biological differences between men and women, it creates dissonance. So for a conservative, who are deeply uncomfortable with mainstreaming transgender rights, if it doesn't feel right for me (the primary argument for trans), and our common human history is false, then maybe there's another reason things are so wacky.
'Trans women should be participate in women's sports, there's no reason not to! It won't affect the fairness of women's athletics'.... But then a trans woman absolutely demolishes everyone to take the national swimming championship and their own teammates are resentful.
'We need to protect our kids! Their minds are still developing until their 25! They can't be trusted to drink or smoke or even stay home alone! But if your 12 year old wants to be sterilized and chemically block their normal development, well of course you should support that unconditionally, they know themselves best and even though we have limited medical information about the doest and long term impacts of these unprecedented permanent, irreversible changes, and what data we does not look good, trust us, we know what's best for your child'
Trans is also distinct from the successful gay cultural assimilation on the basis of representation in the center. There's an argument that the gays cultural acceptance was led by the 'normal' or 'moderate' gays (a la Anderson Cooper, Modern Family, Will & Grace, Pete Buttegieg) and gays make up a much higher percentage of the population. There are no mainstream, centrist trans public figures. The gays have demonstrated that they can operate in the commons and live what is perceived as 'normal' lives to the common man. At the end of the day, from a secular social perspective, not much has changed in the broader society because of gay marriage or gay inclusion.
This is not true for the trans debate. The trans debate has not been able to show why a tiny fraction of the population deserves to disrupt the overwhelming majority of society on things that are extremely personal and extremely common. The bathroom issue makes sense in the same context as a handicap bathroom, in that accommodations can be made, but to the common man, they cannot accept the perceived risk of allowing a grown biological man using the same bathroom at the same time as their 8 year old daughter. The sports inclusion debate has already been lost by the dominating success of Lia Thomas. And what is perceived as 'experimenting' on children thru the advocacy of unproven, permanent body altering procedures would be horrifying at almost any point in human history. Bonus alienation credit for advocating for bypassing parental involvement in these permanent decisions of their children.
All that to say, regardless of the validity of the arguments on either side, on this specific issue conservatives are justifiably concerned, and when progressives say 'you're causing harm by not respecting/accommodating/embracing/endorsing my feelings and shame on you!' the other side says 'right back at you!' except theyre the majority and we're indoctrinated from an early age to believe in democratic principles.... also known as majority rule.
Raise your hand if you think trans people are weird! 🙋 Eh it doesn't matter anyways, they're just poor, uneducated, rural, religious, bigoted, despicable, deplorable apes, who cares about them. Don't believe your eyes! Let us show you the truth of the world, we just came up with it! Science!
Good analysis on science being coded as “elite” which is very true. Also trans is much less natural and grosser than gay but trans couldn’t have happened without gay which couldn’t have happened without feminism which could have happened without individualism against the family
Democrats need to be careful that "weird" doesn't land as elite disdain for the working folks of this country--as "deplorables" did. Remember many Trump supporters feel diminished and dismissed by elites and by the left. Said another way: The left has done a masterful job in alienating the class of people it says they are fighting for.
Agreed but there is a big distinction -- "weird" is being applied to the leaders the GOP has chosen, not the voters behind them. "Deplorables" meant the voters and it implies they are deplorable forever. "Weird" means (to me at least), "hey maybe if your nominees weren't so bizarre then I might actually consider voting Republican". I definitely agree with you that they'll need to tread lightly so that the disdain doesn't bleed over in the way you described.
That's not how I took it, and most of my blue-collar friends (I live in the country, and my neighbors are construction workers, plumbers, etc.) are pretty pissed about it. To them it is deplorables all over again but with a bigger net.
I think we just disagree on direction. I see the groups you are referring as a demographic that the Dems have locked up...what they need is mid-western swing voters...these are a different group and more sensitive to being looked down on by college educated elites. These folks are more like my neighbors.
Again, we probably just disagree on this (and you could totally be correct)...but my sense is that anyone who looks back on Trump's term as weird and problematic (which I personally do) will probably vote for Harris. The folks whose votes are needed look at that period as the calm before the storm of the 2020s (protests, riots, COVID, inflation, border issues, increase in crime, etc.).
That said, I respect your opinion but see the situation differently.
The left doesn’t fight for the “working class” they are too white and stuck in their ways opposing infinite neoliberalism. They fight for humanity in the abstract and punish the actual working class in their countries
A good chunk of the "weird" Trump and Vance have are, respectively, the weird of a born-rich New Yorker and the weird of a guy who -- despite impressive achievements as a self-made man -- has contempt for his former kin and been marinating too long in Silicon Valley's distinctly strange right-wing spaces. Emphasizing that out-of-touch weirdness seems the way to go.
That too: perhaps your point is that "working class" in the US is often used to mean "without college education" (as opposed to meaning "proletarian" in the Marxist sense).
America doesn't really operate on class, so terms like "working class" and "middle class" are content-free; they require you to project your perceptions onto the word to define it.
It's prone to a lot of code switching. Class can mean what the social sciences call cohort, a way to sort people into groups of likes and differences. Income brackets are cohorts. A person making $20,000 a year has much different life experiences than a person making $40,000 a year, and the experiences narrow between a $40K earner and a $60K earner, narrowing again for $60K to 80K, even though we're measuring $20,000 income increments.
Class can also be a stand-in, a euphemism for education, as well as disposition. "Working class" is a media-savvy way to say "uneducated" in the former sense, or "boorish," "loutish", "churlish", etc., in the latter sense.
And their concern about illegal immigrants isn't so much "they'll steal my job!" as "they'll get uppity and demand higher wages!"
That's why ICE raids almost never target illegal immigrants working on farms, because ICE's function isn't so much to deport them as to make sure they _stay_ on the farms.
I don't think there's any way to interpret it as being about the voters, and definitely not on the basis of lower social class meaning weird. If anything it's the opposite. It's directed at politicians who are very wealthy and attended elite universities, and it's pretty pointedly about them personally and the way they present themselves
I'm not convinced that the whole ingroup outgroup hypothesis here is correct.
I think the problem is Democrats are the party of women, who use social shaming tactics to get what they want. The social shaming to get cultural victories was calling people on the right 'bigots' or 'evil.' Now that they have power it's 'weird.'
Ironically Trump has a very feminine style when it comes to politics. It's the only way he's been able to claw back a victory for the right.
Also I'm not sure I buy the entire thesis that Republicans actually care about being called weird that much.
I think you are missing one, though of course not at all the sole, reason why the "weird" line may resonate. It is Vance's stated current political philosophy and Trump's periodic rhetorical forays into cryptic gibberish that seem "weird" - at least from the perspective of people who still think that "small-L" liberal pluralism and democratic decision-making should be understood as the core, shared - and, yes, "normal" political philosophy of the United States. Thiel/Curtis Yarvin/Hazony/tech-bro IQ essentialism trying to channel Carl Schmitt and Sam Francis, with a healthy dollop of Great Replacement Theory, layered on a "girls are icky" subtext, all of which seem to comprise Vance's current political philosophy and the intellectual back-up for MAGA is, for want of a better word, WEIRD. When Trump's rhetoric starts to sound crazy because it's referential in a scattershot way to a bunch of memes and themes that only the Extremely Online far right can even understand, that's . . . WEIRD. And cultish. Not Republican like the people at the country club who really liked Romney and just want to zero out the capital gains tax and otherwise be left alone. "MAGA Thought", thus understood, is outside most people's understanding of the American mainstream. Pat Buchanan's original insight that there is a viable culture-based politics to the right of Reagan has been distressingly successful, but the political philosophy that lies behind it is at odds with the modern understanding of mainstream American political tradition and, as such seems to many in the middle to be . . . WEIRD. How these habits of political thought captured 40% of the population is another day's sad subject, but the power of the rhetorical device of "weirdness" is that the nooks and crannies back of such political thought as drives MAGA does in fact seem . . . weird.
Amusing and informative. Some insights for those folks over the pond who, like me, don’t have a feel for the social landscape there anymore. If I ever really did!
"There"? What about your own, um, social landscape? Talk about weird: yours is a voice no longer heeded by the leaders you elect. You're being replaced en masse by a new people who will (hopefully) better serve their masters.
Superb article! I really enjoyed reading it but no matter how you put it, resorting to calling people 'weird' when you're vying for the Presidency doesn't instill confidence that the people running are taking their responsibility seriously. I long for a return to actual policy discussions, debates that tackle real issues that people are facing.
Calling your opponents weird is not going to solve the deep issues the country faces. It's also not going to bridge this chasm that seperates the right and left. Democrat's called MAGA deplorables and now have the gaul to throw this childish insults at them. It reeks of hypocricy and desperation. Supporting this type of behaviour helps no one. The country needs unity.
Now, I believe that as long as Trump is in politics we can never have unity. He is far too divisive and toxic for both camps. I still think he will do a better job than Biden or Harris, but for the sake of the country both Reps and Dems need to start nominating moderates that actually represent the majority.
If only I had the luxury of saying that any of the GOP candidates for governor currently blitzing my TV with ads before the primary next week were weird instead of inhabiting a right-wing epistemic bubble. (I am crossing my fingers for Mike Kehoe who appears the most sane one.) I think "weird" is a way of confiding in ordinary voters that these Republicans really do not think the way the ordinary voters do and can't be taken seriously.
You shouldn’t associate with them, really, and don’t ever let them sit at our lunch table. Vote Kamala for Homecoming committee- not that weird nerd who wrote a book. Eww, who does that? Can’t they afford ghostwriters?
Definitely complete surprise from this end that most people are a) not really familiar with Vance at all and b) not online enough to remember those cat lady comments and that he made them about Krugman, for goodness' sake. The few minutes I was able to catch of the speech surprised me that his voice sounded very teenage so that could not have helped.
I did read his book years ago (ironically recommended to me by leftist friends working in DC) and saw he was elected to the Senate, but I don’t live in OH and he is junior senator so have zero reason to be aware of him, politically (until now). I can only name 2 senators out of the 4 from the states I live in. Who cares? The former book-loving friends hate him now, of course. 😊
It was former President George W. Bush who first said, after listening to Trump's "American Carnage" Inauguration Speech, "Now that was some weird shit."
Yes yes and I was thinking of his assessment recently but didn't really emphasize the word weird! How else do you describe a president who failed his way into the job through repeated bankruptcies and businesses from casinos, to football teams to Trump this and Trump that. It's at least moderately weird that he would attempt to deny that he had anything to do with project 2025 when it is covered with the orange stains of his fingerprints and is like a photographic negative of our constitution.
Didn't Trump only get the Presidency because Russia helped him there, in part by hacking Fox News in 2014?
No, KGB (FSB) or GRU hacked the DNC, specifically their ad-buying data in the battleground states. And of course all the shabby treatment meted out to the Sanders campaign. And leaked it to the Trump campaign via Wikileaks.
FOX was already fully onboard with Trump after he won the primary.
Russia hacked the DNC in 2016, but they hacked Fox News two years earlier to interfere with the GOP primary: initially just to stop an anti-Russia hawk like Marco Rubio getting the nomination, but their support for Trump turned out to be pushing at an open door.
They hacked the RNC too but did not release that to Wikileaks. Instead they used that information differently.
But the fake Russian political ads were just like the real Republican political ads. You couldn't tell the difference.
The Russians used the Fox News hack in two ways:
1. They engineered a sex scandal (by manipulating Roger Ailes into stopping the hush money payments to the women he'd harassed) which cleared the way for Kremlin stooges Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity to become leading anchors at the channel, and
2. They assisted Trump to win the GOP primary by providing him with inside information on the campaign strategies of his rival Republicans.
MAGA wants Democrats to go back to talking about policy, because they know that's boring. They want all the snark and jokes coming from them.
It's a tragedy that swing voters are not interested in policy, but that is a fact. It is a tragedy that the 2024 election has come down to sandbox insults, but that is a fact.
I have been thinking for several weeks that Dems need to flood the zone with **** a la Steve Bannon. Just generate so many insults that it is impossible for the other side to answer. Although I love Joe Biden and prefer him to Harris, he just was incapable of such mindless insults.
So, to contribute to the cause I have composed my own mindless insult in the voice of Adam Sandler.
Where de weirdos?
Dere de weirdos!
Scare de weirdos!
Warn de weirdos!
Tell them they are way, way out on a bell-shaped-curve.
[Good luck explaining that.]
This response was delightfully weird. :D
I've been posting a number of columns of yours over at the conservative The Dispatch.
Nick Cattagio referred to you this morning.
“To Republicans, being called ‘weird’ is a bitter demonstration of their defeats in the culture wars of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s,” the economist Noah Smith wrote astutely on Wednesday."
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/boilingfrogs/weird-science/
Hi, DougAZ. I used to post on the Dispatch as Neelthakrebew. I got thrown off for using the word the N-word one time, when there was no announced rule. Obviously, I was using it ironically. No warning, just banishment.
Ugg..sorry to hear that Kathleen. There are some areas they are more sensitive about. These blogs as you know are not "Free Speech"..private property.
Glad you're here!!
Thank you, Doug. The irony is that I am an absolute fan of rules. When I know what the rules are I either keep them meticulously or leave.
I'm continuing my search for good sources of information— Noah is almost always one of them.
If you haven't seen Thomas Pueyo Substack, I highly recommend it.
For law, ScotusBlog with more liberal Constitution scholars, Michael Dorf, Eric Seagall and Neil Buchanan. As well as Steve Vladek.
ProPublica is the best Investigation team
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is superb on nukes, climate energy.
Atlantic Council
Kaiser Family Foundation KFF is the very best on Health data, policy
Surely it's the other way around. I think they want Democrats to talk about policy because policy is what's supposed to be important and what people are theoretically voting for. The phrase "MAGA" is itself a kind of policy statement, a statement of goals, even if vague. Trump talks about policy all the time and this is a big part of his support - lots of Republicans out there dislike Trump the man but like his policies. They "hold their nose" and vote for him because they want what he promises to do, as the trope goes.
Noah claims that this insult is getting under Republican's skin because it's somehow insightful or true. But the evidence presented for it getting under anyone's skin is wafer thin: there's a tweet in which someone points out that this is how teenage girls talk and they should be treating the presidential race like serious adults, and then there's a link saying Fox has "scrambled to prove" that JD Vance isn't weird, which goes to a video description that "Watters just made a supercut that did nothing to push back on the talking point". But the video is maliciously edited. Watters starts by illustrating that this is what the Democrats are now saying, and is clearly about to respond when the clip suddenly ends, well before the natural end of the segment. We don't get to hear his pushback. Presumably that means New Republic felt it was too on-point to show their own readers. Instead they claim there wasn't any, an absurd thing to say! couldn't find a copy of the original clip on YouTube to see what really came after, but such segments always have the same format: supercut of the other side saying the same thing over and over, then mockery of it.
This sort of behavior by the American left is by itself weird and unsettling. They seem to have decided that their new form of politics is going to be "post-policy". Harris' website doesn't mention any goals other than beating Trump, which to me as an outsider is both astonishing and deeply strange. She had plenty of time to prepare for this as she clearly knew Biden was senile, yet, she hasn't laid any policy groundwork. What does she want? Why is she even running at all?
Democratic politics in the rest of the world doesn't yet have any equivalent of this phenomenon - politics is still deeply about party policies. Hopefully this trend doesn't migrate outside the US.
Frankly I don't think you realize how weird and far out _you_ seem to be here. Trump is crude but he's not weird. Guys like that are ten a penny. He knows what he wants to do and talks the language of the bar, which is like most men. Meanwhile the whole world has seen disturbingly crazy stuff in the past month, like the discovery that most of you didn't know the US President is senile, something that's been common knowledge around here outside the states for years! How is that possible? And then the split-second shifts in which everyone on that side suddenly starts repeating the same talking points out of nowhere in a way that's obviously coordinated, whilst also claiming to be fully independent of each other? It gives off very strong Matrix vibes, like nothing is quite real.
Not gonna lie, I think writing substack articles on using mean squared prediction error to “identify the wokeness levels of employees” is pretty fucking weird bro.
I didn't say I'm not weird :)
I'd argue that the "weird" accusation is just a way of pointing to all the things that make voters a bit uncomfortable about Trump and Vance that doesn't overclaim.
What keeps happening to the democrats is they see Trump saying something that indicates he doesn't respect traditional norms -- eg his various suggestions he is going to be a dictator for a day or use various agencies in unusual ways or his rude comments about women -- and they call him a fascist or a sexist or rapist and that backfires because now all Trump has to do is convince people he's not Hitler and the democrats look unhinged.
This is just there way of pointing to all those things that make people uncomfortable without characterizing it in a way that looks paniced or overblown.
Strong yes to Alistair's post here, which opens up the perspective. From where I sit, this "weird" meme/moment is mostly media generated and reinforced (including, sadly, our own Mr. Smith). We're watching media introduce, reinforce, and amplify it, which is just another instance of ("mainstream/"corporate/legacy, what have you) media operating as the PR dep't of the Democratic party. Media (again, very broadly) isn't reporting the news; it's making it. It's running part of the campaign.
Noah always surprises me when he writes about the political players in such broad terms--"conservatives," "liberals" (at least he qualifies with "progressive" here). The landscape is significantly more complicated. The analysis, too, seems to depend on tropes.
Another commenter brings up gaslighting... If "weird" lands at all, it's bc it's yet another example of "Left" control of messaging (through media and other cultural hegemonic heights, as Noah notes), which allows for this imposition of reality contra to reality. Noah lists the weirdness of the 2010s as a Trump phenomenon, when for most of us normies out here--old school liberals (not traditional conservatives)--we watched schools begin to impose certain moral framings on children, to hide it from parents, to use state power to act without regard for parental wishes or unique, particular family culture...
I wish Noah'd do the old trick of flipping the players and running the analysis upside-down. It isn't lost cultural hegemony. It's the careless and maybe even gleeful wielding of Power like a cudgel. The casting of a slur, and calling it virtue. The Hypocrisy that points at Hierarchy. Someone, somewhere called it "the iron law of projection." Here it is, again. Who is it that's weird?
What policies do Republicans like?
They couldn't have a platform in 2020 because they knew Trump changes policies faster than he changes his underwear.
So when you all say you like his policies -- what policies?
Presumably these? https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform
Right.
Project 2025.
Yeah, Joe Biden already took care of some of them and Donnie ignored a lot of them when he was in office the last time.
But to be clear, you're in favor of Trump raising taxes on the middle class? So billionaires can have tax breaks?
And you're in favor of privatizing education so that only families who can afford private schools can educate their kids?
Project 2025 isn't mentioned there at all. It's a different platform with it's own name (agenda 47, apparently).
I'm a non American libertarian so what I want won't affect you, but yes fully privatised education would be great. Like food production, there's no need for the government to run that.
Sadly for America, privatisation of the school system isn't in Trump's platform nor is anything even close to that. Nor is there anything about taxes except abolishing taxes on tips. But I find it fascinating how in a discussion about policy you first assumed he didn't have any, then assumed you knew what they were without even clicking the link, and were wrong on both counts. This isn't changing the impression that the left has lost interest in policy in the US.
Well, no, Alistair , I knew his platform is going to be project 2025/Agenda 47, but given how fast he's been running away from it, I didn't think any of you would be stupid enough to bring it up.
I guess you're a few days behind the curve.
Tips by the way is going to include C Suite bonuses. That was discussed in P2025.
Okay. Please tell me which modern economy has a fully privatized school system? The deVos family has been pushing that one since she was Secretary of Education.
And exactly how do you intend to prevent adulteration and food poisoning in a fully privatized food system? Because my understanding is we can't export food to the European market because our safety standards aren't in sync but you must have a solution for that, right?
I'm sure it's easy to be a libertarian in the UK. You're protected from the consequences of your own bad ideas usually. . . Hey, how is brexit going?
What they're saying is that America has moved on from Trump AND his people. They're anachronisms, or "weird", and so is he. It's a deliberate use of teenager talk. Everyone's supposed to understand what's meant by the exclusion-ing language.
If you don’t see that MAGA is mostly just vibes and anger, I question all of your premises.
I don't think Trump has policies. He is transactional and that is why businessmen like him, they think with the right stimulus he can be led. As for weird, listen to his stump speeches. The MAGA people are attracted to his pro wrestling and reality TV aura - he talks that language and what he says is clearly understood. I don't think calling him and Vance weird is particularly effective except it stops them from saying he is a threat to democracy.
Look at the crowds behind him. They're bored and scrolling through their phones.
I'm curious if the crowd noise is being artificially enhanced.
Joe is too much of a gentleman to engage like that. He won in 2020 because the almost stoic endurance of Trump's attacks (except when Hunter was the subject, that really got Mr Biden).
You are right about Joe Biden. And that strategy did work in 2020.
Kamala is tackling Trump's torrents of insults in an appropriately balanced way: "If you've got something to say, say it to my face."
There's fearlessness, adequate amounts of street--and all without bitchiness or assholery. Instead of playing the grownup who endures the petulant and ill-raised six year-old, as Pelosi did; VP Harris is the kid who confidently calls the bully's bluff during lunch recess.
Well put.
If he was a few years younger I'm convinced we could do it again. The "when they go low we go high" kinda self-righteous strategy could work again but no point speculating about that.
Michelle Obama said that in 2016 and it decidedly didn't work.
Joe Biden said "Can you just shut up, man!" and that did work.
You're also ignoring it's not just Trump.
It's Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tommy Tuberville, Matt Gaetz and a slew of others.
I'm tired of us bringing a knife to a gun fight.
If that means mocking these twits six ways to Sunday, so be it.
The "policies" Republicans like are Project 2025. Those are the policies Trump is planning to implement.
Let them own those policies to the American people. If they're not whiny little cowards.
"I have been thinking for several weeks that Dems need to flood the zone with **** a la Steve Bannon. Just generate so many insults that it is impossible for the other side to answer."
You don't even realise that you have become the thing you hate the most. You have become the left wing MAGA.
I completely and thoroughly realized that I have descended to the level of the MAGAs. Hopefully, this will be temporary. If I didn't think it was of paramount importance to defeat Trump, I wouldn't go here. I just said that I prefer Biden to Harris, in large part because Biden can't campaign this way.
You literally want your candidate to sink to the lowest form possible to justify your means. You are a part of the problem.
What happened to the 'party of decency?
calling people weird and creepy is not the lowest form of anything! It's pretty laid-back, yet effective.
It is not as if elected Democrats are accusing Republicans of being pederasts, human traffickers and murderers. I mean, really who exactly are the people who have lost their minds and sense of professional and collegial propriety?
Both parties are ridiculous.
This is the lowest form: "I have been thinking for several weeks that Dems need to flood the zone with **** a la Steve Bannon. Just generate so many insults that it is impossible for the other side to answer."
"Next to" lowest. Trump IS weird. Maybe it would be even better however to hang the "not nice" label on Republicans for supporting Trump.
I agree that we are in a pit. And I'm not sure how we can get out of it. We definitely need a candidate who can voice decency MORE effectively than Joe Biden. My pick was always Amy Klobuchar. I worked for her in 2020. But the most important fact is that we cannot have a second Trump presidency. As a historian, it is entirely possible to imagine that a new voice will emerge to lead us back to decency. But it's not gonna happen in 2024.
I don't necessarily share the over-dramatic response to a second Trump presidency but I agree we need a return to decency from both camps. This race to the bottom has divided American so much that there are people genuinely speaking of civil war. People have lost their minds.
I am in total agreement with you. But history happens in steps. We cannot accomplish the goal that you and I share before November 5 2024.
Hostilities can be reversed—I'm thinking of the unbelievably racist cartoons that appeared in WWI and WWII depicting our enemies— those feelings largely vanished after the wars.
Indeed, I believe that Progressives have consistently been the aggressors against the US traditionalists for more than a century. One of my prime examples is Hee Haw— country folk can be on network TV only if they are presented as idiots.
Here is a comment I posted on a progressive site and got a lot of pushback on it.
My personal issue is that liberal Americans just can't let conservative Americans have their own communities where their own values prevail. Quite frankly, I think it is liberal aggression against conservative culture that has dragged our country down into the near civil war that we are suffering from today. Liberals may not use the word subhuman—instead they use words like low information, uneducated, unthinking. You yourself have used the term hateful repeatedly!
Of course, since liberals want to dominate the country, conservatives think it's just fine to impose their views in return.
As I have pointed out, I plan to go to Pennsylvania this fall and work for Harris. I don't want to see project 2025 implemented, and I do not want to see the conservative way of life bullied out of the states and towns that wish to embrace it.
What strikes me is very strange is that I can imagine you because I have met the average lib over and over and over again. Apparently, you cannot imagine me who wants both sides to flourish without seeking to eliminate each other. I think it's you who needs to broaden your mind.
If drag queen story hour is such an innocuous practice, why does it need to be defended and pushed so strenuously?
You don't share it because your health decisions haven't been blocked and you're not the one at risk of dying.
Make sure the women in your life understand we're being "overly dramatic."
If you're not worried that a second Trump presidency will mean the end of democracy as we know it (and I agree with you, btw) then it would seem that calling Trump/Vance "weird" is a massive improvement in civility over calling them fascist authoritarian Nazis or whatever.
Not to mention that when MAGA has it reinforced to them that they terrify liberals (Biden: "MAGA extremists") then that's not good for conservative sensibilities either because it encourages them to lean into being hostile or triggering ("let's hand out Mass Deportation Now signs at the RNC, that'll really freak out the libs"). I'd rather have them feel pressure to prove they're normal/non-weird than to have it be in their strategic interest to double down on rhetoric that scares people.
It's a little bit difficult when your candidate, Harris, is pretty much an empty vessel when it comes to political philosophy, and policy. "They're weird, eww!" is a lot of what her candidacy has.
I mean, you can despise the Trump candidacy's POV, but at least it more-or-less has one.
Trump just won the election based on this. It is basically Hillary's "deplorables" comment without event the context. Do you think mid-western swing voters are going to be swayed by this...I am a West Coast moderate who has not voted for a Republican in like 20 years and was a never-trump based on his unpresidential behavior...and I am reconsidering my vote (actually, I still won't vote for Trump, but for a second, I thought about it).
Trump scares me because he is unhinged, but at least there were institutions like the media and our overall government structure to contain him. When I see Dems devolving back into the 2020 mob mentality, I get even more scared because the institutions that would check Trump seem to just want to go along for the ride when the Dems get destructive.
That's funny.
"Mob mentality"?
You mean like Charlottesville? Michigan State House? January 6th? Texas legalizing hitting protesters with your car?
Actually yes I do mean both sets of behavior...and your inability to see the similarities between the events is disappointing...You are looking at this like a team sport, Dems and Reps in a tit for tat race to bottom, where the other sides idiocy somehow makes your sides idiocy acceptable.
New flash, none of this is acceptable behavior in a democracy. Republicans frequently engage in horrible behavior. Does that make it ok for Dems to behave the same?
To my initial comment, I think a significant difference between the two is that when conservative nut jobs act up, a good 70% plus of us (including the broad media ecosphere) condemn the behavior. In 2020 we saw political killings (look at Portland), an armed takeover of portions of Seattle and Portland where residents were deprived of their rights and authorities allowed armed gunmen to take control away from civil authorities. We also saw hundreds of politically motivated arsons, where the police were ordered to just watch protestors start fires and could not intervene until after the buildings were burning (check out Portland and in particular the protestors repeated burning down of the police officers' union), people blockading the exits to buildings and lighting them on fire (again it happened in Portland multiple times)...and the media and PMC called it a mostly peaceful protest. This is not because these protests where not violent...it is because people are tribal and have a difficult time acknowledging their own sides hypocrisy.
I equally condemn Trump and him being an idiot. The difference is that when conservatives act like idiots most the population is able to avoid the kind of motivated, tit for tat reasoning that makes you want to argue that because conservatives act like idiots, it is somehow ok when far left types engage in the same behavior. Both are wrong.
Quite frankly, this is the same kind of motivated reasoning that is making people (who already largely agree with Harris' platform) convince themselves that calling people names (a very Trumpian tactic) will somehow sway voters. Guess what....the people swayed by name calling already support Trump and aren't going to change. A novel idea would be to adopt the Michelle Obama attitude of "when they go low, we go high."
You're complaining we're calling them weird while they're trying to kill us?
This is not a team sport except for straight white men who don't think there is any risk to YOU.
I'm sorry you are more concerned about what Emily Post would think than Heather Heyer's mother.
I think, as a moderate, I’m just hoping for a return to normalcy and boring politics.
To me, the Democrats language singles that we’re putting the weirdness of 2010’s politics behind us, and that’s really what I want.
Maybe you are correct; however, this is not a return to boring politics but just the opposite...it is a repeat of Hillary's deplorables. Even your comment that we are putting the "weirdness of the 2010s politics behind us..." is kind of the point. Do you hope to set aside the divisive name-calling of that era by engaging in more divisive name-calling?
Just my thoughts but I suspect this resonates with elite educated voters who are inherently anti-Trump but will fail spectacularly with other demographics.
What they're selling is a return to normal politics. Vote for them and politics stays weird, vote for us and we'll return it to normal.
Whether you buy that or not is a different story.
I think you're picking up a longterm shift in party alignments. I think this messaging is targeted at boring suburban voters who find Trump more than a little distasteful, but were worried about Biden's age. I think there’s likely a bunch of voters like that out there that this will resonate with.
The difference between this and the deplorable comment is that comment was targeted at the voters, this is targeted at the politicians. I think its a key difference, but I might be wrong.
I disagree. It would take more than insults to truly become MAGA. MAGA is trollishness wrapped around Trumpian authoritarianism.
One of the things I hate the most about MAGA is that Trump promised he’d only accept election results “If I win” in October 2016. And some people insisted that we should laugh things like this off.
And then, on Jan 6 2021, Trump sicced a mob on his own Vice President, Mike Pence, for refusing to overturn the vote certification for Trump. Pence still refuses to endorse Trump, and says Trump asked him to choose Trump over the constitution.
In follow-up polling after Jan 6, most Republicans polled blamed Biden for the uprising.
And then Trump referred to the Jan 6 rioters as “patriots” and said he would pardon them.
And if you point these things out, Trump’s supporters and anti-anti-supporters, as well as many self-styled centrists, will say you have “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
It’s all weird, but also disturbing. It’s not just a matter of “Trump says mean things.”
Are you whining that we are using Republican tools and strategies to defeat Republican attempts to overthrow the Constitution?
Seriously?
Once one party goes all out for lies or nastiness the other party needs to follow to remain competitive.
Race to the bottom. We truly get what we deserve if this is what we believe in.
It is not a matter of belief. Itis a description of what happens when politics becomes exclusively about the feels and not the facts. The reason why this has happened is the Democrats have become your father's, grandfather's or great-grandfather's (depending on your age) Republican party.
The Progressive Left are still around, the commie hippies and radicals of fifty years ago are now the "woke leftists." The rest of the Democratic party are Republicans, first the Eisenhower-Nixon-Rockefeller Republicans who entered the party and now make by the liberal faction. They have been followed by Reaganite movement conservatives who joined Democratic converts to Reaganism to make up the neoliberal faction of the Democratic party.
So today the choice is between the Republican party and the Birchers. The Reagan folks knew their product would not sell and they lied about it from the start. Now that the Democrats are offering the same product, they need to lie (and do) while the new Trump Republicans have taken lying to new levels. This is why it has become a race to the bottom.
When you look at past campaigns you do find plenty of civil ones, but you also find plenty of unhinged ones. Insults are pretty commonplace in politics.
In my post I mentioned the bell curve and referred them to Wikipedia for an illustration that will help them understand why democracy works, if it is allowed to work, by holding free and fair, unsuppressed and unjerrymandered elections, so that the laws of probability can work. I know the principles of statistics aren't laws, but if you have a population of 200 million voters, it gets Dangerously close to it. And as a backup we have free and fair elections to get rid of the mistakes, like say Agent Orange.
Free and fair unsuppressed and ungerrymandered elections would be a real joy.
How could you not know Joe Biden after all of his years in politics, fat? You must be DOA. I should take you out back and challenge you to some pushups 😂 for hanging out with the racist Romney crowd who wants to put you in chains.
Neither Biden nor Harris have an intellectual bone in their body nor have ever come up with any original ideas, so name calling is a great strategy (all pols use it).I much prefer Harris’ approach to Joe ‘s mean old coot schtick. She hopefully won’t be trying to re-enact a Reichstag speech as Joe did- laughter is better medicine than hate.
Problem is everyone already has their own impressions of Trump- this will work for Vance , though, who is unknown.
'[Biden] just was incapable of such mindless insults'
Nice inadvertent oxymoronic joke.
Of course, I can see the irony. To win this important election, I am willing to fight fire with fire. My preference would be to keep Biden as the candidate, but it is obvious that the American public thinks he is too old. I do not share that opinion, but to win an election you have to work with the electorate as it exists.
You missed the fact that I'm not aiming for Trump supporters, but for two or three percent of undecideds or folks who don't usually vote. In 2020 I managed to talk five people into voting who had never voted before.
I'm hoping that a politician will emerge in the future who can communicate so effectively that they can engage the average population in a somewhat higher level of political discourse. Lincoln and FDR were figures of that kind, and so was LBJ.
Give the other side a taste of their own medicine and in return you get why are so mean to us, is the strategy de jour apparently. MAGA is weird by definition as they claim conservative values of the moral high ground while clinging to an amoral criminal would-be despot.
Whereas traditional Republicans are leaving the cult shamefaced over what they had voted for in recognition of the assault on democracy by MAGA on Jan 6. I get they would never vote for Hillary and bought Trump owning the libs as their guy.
The evidence denying and whataboutism is not working like it had been as they now face the reaction to the political world they helped create.
I'm not sure if many Republicans are actually ashamed. There's been such a stress for so many decades that politics are dirty, stupid, and ugly, that many people think it just has to be that way.
I used to subscribe to the Dispatch, a publication by and for never-Trump Republicans and many commenters there said they couldn't possibly vote either for Trump or any Democrat.
I'm not sure about the whole article but yeah, we crave normalcy. Even tho I consider myself politically involved, I'm as tired as everyone else of the weird fascist doomerist rethoric. I really hope chill politics take over at least for a decade.
God we need this so bad as a society. Get rid of this ridiculous extreme candidates and bring some moderates man.
Biden can be considered a moderate. But he was getting slaughtered. Until society figures out how to present and amplify moderate voices in the age of social-media, short-form videos & memes, we are stuck with extreme candidates
You're absolutely right on Biden. The problem is that we know he wasn't leading.
You're also absolutely right on the social media aspect. Sensationalism sells hard. Politicians are appealing to the worst in people. We need a social media cleanse.
What may help is that many of us disengaged from social media. Between Facebook becoming a battleground over politics for a while that literally caused permanent rifts in friendships and families, to the algorithms of Instagram and TikTok sending us influencer content rather than our friends’ and families’ content, a lot of folks I know ages 35+ just don’t use those sites so much anymore. Facebook also serves up far less “news” content, at least for me. The memefication may still reign in the young, but they are unreliable voters. The danger is the “memeragement” still amongst the senior population - I have no idea how much of that still goes on. My parents also disengaged from Facebook but I don’t know how common that is.
Facebook has definitely become boomerville and is a hotbed for political misinformation but imo Twitter is the worst of the lot. Twitter really brings the worst of the worst out, is highly divisive (no matter how right wing lefties want to say it is) and it rewards sensationalism through monetization.
Twitter is a far more dangerous social media than any other. Which is a shame because it can be a brilliant place to be.
The good thing about X/Twitter is that a LOT of folks left. Also, journalists aren’t treating “today’s main character on Twitter,” as newsworthy as they used to. I used to see tons of articles on supposedly journalism sites that were basically, “here’s what blew up Twitter today,” whereas now I think it’s just treated as a right-wing cesspit, unworthy of their attention.
Call me crazy, but I think Musk did us a favor, unintentionally of course, by burning what Twitter was to the ground.
Biden wasn’t leading, yet. The campaign hadn’t really started. Biden would have won. Here is why: Since Reagan, it's been a turnout election. If there is a high turnout, the Dem wins. Low, the Republican wins. Biden has never been a great orator but, he had a lot of money, a fantastic record, built a great field operation, and was clearly preferred by normal people. Trump is clearly not and this JD Vance thing is a Godsend. Biden would have won. Now Harris will win because Trump and a good Harris campaign will cause a high turnout. It will still be close.
In the Trump era, high turnout is good for republicans and low turnout is good for democrats. The stable suburban educated upper middle class is now the Democratic base, while the disaffected disgruntled marginalized people are the Republican base.
I don’t think so. Republicans always turnout by feeling of efficacy, types of jobs and family situation. A lot of Democrats still punch the clock.
How about a "Truth in Media" law; whereby deviating from the journalistic practice of airing/publishing material only if it is corroborated by >2 sources is penalized?
It's a good idea but impossible to enforce. Keep in mind, all of us on Substack would be subject to the same rules.
Where do you get >2 sources if no one is publishing things until they already have >2 sources? Many sources won’t come out until there’s already some public discussion.
Responsible media entities like WaPo, NYT, Miami Herald, etc. publish stories only when they're sure of the facts. Which almost always means getting corroboration from >1 independent source. Or providing external data that strongly corroborates a single source.
FOX News and the rest of the RW media ecosystem has collectively slimed the 4th Estate--and possibly fatally wounded our democracy--by serially publishing uncorroborated falsehoods, like "Democrats abort babies after they're born." By normalizing using "People are saying that..." instead of actual human sources, the media is being harmed, not helped.
Trump's notion that we should "open up the libel laws" and make it easier for politicians to sue for libel might not be such a bad idea...
I think the recent polling shows that the moderateness/Biden-ness wasn't the problem, it was the coldness. Replace with Kamala and mostly the same platform gets better polling.
The issue was that Biden was too old and most ppl don't know that the administration does most of the day-to-day work of the presidency (or didn't like the idea of rule-by-administrators w/ a Biden figurehead). To be honest, I don't like the latter either, but Biden was & is clearly not fully-functioning mentally.
I don’t think being a moderate was Biden’s weakness. He’s been a good president but was a weak candidate this time around, as exemplified by his debate performance.
This has been my big takeaway about why "weird" hits so well. It subtly centers the idea that this election is about the return of the normies. I think Noah is spot on when he talked about exhaustion. The polls back up my personal experience... and my family skews conservative. The idea that we're all just tired of angry people screaming about weird things is fairly bipartisan.
Interestingly, my drive home there was a talk show discussing Trump's latest interview. The man can't go outside his bubble. Reality bites hard. The juxtaposition of the questions.. then his answers and the follow ups of what basically distills into "what the hell are you talking about?" shows the distance of reality and the Trump delulu world. Weird doesn't even cover it. It was as if he was a demented person... and needed a care home where he could be safe from his paranoia.
This. After all the stuff, people are just tired of being scolded from any direction. Because it's fucking weird to scold people over their politics that you do not know or have no connection with. These days, anyone too into a thing just seems to give me The Ick. Like why does this weirdo think anyone cares about their opinion of the olympic ceremony.
Electing Harris would essentially validate the last four years (and really the last decade). I don't see how that brings back normalcy.
That’s possibly because you’re weird. Joe Biden is the epitome of normal. Quiet, steady, successful, gets things done, normal.
I think this gives short shrift to the weirdness the Dem coalition is themselves responsible for (which Noah gestures at). The stronger Harris comes out against the Hamas ppl storming DC and the "Whites for..." cringe, the better she'll play in swing states.
I'm not sure why there's all so much softness still towards the protest left, Dems aren't in any danger of losing Cali or NY and clearly voters peg them as a cause of the 2010s unrest as much as Trump was.
The cognitive dissonance of the Trump camp, with the endless lying, fabricating and 'alternative facts' is what's maxxed the stress levels. Sure, all politicians lie or exaggerate to some extent; but the GOP under Trump has gone full tilt pathological in the lying department. Mainly because Right Wing media rarely ever calls them on it.
I'll be honest, I don't listen to any Trump news (or really any news) and I don't follow any of the day to day soundbites.
I know that the left lies about IQ, COVID, and Gender amongst other things. I can point to impactful policies based on those lies that have negatively impacted me and my family.
I have a hard time coming up with a lie Trump has told that has resulted in a policy that has negatively impacted me or my family.
I'm just not seeing how the party obviously associated with things like this isn't the "weird" party:
https://i0.wp.com/www.thewrap.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/lastsupper.jpg?fit=990%2C557&ssl=1
Nothing wrong with feeling that way.
I’m sure you can see how Trump lying about the elections results and pressuring Mike Pence not to reject electoral votes causes people stress. Just as apparently the gender thing causes you stress.
If you see the Democrats as weird, that’s okay. To me, the weird parts of the Democrats are on the fringes of the party whereas the weirdness of the Republicans are front and center.
The last four years were clearly much more of a return to normalcy than 2014-2020!
WTF are you talking about?
I was told I couldn't leave my house. They shut down businesses and schools. They ordered everyone to wear face coverings everywhere even on toddlers. The same people that did all that rioted in every major city. My work held racial hatred struggle sessions run by mentally ill women. They spent trillions of dollars paying people to stay home and order Uber eats rather than work and caused double digit inflation. I could go on and on and on.
The Trump years were great. Covid/BLM/GreatAwokening/Trans years were awful.
I seem to remember all that happening in 2020. The period 2014-2020 was the ramp up, and the period since then has been a ramp down.
Trump didn't do anything I just mentioned in 2020. My Democrat Governor and Democrat protestors did all those things. And they kept going long after 2020.
The end note about what happened to Austin sounds like it was written about San Francisco, now light-years removed from the city of my youth. The coastal cities becoming “knowledge-worker enclaves” may have empowered and affirmed one category of out-group ‘weirdos’, and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. But it also stamped the life out of the different kinds of weirdos that lived in the cities before.
SF can have such weirdness once again if they ever decide to build a plural amount of apartment buildings per year. Though this is a problem in pretty much all coastal metropolises, not just SF.
Richard Florida "Rise of the Creative Class." If your city can't attract gays, you're doomed and will end up a ghost town.
Drag Queen Hour has become a new economic imperative for economically struggling cities?
Florida's changed his tune a bit since the "good ol' days." Per Richard, cities now live (and die) based on their ability to support growing families. Whoda thunk?https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-bringing-workers-back-downtown-wont-make-toronto-great-again-but/
This is a great analysis. I've been considering why this resonates with me so much when I, too, have always reveled in being "weird." One of my friends described it as, "Not quirky weird. Cover your drink weird." Weird like the guy in the van you don't take candy from. The Trumplicans make me feel profoundly unsafe--and I think, for good reason--but if I point out that Trump is literally trying to make himself a facist dictator, I'll be a hysterical (liberal) woman. Weird and creepy, though? Yes, people will hear that. It sticks.
Well put.
Kamala is slinging a particularly female version of that moniker, as "weird" as applied to an aggressive and amoral man also denotes "creepy". A someone that normal people will avoid. Kamala is aptly mobilizing the female and youth vote for November.
Kamala was so good in Atlanta last night, taunting & challenging Trump with a big smile before a raucous crowd. I don't expect he'll react calmly to a Black woman laughing at him.
Indeed. A big part of the fascist sales pitch has always been "We fascists are badasses." Laughing at them proves that they're not.
I seem to recall there being a line leading up to, or during WWII to the effect of, “Hitler has got one ball, Mussolini’s got none at all!”
You might not want to see Trump appearing before the National Association of Black Journalists convention today.
It was like the scene in "Bulworth" where Warren Beatty's title character berates a Black congregation by leaning into racism, only Trump played it straight.
It’s the insecurity of Vance and his MRA colleagues that stands out to me.
I’m a straight dude, I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the brief period where saying “kill all men” was cool in progressive online spaces and I was considered lame and not in on the joke if I complained, but I’m mature enough and secure enough in myself to not have my entire politics and personality formed by that experience. Vance and the alienated young men he’s supposed to activate aren’t able to respond proportionately and appropriately to progressive overreach of the last decade and it makes them seem like weak losers to most other men.
The problem is that culture is a palimpsest, so by staying quiet a lot of that stuff is now just part of the left/progressive/urban culture. I'm making it a point to draw the line now, but it's been 10 years or so since that horse has left the barn, as it were. Not saying there was another way (actually Trump losing in 2016 would have taken a lot of air out of progressive weirdness), but I guess I'm resigned to saying for the rest of my life "nope, that's not how it went down".
I’m torn. An unspoken agreement to never speak of the things we did or said during a period of mass hysteria is oftentimes a necessary condition of the mass hysterias end.
There's an asymmetry between "normal" and "weird." In my view, someone is "normal" by conforming to societal norms, but someone is "weird" by substantially breaking them. This asymmetry means that (in some sense) there are many more ways to be "weird" than to be "normal." It can be misleading when a single word covers the well-liked quirky folks, the tolerated outcasts, and the truly dangerous people.
You can expect two "normal" people to be relatively similar to each other, but two "weird" people may be more distinct from each other than they are from any "normal" person.
Yeah…you might be overthinking it — it annoys them because it comes across like gas lighting . The po faced middle American marine/big state school grad/ “boot strapped to Harvard” guy is “weird”, according to to the party of (insert whatever progressive wackiness you like), according to the strange dorks that make up much of the press!
Anyway, making “weirdness” an issue in this election is exactly the kind of move one expects from a top flight campaigner like Harris.
It’s not his background that is weird, it’s his ideas.
His views on no-fault divorce and parents voting for their children is pretty out of step with most people.
I have a better idea. Instead of parents voting on behalf of their children, we should lower the voting age to 14.
How about we restrict voting to those who pay payroll taxes - not income taxes, but the payroll tax that goes to Social Security. Also anyone that receives Social Security, since by and large they paid into the system. Even the lowest wage part time jobs cause you to pay payroll taxes. A 14 year old could vote if they paid payroll taxes, but a basement dweller couldn’t.
The advantage that Universal Suffrage has over such schemes is defense against certain forms of oppression. What if a plurality passes a law that effectively makes it impossible for me to get a job? Then I'm disenfranchised forever and they can maintain power forever!
Under our Constitution that would be cruel and unusual punishment.
Isn’t that the standard punishment for most felonies? Having a felony on your record makes it very hard to get lots of jobs. (It also permanently disenfranchises you in some states.)
Thanks for writing great articles!
Since I am one of those Boomer parents you referred to, I have some expertise in “weird.”
Within the counterculture movement that went along with the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a lot of weirdness. People who hid themselves and their weirdness were more or less able to come out and be part of that group.
Women are now seen as equals, gay people can be gay. A victory for both of those groups. Black Americans have far more agency these days than their population weight would actually carry.
It is an observation and I have no empirical data to back it up but I’ll just give some examples.
Yesterday on CNN, a panel of 4 black political commentators and one white dude. While multi-ethnic marriages are exploding, melanin concerns all sorts of problems in identity causation. You would think that every white woman is married to a black dude in TV commercials. Corporations poured money into DEI and DEI positions. The FOX News Morning show had to add a black dude to the show.
I found most of this amusing. I have long thought that black Americans deserved reparations. Not for slavery but for Jim Crow. The promise of equality was never given. Not in money but in education.
Of the most difficult of issues is how do you instill a culture of education in a community?
I digress. The point I would like to make is this. The result of those wars are most if not all of the institutions that helped raise American children have been trashed. Whether or not they deserved it, it has left parents virtually alone. Neighbors or the local barber no longer yell at kids to stop misbehaving. Schools no longer punish kids for misbehaving. There are no groups like the Boy Scouts or Boys and Girls Clubs teaching moral or ethical behavior.
Let your freak flag fly and keep on trucking was the mantra. Anything goes, which, of course, led to moral relativism. Hey, it was no problem that Bill Clinton was a serial sexual assaulter. He played sax on TV, he was cool.
So today we have a set of young men who have no idea what relationships are or what they mean. Sex is taught by Porn Hub to anyone with a smart phone. We are part of the great reduction in marriage and children leading to a birth rate crisis that has profound implications for the American economy.
Sure, the weirdos feel more comfortable being weird. They can be a witch doctor or part of a group from Suicide Squad. What is left is the dystopian society we currently find ourselves. The weirdos are in charge. Social Media is destroying young women, it has made young men into incels. It has devalued love and marriage. Our politicians have no restraint; they hate everybody equally. If you asked normies what makes America a great country, if you were on the quad at Harvard, you’d get some weird answers, likely starting with, “No, America is not a great country”.
You and I have won a pyrrhic victory. We have thrown the baby out with the bath water. Can we find ourselves back? Only with good parenting. Sadly, that is in short supply.
Yeah and your boomer policies created this. You guys destroyed the family with your relativism and now you’re mad about the grandkids not being normal. You don’t get to do that. Why do you think barber doesn’t police things any more? Why do you think good parenting is in short supply? Maybe because you destroyed the family for the fake delusional of “equality” which btw is never possible on this earth because that was your false god that was always fake and delusional. Now while you guys enjoyed being raised by families and a normal society, I have to raise my child in a society that will tell him he can be a girl if he wants to and anyone who judges him is “creepy.” Maybe do some self reflection and think all those “wins” for all those that were “oppressed” were actually terrible things for the primary unit, the family and all those evil guys like Nixon were actually right.
I am a public school kid, as one of the few/only Asian-American eldest child of immigrants in a mostly white neighborhood. My teachers were great role models, and my father took me and my two siblings to the library. I interacted with kind neighbors and strangers, and learned most things about the world through them and started serving as intermediary for my parents and society. I count my lucky stars that that childhood left me with a love for reading and learning and critical thinking and a sense of being part of this great American experiment. That I grew up reading Washington's farewell speech, and Frederick Douglass, and in awe of how this country that doesn't bow to god or king but to common American values can exist, however flawed in practice. My family moved to a Muslim enclave inside a bigger, more diverse and liberal city in the middle of high school and my siblings found it easier to find community with the black-and-white worldview and morality of orthodox muslims rather than decipher the weirdness of the diversity. The weirdness of cheerleading, and social media, and what they felt was toxic feminism and leftism being forced on them without expecting in in public schools. They got overwhelmed. They started speaking about Americans are this or that, using language that doesn't include themselves as "American". Of course, racists/White cultural milieu can leave you feeling othered, but one ought not give in to it, and give up their American card.
I have a back-and-forth with myself because I am incredibly weird and progressive, but have seen how when those values come into the public schools, and public space then Muslims get scared and pull their kids out of schools. (I am happy that instead of pulling me from public school, my parents just pulled me from Sex Ed class. Then in college I learned and experimented on my own time...) Now older muslim cousins check what the younger kids are reading and draft emails for parents to send to "protect" the minds of their younger siblings. I would rather have them at the table, feeling like an American and hide aspects of my weirdness and progressiveness. As a counterpoint, maybe even if public schools didn't change from late 2000s this still could have happened as Muslim numbers grew, but IDK. There is a robust online community of orthodox muslim preachers and people sharing and showing how religious they are, and it's easy to score social points for showing you are not assimilated.
I do not find anything incompatible with having a moral structure you are comfortable with and democracy.
The idea is that man can decide his issues without a King or a dictator. I don’t think you need God to solve man made problems but it does t hurt. We in America have a deep seated belief that you can manage your life. Free to make the decisions that benefit you.
We try and fail to have respect for diversity and sometimes we fail.
God doesn't do anything, because it doesn't exist.
Nice commentary but no. Trump and Vance are weird. Liz Cheney is as white bread conservative as the day is long. Liz is not weird. Most conservatives are not weird. The Republican Party has been taken over by Tea Party misfits and weirdos, not conservatives.
Weirdness is in the eye of the beholder. Which was the point of this article.
You only thing this because the legacy media has told you. Serving as a court jester is actually pathetic and undignified behavior
The "legacy" media is far more reliable than Breitbart News. :P
I have been finding, running and electing people office for 50 years. I don’t need legacy media. I can see, hear and read primary sources such as actual legislation all by myself.
Liz Cheney is a liberal she’s not actually opposed to the liberal regime at all. Call that what you want but it ain’t conservative
Liz Cheney is a model of a conservative. She never votes for liberal bills. She just ain’t wacko MAGA.
You must be young or new to this field of discussion.
No they are both selling you a message
Yes. But not weird.
Who cares about weird anyway? It's irrelevant and unimportant.
The "weird" bit is even stronger than just "outgroup". The conservative Christian right wasn't all that crazy in the 1970s through 2000 or so. (Well, it really was, but they thought of themselves as the center and were sort of getting away with it.) But the current policies (no abortion, no contraception, no divorce, no trans (and, yes, that's really what they intend to do)) really are seriously crazy wacko city. Pence and Mike Johnson are seriously sick wackos on sexual morality. And they're the sane ones.
So the weird bit is a heavy duty "the truth hurts" insult. Hurtful because it's true. Effective because it's true. These sick policies are policies the majority of Americans aren't interested in living under.
The trans issue is a tough one for non-progressives (and many progressives ie. TERFs) because it's arguments ultimately boil down to 'don't believe your eyes, let us smart, educated folk tell you the real truth of the world, and shame on you for thinking the majority of public opinion could possibly understand'
Conservatives love their conspiracies, but I'd argue progressives tilled the ground it sprouted in. Using 'science' (code now to conservatives as 'elite and disconnected) , especially social sciences, as a bludgeon but then denying it for social issues causes dissonance. I'm not arguing the validity of the arguments, but by explicitly denying the validity of the historical, commonly understood biological differences between men and women, it creates dissonance. So for a conservative, who are deeply uncomfortable with mainstreaming transgender rights, if it doesn't feel right for me (the primary argument for trans), and our common human history is false, then maybe there's another reason things are so wacky.
'Trans women should be participate in women's sports, there's no reason not to! It won't affect the fairness of women's athletics'.... But then a trans woman absolutely demolishes everyone to take the national swimming championship and their own teammates are resentful.
'We need to protect our kids! Their minds are still developing until their 25! They can't be trusted to drink or smoke or even stay home alone! But if your 12 year old wants to be sterilized and chemically block their normal development, well of course you should support that unconditionally, they know themselves best and even though we have limited medical information about the doest and long term impacts of these unprecedented permanent, irreversible changes, and what data we does not look good, trust us, we know what's best for your child'
Trans is also distinct from the successful gay cultural assimilation on the basis of representation in the center. There's an argument that the gays cultural acceptance was led by the 'normal' or 'moderate' gays (a la Anderson Cooper, Modern Family, Will & Grace, Pete Buttegieg) and gays make up a much higher percentage of the population. There are no mainstream, centrist trans public figures. The gays have demonstrated that they can operate in the commons and live what is perceived as 'normal' lives to the common man. At the end of the day, from a secular social perspective, not much has changed in the broader society because of gay marriage or gay inclusion.
This is not true for the trans debate. The trans debate has not been able to show why a tiny fraction of the population deserves to disrupt the overwhelming majority of society on things that are extremely personal and extremely common. The bathroom issue makes sense in the same context as a handicap bathroom, in that accommodations can be made, but to the common man, they cannot accept the perceived risk of allowing a grown biological man using the same bathroom at the same time as their 8 year old daughter. The sports inclusion debate has already been lost by the dominating success of Lia Thomas. And what is perceived as 'experimenting' on children thru the advocacy of unproven, permanent body altering procedures would be horrifying at almost any point in human history. Bonus alienation credit for advocating for bypassing parental involvement in these permanent decisions of their children.
All that to say, regardless of the validity of the arguments on either side, on this specific issue conservatives are justifiably concerned, and when progressives say 'you're causing harm by not respecting/accommodating/embracing/endorsing my feelings and shame on you!' the other side says 'right back at you!' except theyre the majority and we're indoctrinated from an early age to believe in democratic principles.... also known as majority rule.
Raise your hand if you think trans people are weird! 🙋 Eh it doesn't matter anyways, they're just poor, uneducated, rural, religious, bigoted, despicable, deplorable apes, who cares about them. Don't believe your eyes! Let us show you the truth of the world, we just came up with it! Science!
Good analysis on science being coded as “elite” which is very true. Also trans is much less natural and grosser than gay but trans couldn’t have happened without gay which couldn’t have happened without feminism which could have happened without individualism against the family
Correction on the last word, which should be Science™.
Having your teenage son monitor your porn intake is most definitely weird.
Democrats need to be careful that "weird" doesn't land as elite disdain for the working folks of this country--as "deplorables" did. Remember many Trump supporters feel diminished and dismissed by elites and by the left. Said another way: The left has done a masterful job in alienating the class of people it says they are fighting for.
Agreed but there is a big distinction -- "weird" is being applied to the leaders the GOP has chosen, not the voters behind them. "Deplorables" meant the voters and it implies they are deplorable forever. "Weird" means (to me at least), "hey maybe if your nominees weren't so bizarre then I might actually consider voting Republican". I definitely agree with you that they'll need to tread lightly so that the disdain doesn't bleed over in the way you described.
That's not how I took it, and most of my blue-collar friends (I live in the country, and my neighbors are construction workers, plumbers, etc.) are pretty pissed about it. To them it is deplorables all over again but with a bigger net.
The people who feel that way were probably already Trump leaning.
I think the messaging is effective for the people the Democrats want to target— Suburban moderates who are tired of all the Trump-y weirdness.
I think we just disagree on direction. I see the groups you are referring as a demographic that the Dems have locked up...what they need is mid-western swing voters...these are a different group and more sensitive to being looked down on by college educated elites. These folks are more like my neighbors.
Again, we probably just disagree on this (and you could totally be correct)...but my sense is that anyone who looks back on Trump's term as weird and problematic (which I personally do) will probably vote for Harris. The folks whose votes are needed look at that period as the calm before the storm of the 2020s (protests, riots, COVID, inflation, border issues, increase in crime, etc.).
That said, I respect your opinion but see the situation differently.
I'm open to being wrong as well.
I think it will come down to how effectively the Dems make it clear that the message is targeted at Republican politicians and not voters.
The issue with the deplorable comment is it was pretty clearly targeted at voters, and people rightly hated that.
Yep, when I saw Clinton make that comment I knew she had lost.
The left doesn’t fight for the “working class” they are too white and stuck in their ways opposing infinite neoliberalism. They fight for humanity in the abstract and punish the actual working class in their countries
A good chunk of the "weird" Trump and Vance have are, respectively, the weird of a born-rich New Yorker and the weird of a guy who -- despite impressive achievements as a self-made man -- has contempt for his former kin and been marinating too long in Silicon Valley's distinctly strange right-wing spaces. Emphasizing that out-of-touch weirdness seems the way to go.
Wasn't the archetypal Trump supporter not a worker but a small business owner?
No--the archetypal Trump supporter is one without a college education.
That too: perhaps your point is that "working class" in the US is often used to mean "without college education" (as opposed to meaning "proletarian" in the Marxist sense).
America doesn't really operate on class, so terms like "working class" and "middle class" are content-free; they require you to project your perceptions onto the word to define it.
It's prone to a lot of code switching. Class can mean what the social sciences call cohort, a way to sort people into groups of likes and differences. Income brackets are cohorts. A person making $20,000 a year has much different life experiences than a person making $40,000 a year, and the experiences narrow between a $40K earner and a $60K earner, narrowing again for $60K to 80K, even though we're measuring $20,000 income increments.
Class can also be a stand-in, a euphemism for education, as well as disposition. "Working class" is a media-savvy way to say "uneducated" in the former sense, or "boorish," "loutish", "churlish", etc., in the latter sense.
Right. A small business owner.
George Carty is right.
Ta-nehisi Coates wrote this in 2017, and it proved prophetic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/ Go to the part where Coates does the numbers.
That was the shot. Robert A. Pape ran the numbers on the insurrectionists. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/06/trump-capitol-insurrection-january-6-insurrectionists-great-replacement-white-nationalism/
The modal maga is a status-anxious asshole boss.
And their concern about illegal immigrants isn't so much "they'll steal my job!" as "they'll get uppity and demand higher wages!"
That's why ICE raids almost never target illegal immigrants working on farms, because ICE's function isn't so much to deport them as to make sure they _stay_ on the farms.
I don't think there's any way to interpret it as being about the voters, and definitely not on the basis of lower social class meaning weird. If anything it's the opposite. It's directed at politicians who are very wealthy and attended elite universities, and it's pretty pointedly about them personally and the way they present themselves
I'm not convinced that the whole ingroup outgroup hypothesis here is correct.
I think the problem is Democrats are the party of women, who use social shaming tactics to get what they want. The social shaming to get cultural victories was calling people on the right 'bigots' or 'evil.' Now that they have power it's 'weird.'
Ironically Trump has a very feminine style when it comes to politics. It's the only way he's been able to claw back a victory for the right.
Also I'm not sure I buy the entire thesis that Republicans actually care about being called weird that much.
"I think the problem is Democrats are the party of women,"
Thomas, you're telling on yourself.
? You saying I'm a woman???
I'm a man!!!! I'm so masculine :'(
What your sex and gender are makes you, you. That's not the issue.
The issue is, if you see women advancing to positions of power in customarily male spaces, do you feel threatened?
Yes, yes I do.
I think you are missing one, though of course not at all the sole, reason why the "weird" line may resonate. It is Vance's stated current political philosophy and Trump's periodic rhetorical forays into cryptic gibberish that seem "weird" - at least from the perspective of people who still think that "small-L" liberal pluralism and democratic decision-making should be understood as the core, shared - and, yes, "normal" political philosophy of the United States. Thiel/Curtis Yarvin/Hazony/tech-bro IQ essentialism trying to channel Carl Schmitt and Sam Francis, with a healthy dollop of Great Replacement Theory, layered on a "girls are icky" subtext, all of which seem to comprise Vance's current political philosophy and the intellectual back-up for MAGA is, for want of a better word, WEIRD. When Trump's rhetoric starts to sound crazy because it's referential in a scattershot way to a bunch of memes and themes that only the Extremely Online far right can even understand, that's . . . WEIRD. And cultish. Not Republican like the people at the country club who really liked Romney and just want to zero out the capital gains tax and otherwise be left alone. "MAGA Thought", thus understood, is outside most people's understanding of the American mainstream. Pat Buchanan's original insight that there is a viable culture-based politics to the right of Reagan has been distressingly successful, but the political philosophy that lies behind it is at odds with the modern understanding of mainstream American political tradition and, as such seems to many in the middle to be . . . WEIRD. How these habits of political thought captured 40% of the population is another day's sad subject, but the power of the rhetorical device of "weirdness" is that the nooks and crannies back of such political thought as drives MAGA does in fact seem . . . weird.
Amusing and informative. Some insights for those folks over the pond who, like me, don’t have a feel for the social landscape there anymore. If I ever really did!
"There"? What about your own, um, social landscape? Talk about weird: yours is a voice no longer heeded by the leaders you elect. You're being replaced en masse by a new people who will (hopefully) better serve their masters.
It’s a worry. The salient point is that when you are in it, you barely notice incremental change happening. At least that’s true for me.
What if there is no 'there' 'there'?
Also a worry.
Superb article! I really enjoyed reading it but no matter how you put it, resorting to calling people 'weird' when you're vying for the Presidency doesn't instill confidence that the people running are taking their responsibility seriously. I long for a return to actual policy discussions, debates that tackle real issues that people are facing.
Calling your opponents weird is not going to solve the deep issues the country faces. It's also not going to bridge this chasm that seperates the right and left. Democrat's called MAGA deplorables and now have the gaul to throw this childish insults at them. It reeks of hypocricy and desperation. Supporting this type of behaviour helps no one. The country needs unity.
Now, I believe that as long as Trump is in politics we can never have unity. He is far too divisive and toxic for both camps. I still think he will do a better job than Biden or Harris, but for the sake of the country both Reps and Dems need to start nominating moderates that actually represent the majority.
If only I had the luxury of saying that any of the GOP candidates for governor currently blitzing my TV with ads before the primary next week were weird instead of inhabiting a right-wing epistemic bubble. (I am crossing my fingers for Mike Kehoe who appears the most sane one.) I think "weird" is a way of confiding in ordinary voters that these Republicans really do not think the way the ordinary voters do and can't be taken seriously.
You shouldn’t associate with them, really, and don’t ever let them sit at our lunch table. Vote Kamala for Homecoming committee- not that weird nerd who wrote a book. Eww, who does that? Can’t they afford ghostwriters?
And get a girlfriend, for Pete's sake. Leave that couch alone!
Definitely complete surprise from this end that most people are a) not really familiar with Vance at all and b) not online enough to remember those cat lady comments and that he made them about Krugman, for goodness' sake. The few minutes I was able to catch of the speech surprised me that his voice sounded very teenage so that could not have helped.
I did read his book years ago (ironically recommended to me by leftist friends working in DC) and saw he was elected to the Senate, but I don’t live in OH and he is junior senator so have zero reason to be aware of him, politically (until now). I can only name 2 senators out of the 4 from the states I live in. Who cares? The former book-loving friends hate him now, of course. 😊
Or secretary of state, who is in charge of our elections!!
Spouse watches allll the local news so we see allll the ads.