Republicans ARE Weird and We Should Say So
On who gets to define normal in American politics
When I was a kid, I wore the term weird like a badge of honor, and also like a shield. If I call myself weird, it can’t hurt me when you do it. Looking back, it was a strange word for me to try to own, when I spent most of my time holding my friends up like a measuring stick, hoping to find myself at the mean, median, and mode of their behavior. I wanted just enough quirks to keep them interested, but not so many as to single me out. My friends had crushes on boys, so I had crushes on boys. My friends went to youth group so I went to youth group. My friends did sports, shopped at Limited Too, and read Amelia’s Notebooks - you get the picture.
This is, of course, part of a pretty standard negotiation between differentiation and acceptance that happens in childhood. And in some ways it was really beneficial. I always had this narrative about myself that I was unathletic, but I did a lot of sports in school because my friends did and I think it helped me learn to love moving my body around and to value how it feels for both my body and my brain. But there are also things we internalize as kids about our sexuality and relationships and behaviors, ways of trying to stay within the norm of those around us, that closes off avenues of possibility and exploration. If the negotiation between differentiation and expression is a normal experience of childhood, then so is a fraught relationship with the concepts of ‘normal’ and ‘weird’.
While progressives have been noting the “weirdness” of modern Republican politics for some time, Tim Walz was the one to bring this attack into the mainstream during a MSNBC interview at the end of July. Since then it has been a key feature of the discourse and the discourse about the discourse and the backlash to the discourse. Are Republicans weird? Is it effective to call them weird? Is this mean to people who are actually weird? Will this make people think Democrats are too mean to govern? Are Democrats going too low? Has this ruined politics forever?
It’s no surprise that everyone is having a lot of feelings about this. Whether it’s failed Republican presidential primary candidate Vivek Rameswamy claiming this is hypocritical because Democrats are the party of diversity and inclusion, J.D. Vance accusing Democrats of bullying and name calling because he apparently forgot who his running mate is, or Donald Trump Jr. going for a ‘we’re not weird, you’re weird,’ response, Republicans find themselves flummoxed by finding themselves on the other side of the term.
Modern political discourse has long been characterized by hypocrisy and obliviousness, so none of this should be surprising. But it is somehow still deeply galling that the party whose current figurehead is known for coining derogatory nicknames for literally anyone who disagrees with him is trying to gin up moral outrage at being called weird. But I think what Republicans find most disconcerting is that while they long ago cast themselves as the arbiter of the mainstream of American politics, they now find themselves firmly on the other side of the line. As Jamelle Bouie writes in the New York Times:
“For years, in the American political imagination, Republicans were the normal party and Democrats were the party of weirdness. This was one of the major themes of the 1972 presidential election, when the Republican Party of Richard Nixon framed itself as the party of normalcy and of faith in America as it is….The Democratic Party of George McGovern was, in this narrative, the party of “acid, amnesty and abortion,” the party of chaos, disruption and overreach. Out of touch with the vast American middle, it had cast its lot with cultural elites and antiwar militants.”
Now, I would argue that Republicans of the Nixon and Reagan eras were also pretty weird. How else would you describe secretly taping all of your political opponents, or legislating on the belief that the rising sea of unregulated capitalism would lift all boats instead of swamping all but the largest of them. At no time in American history has deregulation led to widespread economic prosperity but by god they were going to try it anyway.
I would also argue that what they denigrate as the radical left isn’t really that radical at all. They’ve tried to make it a radical position to want to feed children, to make sure people have access to health care and can earn enough money to clothe and feed and house themselves. It’s somehow radical to let grown ass adults decide who to love and who to marry, to let people of all ages make their own decisions about what happens to their bodies, to use the bathroom or get health care from your doctor.
But still, for much of recent American history, Republicans have managed to cast themselves as the ones in touch with middle America. They’ve cast Democrats as coastal elites and as “not real Americans,” as out of touch with real American experiences. But as the box they’ve drawn around the average mainstream American experience gets smaller and smaller, the holes in their argument have become clearer and clearer.
The modern Republican party has made it clear that what they consider normal are a white man and a white woman getting married and having kids. The wife stays home, the husband goes to work, the kids go to school where they learn that the US is the best country ever and has never done anything wrong in its entire history, they read books about white, straight kids whose lives look exactly like theirs, they monitor what bathroom their friends are using, and they make sure everyone else is coloring in between the lines, and that the girls listen when the boys tell them what to do, no matter what they tell them to do. And no one ever sees a tampon.
The people who believe that there is only one right way to exist in the world, that anything they don’t understand is deviant or wrong or immoral, that society is better when some of us are kept small and scared while others grow rich and powerful should not feel as though their views are welcome in the mainstream. Weird is a scary word because they made it so, because they made straying outside their narrow box downright life threatening.
So whether or not it’s the most politically effective communication strategy for the Democratic party (
points out in the Message Box that based on polling it might be “more cathartic than constructive” but is certainly not causing any harm), I think it’s good that we’re calling out this rhetoric and these policies for being beyond the pale. I don’t know that we’re ever going to get around making the distinction between weird and normal. I’m not an anthropologist or a psychologist, but I think this is just something humans do. But if we can draw the axis of weird versus normal between how much your behavior is designed to control people and how much it’s meant to help people, I think that can only be good for us. And if kids can devote less energy to trying to fit inside a white, straight, cis box whether it fits them or not, and devote more energy to exploring their own identities and world around them, that can only be good for us too.(And anyway, I just saw that MAGA folks attending Trump rallies are carrying “JD Vance Sperm Cups” to mock, somehow, Tim Walz and his wife for needing IVF to conceive their children which is OBJECTIVELY WEIRD in addition to being cruel. I honestly don’t know what else you’re supposed to do with that. Have a nice day!)
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Sign up for a phone bank for Pennsylvania! Winning Pennsylvania is crucial to Democrats keeping the White House. In 2020 when we knew the election wasn’t going to be decided on Election Night, I went to bed and didn’t sleep a wink because I was still so nervous. But around six in the morning I got a news alert that said that a new batch of vote by mail ballots came in from Pennsylvania that were really good for Democrats and I knew that we were probably going to win and I just had to be patient.
Let’s make sure I get to breathe that sigh of relief even earlier. Phone bank for me! And for democracy, I guess!
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