Why It Works to Call Them Weird
Shifting political talk from policy to values
The Democrats’ pivot to “You people are weird” as their primary electoral rhetoric strategy has been both swift and, at least in early signs, effective. It’s getting attention, provoking whining from the Trumpist right, and energizing memeing from the online Zoomers who’d been discouraged by a politics of old men calling each other threats to freedom and democracy.
This isn’t to say that the Trumpist right—and its neo-reactionary friends among conservative intellectual classes and reactionary tech titans—isn’t a grave threat to freedom and democracy. It very clearly is, with the movement having plenty of fascist or proto-fascist parallels. But calling them weird has found broader purchase in a way that pointing out those other features hasn’t.
There are two reasons for this, both tied to the shift in the nature of our national political conversations in the years since Trumpism vanquished any lingering Reaganism. First, the culture war came to supplant policy disagreement as the primary concern in political debate. Second, structural features of both America’s two-party system and the technology platforms that have been primary mediums of political talk have emphacized a particularly creepy sort of right-wingness. (The word of the moment is “weird,” but “creepy” is probably more accurate in describing what it is about the contemporary right so many of us react viscerally against.)
A Conflict of Values
Politics, for most, has long been at least as much about values as policy. It’s not just “what bills will this guy try to pass?” but also, “which candidate would I rather have a beer with?” It’s attractive versus unattractive personalities, because we’re social and emotional creatures, and not pure utilitarian calculators of policy impact.
But prior to roughly the rise of Trump, there were filters in place that meant much of the way politics was presented in the media environment, and much of the way political figures presented themselves, was policy focused, because the weird fringes got filtered out. Yes, the right had its John Birch type nuts, and yes the left had its creepy tankies, but you didn’t see them all the time, because the people who made it onto TV had been selected for by the still-powerful media gatekeepers. Those media gatekeepers both selected for the relatively normal and had a preference for policy talk—and the horse race politics they tied into policy talk.
George W. Bush did lots of bad things, and he had trouble speaking clearly, but he seemed relatively mainstream. His values were, to borrow a phrase from the late P. J. O’Rourke, wrong within normal parameters. Trump’s values are, let’s just say, not. When politics talk was mostly policy, though, and when the people the media showed us talking about policy had positions not too far removed from the Overton Window, creepy values were kept more on the down low, and the people who couldn’t keep them on the down low didn’t get as much attention in the media landscape, except as fringe curiosities like David Duke.
What changed, in the run-up to Trump and certainly during and after his administration, is that policy talk lost its primacy in favor of cultural talk. The culture war devoured everything. The difference between a progressive and a conservative became less about tax preferences or affinity for free enterprise, and more about whether you think trans people should be able to show their faces in public, or whether you see taco trucks as a sign of civilizational progress or civilizational decline.
The effect of this was to move values into the spotlight. The culture war just is a competition between which cultural values will dominate social life. And the cultural values of the far-right are, well, creepy. They’re off-putting. The most committed right-wing culture warrior is not someone many of us would want to have a beer with. Elon Musk, JD Vance, Curtis Yarvin, Chaya Raichik, Kevin Roberts, and their like are profoundly unadmirable. Most Americans get that. They don’t want to be around people of that sort, nor do they want their children to grow up to be people of that sort. There’s something they find troubling about their behavior, beliefs, and values that goes well beyond the particulars of their policy preferences. They’re creepy.
Structural Distortions
But that doesn’t answer the question of what changed. There have always been the value fringes, and they’ve always been making creepy arguments for why they ought to rule and what they’d do if they get to. They wanted culture war talk to replace policy talk, too. Yet it wasn’t until relatively recently that the shift actually took place. Why?
The answer begins with the rise of the internet, and particularly social media, though it started with blogging. These new technologies enabled anyone to reach basically everyone, and at close to no cost. Yes, the John Birch Society could print pamphlets, but putting a pamphlet in every Americans’ hand is cost prohibitive. Putting a blog post in every Americans’ browser isn’t. And being able to do so also routes around those elite media filters keeping the weird values on the edges. This new media and communication landscape enabled not just the rise of Very Online politics, but gave them a way to reach mass audiences.
Take the neoreactionary philosophy that is so influential on JD Vance because it was influential among a certain hard-right portion of the venture capitalists who funded his career. This stuff isn’t just evil in its aims and worldview, it’s also quite stupid. (For a deep—but, I promise, very fun—dive into neoreactionary philosophy, and one that makes clear not only how dangerous these ideas are, but also how amateurish is the philosophy and self-anointed philosophers behind it, I cannot recommend Elizabeth Sandifer’s Neoreaction a Basilisk highly enough.) Neoreaction is a movement built upon arguments that, prior to blogging, wouldn’t have lasted much beyond the freshman dorm room door, but in the age of the internet, their unsophisticated thinkers have somehow managed to convince a critical mass of equally unsophisticated thinkers of their genius.
Because these unsophisticated thinkers were networked online, and had platforms that could reach anyone who found a link to them, and because of the way social media tricks us into thinking fringe ideas are more widely held than they in fact are, a movement like neoreaction, which is just an intellectualized veneer on the same old right-wing culture warring, could come to appear influential. It could come to seem like an exciting new philosophy pointing a way forward instead of warmed over and backwards reactionary arguments that have either failed to stand up to philosophical scrutiny, or led to catastrophic political authoritarianism and violence, every time they’ve surfaced in the past.
Aaron Ross Powell
Then came Trump. Now, Trump is not a neoreactionary—or any other sort of philosophy, for that matter. He doesn’t really have or process ideas. Rather, he’s just pure and mindless self-centeredness, a creature of id and grievance and desire for power. But he also, unlike the GOP’s leaders in the decades before him, doesn’t have any problem with centering those fringes. The most morally corrupt members of the right were also the ones most likely to flatter him, and most likely to champion him as a means to fulfill their own desire for power. Any recent Republican presidential nominee would’ve seen immediately how disastrous a VP pick JD Vance would be, precisely because his entire public persona is the Very Online right-wingness most Americans can’t stand.
Now for the second structural feature that matters in this story. America’s is a two party system, and more or less has to be because of the way we structure voting and elections. What this means is that one half of mainstream politics just is whatever the GOP is. When Trump took over the party—to such a thorough degree that he simply is the party—the Very Online right became the American right. And so they became impossible to ignore.
The Rhetoric of Weird
The reason “weird” works is because it recognizes this shift, and recognizes that, while the Very Online right is popular in certain corners of the internet, it’s still the same creepy and dangerous ideas that failed when David Duke and Pat Buchanan tried them. And “weird” is working now, as strategic rhetoric, because policy talk obfuscated just how out there and repulsive are the values behind it, while “weird” highlights, in a way most immediately relevant to voters, the kind of people who promote them.
You can critique a philosophy by showing how its arguments don’t work, and that’s important. We shouldn’t accept arguments that don’t work. But you can also critique it by looking at the motivations behind those arguments. And while that can’t prove the argument wrong, it can give reason for greater skepticism about its rightness. “Weird” is working because it shifts the conversation to the question of “What kind of people do you want holding power over you?” And for plenty of Americans, the answer is, “Not those guys.”