The Democrats seem to have settled on a new and sophisticated campaign strategy: calling the Republicans “weird”. Ever since prospective vice president Tim Walz first aired the insult on a TV show a few weeks ago, it has become the party’s unofficial battle-cry. And the strategy seems to be working, with even Trump being lured into disavowing his own weirdness and that of his running mate, J.D. Vance.
Much of the force of the new “weird” insult is directed at Vance but threatens to become contagious. Contrary to popular belief, guilt-by-association is not really a thing: attributions of guilt only make sense in terms of what an individual does, not who he stands next to. In contrast, weirdness-by-association is absolutely real. As every child in the playground instinctively knows, making friends with the weirdo who has just arrived in class can make you vulnerable to unflattering reappraisal.
Not helped by his awkward attempts at a statesmanlike public persona, Vance has been caught out by old comments of his, such as riffing about “childless cat ladies” running the Democrats. What presumably came across to Fox News fans at the time as edgy pugilism now appears to the wider world as an unnecessarily mean and aggressive attempt to sow division. The incident encapsulates the general PR problem of the popular conservative echo chamber, which for years has gloried in transgressive puerility and irony-soaked radical-posturing as a counter to the po-faced pieties of the Left — but now looks psychopathic to those normies not in on the “joke”.
Indeed, a true irony of the current situation is that the coarsening of discourse allowed by Trump and the online Right is arguably what has allowed Walz and co. to lean so heavily into cheap insults and get away with it. Even so, the sight of leading progressives enthusiastically bandying around jibes like “weird” and “creepy” is still somewhat disorienting. The robust language has a transgressive ring of danger about it, compared with the past oversensitive decade strewn with dog whistles and fig leaves everywhere they looked.
In fact, it must be highly galling for those who have built careers policing language, condemning “othering”, and deconstructing the concept of normality in the name of progress, to see their party of choice revalidating mainstream instincts and the scapegoating of social outliers in such a big way. It’s also a blow to anyone with remaining fantasies of a new enlightened political discourse on the Left: “weird” is more an instinctive expression of distaste than a rational analysis, which is partly why it works so well. Judgements of what is weird and creepy come from the gut not the brains.
A lot of scrambling is now taking place in internet circles, trying to convince the general public that the Democrats are the real weirdos. The X account Libs of Tiktok, for instance, has pronounced of Walz’s time as Governor of Minnesota: “This is the guy who signed laws requiring tampons in boys bathrooms, allows kids to get their body parts chopped off, and wants p**n in schools.” Conservative activist Christopher Rufo elaborated further: “He’s hip to ‘Gender Queer’. He loves non-binary children. He knows that graphic depictions of vibrators, blowjobs, and strap-on dildos belong in every classroom.”
These strategies might play well to the like-minded, but in terms of convincing neutral onlookers that Republicans are not weird — which surely should be the goal — they look monumentally self-defeating. Far too much backstory is required to explain the provenance of the supposed gotchas to the casual observer, and without it the accusations look paranoid and prurient, only proving the initial point.
And whatever the results of Walz’s liberalised policies in practice, nobody who wasn’t already viciously opposed to him could think it was a fair description of his mindset that he positively “wants” porn in schools, or intentionally aims to get pictures of vibrators “in every classroom”. Rather, insofar as the man thinks about sexually explicit books in school libraries at all, he presumably frames them as equipping young minds with tools to reduce shame and help them deal with a complicated modern world. It may be a lazy and wrongheaded take, but it scarcely makes him a modern day Marquis de Sade.
This overreach on the part of his critics smacks of desperation, and is part of what generates an impression of loss of perspective amongst those doing it. It’s a fair criticism of the Left that they often only see the world they would like, and do not notice the one we actually have. But equally, those conservatives caught up in exaggerated, febrile visions of a progressive-ruled world seem unable to notice salient aspects of reality too. Things may be bad in lots of ways but they are not as bad as some apparently would wish, for the purposes of self-vindication if nothing else.
And it is not just US Right-wing commentators who suffer from this affliction. Their British counterparts are also having a moment in response to the riots of the past days, with reactions that look increasingly bizarre to those who don’t already agree with them on the basics. Here too we find an online commentariat whose dystopian prognostications and telling ellipses seem to reveal more about their own psyches than about the riots. Given the originating subject matter, there are fewer hints of suppressed sexual excitement in this case — but then again, arousal comes in many forms.
For instance, one day after rioters tried to burn down a hotel full of asylum seekers, leaving the shell covered in explicitly racist slogans, academic Matthew Goodwin published a blog implying that the Labour Party wanted you “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears”, Orwell-style; yet he himself had no mention of this specific incident as he railed against comparatively more peaceful pro-Palestinian marches as evidence of supposedly two-tier policing. (In a previous blog, for what it’s worth, he conceded that “violence against police is never justified”.)
Bundling the Southport crime, committed by a British-born citizen for as yet unknown motives, together with past grooming gang scandals and the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, he accused Labour of “doing all they can to distract us from asking for the real reasons why our children have been blown up at pop concerts, murdered at dance classes, and subjected to industrial-scale, anti-White rape across dozens of English towns” — though fastidiously avoided spelling out the “real reasons” himself. Meanwhile over on X, Laurence Fox has been continuing his public nervous breakdown by writing cringeworthy free verse about the “Sun god cult”, and Kellie Jay-Keen (aka Posie Parker) has implied that the British public has only two real choices — the National Front or the Paedophile Information Exchange. As Donald Trump said on a different occasion, they aren’t sending their best.
Nonetheless, it remains reasonable for people on both Left and Right to complain about the way mass immigration is habitually managed in this country, and nor is it to say that all protestors are unreasonable rioters. They are correct to point out that the Establishment too often designates such complaints as “far-Right”, and that some institutions, including judicial ones, are making what look like unacceptably unfair decisions based on ethnic factors. Yet when even Tommy Robinson is attempting to distance himself from the excesses of “lads in balaclavas wearing black”, talking heads who continue to sentimentalise or excuse the worst culprits over the past few days most definitely have a PR problem. Attempting to cast opportunistic recreational violence by bored dickheads as some kind of noble quest on behalf of the working classes only seems plausible if you are already desperate for it to be true.
And here too, as in the case of US commentators, the fact that most people don’t keep up with the intricacies of online political wars, and don’t have time to read endless Substacks, means they have no real idea what or who you are railing against as you churn out your hot takes. You may imagine you are bravely fighting dragons in public to widespread applause, but all they can see is you wrestling with your own shadow — and you look really weird doing it.
A quicker way of saying all this is that keyboard warriors coyly hinting at ethnonationalist sympathies still look like unsavoury losers to most UK onlookers — and thank God for that. Perhaps the figures involved don’t care — after all, as one points out, they can make a lot of money out of it — but more mainstream politicians on the Right probably should. Whatever the motives, their associates are a reputational liability. The impression they leave for neutrals of embarrassing, unpleasant weirdness is likely to be contagious, unless distancing measures are swiftly brought in.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/