'Weird' Should Not Be An Insult

Not If You're On The Left Anyway

Harris filtered through ‘brat green’. Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Chris Kleponis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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The Kamala Harris campaign recently sent out an email itemising its takeaways from an appearance Trump made on Fox News. One of them was, 'Trump is old and quite weird?’ Yes, this was an official communiqué from a candidate for president, implied uptalk and all.

The Democrats have landed on a label for Donald Trump and his allies: they’re weird. Its unclear where this tactic originated but the person who has done the most to popularise it is Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who has been putting in an impressive campaign to be Harris’s VP pick. On the same day as that press release, he tweeted a clip of Trump with the caption, “Say it with me: Weird.” The line gained momentum after JD Vance’s remark about “childless cat ladies” was uncovered. It quickly become almost mandatory for Harris’s allies to use it.

Pundits and consultants have been lining up to say how smart this tactic is. I’m not so sure about that. I am sympathetic to the underlying logic: a weak claim about your opponent can be more devastating than a strong one. In his memoir, The Master Tony Blair wrote about the way he went about seeing off his political opponents:

“I defined Major as weak, Howard as an opportunist, Cameron as a flip-flop…these attacks seem flat, rather mundane almost, and not exactly inspiring - but that’s their appeal. Any one of those charges, if it comes to be believed, is actually fatal. Yes, it’s not like calling your opponent a liar, or a fraud, or a villain, or a hypocrite, but the middle-ground floating voters kind of shrugs their shoulders at these claims. They don’t chime. They’re too over the top, too heavy, and they represent an insult, not an argument.”

Politicians and their supporters love to make the stronger claims because they are more emotionally satisfying for them and their supporters. But as Blair says, the floating voter is liable to ignore or reject this kind of rhetoric. After all, if they agreed with it, they would have made up their mind already. In fact, the strong claim risks backfiring. The floating voter probably sees something they like in your opponent; they may even have voted for them in the past. If you denounce the opponent as obviously evil, corrupt, and so on, then what you saying about this voter? (Oh and in case you’re wondering, yes, there are still swing voters in American elections, and they’re more vital to a campaign’s success than ever).

So - is ‘weird’ a good example of this kind of mild-but-deadly attack? I don’t think so. Firstly because it is, to borrow Blair’s distinction, an insult not an argument. It takes a hell of a lot to make me agree with this nutcase (I’m allowed to use over-the-top insults) but he’s absolutely right:

The “weird’ tactic is dumb and juvenile, and it generates a dumb and juvenile response. Republicans have started to say ‘No, they’re weird’, and with equal justification, or lack of it. I’m reminded that Biden resorted to calling Trump a “sucker and a loser” in his fatal debate. What is this - when they go low, we go low? The best hope of the Democrats is to seem more mature and stable than Trump and company. You don’t do that by saying “You’re weird”, like a teenage bully in the locker room. You do that by sounding mature and stable.

Of course the Harris campaign should lay into Trump and Vance when they say stupid or offensive things (they are providing plenty of opportunity). But for Democrats to hang their hats on not being the weird ones seems a little complacent. Every in-group thinks it’s normal and regards the out-group as weird. But on a range of policy issues, including immigration, race and gender, the Democrats are further from the median voter than the Republicans are. Politicians should be constantly asking themselves in what ways they might seem weird to the mainstream voter.

It gets worse: Ramaswamy is correct on his second point, too. Using “weird” as an insult ought to be anathema to Democrats. If they want to be the party that stands for freedom, then they should celebrate everyone’s freedom to be as weird as they want. After all, who are the people who most often get dismissed and bullied for being “weird”? We could start with gay kids, Muslims, and go from there. The Democrats are meant to celebrate unconventional sexualities, minority religions, neurological types. They cannot be anti-weird. They have to be the party that says “weird” is good. Weird is normal.

One of the remarkable things about the ‘weird’ tactic is that it has given Republicans the chance to appropriate the language of inclusion. Sam Brown, the GOP candidate for Senate in Nevada, is a military veteran who sustained severe burns in Afghanistan in 2008 when a bomb blew up in his face. His face has been reconstructed, but the damage is visible. He recently tweeted: “My message is to anyone else who has been put down or called "weird" because of their experiences or who they are... I say to you: do not allow others to define you. I'm proud of my scars.”

In fact to grasp that ‘weird’ is problematic for Democrats we needn’t look any further than their other meme of the moment: brat. The title of Charli XCX’s new album has found its way into the Harris campaign, assisted by a well-timed tweet from Ms XCX herself. Harris’s supporters filter her image in ‘brat green’, a lurid hue designed specifically as a branding device for the album. The campaign’s official twitter feed uses brat green as a header.

Insofar as it means anything specific, ‘brat’ involves an embrace of oddness, idiosyncrasy, a perverse refusal to conform. The designer of the album talks about growing up as a ‘weird, gay kid with no friends’, and wanting his design to capture an off-beam, awkward sensibility. The singer herself has said that brat is ‘that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes…who is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, does dumb things.’

Funnily enough, that sounds much more like Donald Trump than Kamala Harris, which points us to another problem. ‘Brat’ is not just contradictory to the weird line, it’s antithetical to the Democrats’ entire campaign strategy. If swing voters choose Harris it will be because they have come to believe she’s less volatile and does fewer dumb things than her opponent.

I am hoping that this infatuation with Twitter and TikTok memes is just a phase and they’ll get on to debating trade policy soon. But there is a deeper question here. Do the Democrats want to be the party of normality or not? Historically, much of the energy of the left has been derived from its association with outsiders and nonconformists. But the left tends to win elections only when voters regard it as “normal”, mainstream, regular, a bit dull.

In 2018 the novelist Walter Kirn wrote an interesting essay for Harper’s Magazine about the Trump supporters he met while on a roadtrip. Kirn was raised, in the seventies, as a Mormon in the midwest. His community was a conservative one, for the most part. As a teenager he was strongly drawn to the relatively few liberals he met: “Compared with the dry, judgmental people at church who feared a communist plot against America, worshipped the military and law enforcement, and seemed obsessed with hygiene, health, and thrift, the liberals I knew were a refreshing change of pace: open, adventurous, questioning, and fun.”

The liberals said heretical things and made fun of the government. They read strange books and smoked dope. The very best thing about them, the teenage Kirn decided, was that they were “a little weird.” In 2018, he suggests, left and right have swapped places. It is liberals who now assume the position of humourless puritans, who insist on conformity to social rules, who revere the CIA and the FBI. It’s the Trump supporters he meets on the road who are eccentric, unbuttoned, a little mad, and fun to be around. Now, the Trump fans Kirn talked to aren’t necessarily typical of Trump voters, many of whom probably resemble the tight-lipped authority figures in his hometown. But there is undoubtedly an irreverent, anti-establishment spirit to Trump’s brand and support, which thrives on opposition to liberal piety.

So do I think Democrats (and the left generally) should be weird and fun, or normal and dull? Perhaps it’s not a binary choice, but there is a trade-off. Campaigns run on the energy of their most active supporters, but that energy can soon start to seem ‘weird’ to everyone else, especially for left-wing parties. Lean into that energy too much and you lose the confidence of voters in the middle who simply want a president who seems sober and responsible enough to trust with nuclear weapons.

We’re currently in a moment when the Republicans have a lot of weird energy, manifest in their unstable candidate. To win, Harris and the Democrats should provide a contrast. That doesn’t mean shouting ‘weird’, as if weird is a bad thing. It means being grown-ups, not brats. Obama was charismatic, yes, but he also made a huge effort to present himself as a regular midwestern guy. I’m reminded of Gustave Flaubert’s advice to artists (paraphrased): be regular in your life so that you can be radical in your work. Left-wing leaders have to work extra hard at being dull in order to get exciting things done.

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In my book on productive disagreement I have a whole chapter on the importance of being aware of your own weirdness. Check it out - though I say so myself, it’s a great read. More buttons to smash:

After the jump: an explainer on the Olympics women’s boxing controversy, plus: did Trump get hit by a bullet or not?; remarkable data on the virtue of American teenagers; the aesthetics of pylons; the Scottishness of Andy Murray; the real problem with JD Vance, and more…