Weird: A Sympathetic Reappraisal
These people are weird because they think they're normal and that everyone should be like them, despite being totally weird. *That* is weird.
The political word of the month, as I think everyone knows, is “weird.”
Finally, after eight years of failing to convince middle America that Donald Trump is a malevolent, lying autocrat, someone (in particular, Governor Tim Walz) has found an effective way to deflate him. Call him a weirdo.
Understandably, there’s been a bit of a backlash against this tactic in the weirdo community. We like being weird, we don’t like being stigmatized, and we definitely don’t like being associated with Donald Trump and JD Vance.
So, as a charter member of said community, I propose a critical, but ultimately sympathetic, reappraisal of the term. Because it fits, it works, and it says something useful about big, important things.
1.
After years of resisting it, I embraced my inner weirdness many years ago. To me, “weird” is a compliment. It connotes quirkiness and difference; it is the opposite of being basic, bland, conformist, and boring. Most of my friends, really almost all of them, are weird in some way.
Even this newsletter, insofar as it includes both guided meditations and political analyses, is a little weird. So is my whole career, blending journalism, spirituality, academics, psychedelics, meditation, poetry, and whatever else I’m forgetting right now. I am serious about three religio-spiritual identities, I have unusual musical tastes that trend toward the marginal, I have lived a rich and full queer life (but am now a parent), I’ve gone on months-long silent meditation retreats, I’ve danced around the maypole many times, and I’m a little weird personally, as an intelligent introvert with mild social anxiety.
I’m into all this; it’s me, it’s always been me (even as a young child), and I’m fine with it. More than fine with it, actually – I kind of love it, and love meeting other weirdos, even (especially?) when their quirks don’t quite line up with my own. We are the creatives, the innovators. We travel with “multiple passports,” in the words of queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid. It’s not all wine and roses; social interactions can be challenging, as can holding certain kinds of jobs. But I’ve found my lane(s) and I embrace weirdness fully.
I also love the origin of the word, which dates back to the Germanic/Old English word wyrd, referring the magical, perhaps divine, power to alter one’s destiny. It referred to the Fates, like the “Weird Sisters” in Macbeth, and from there to witches, the ‘otherworldly,’ and David Bowie. The original meaning still resonates today: societal expectations can put us into specific tracks, but the weird diverge, and carve out their own destinies. As the Urban Dictionary puts it, a weird person “someone who is too real for reality and doesn't give a crap about what other people think.” Yes, please.
Now, just because I like the word “weird” doesn’t mean it’s not problematic. Obviously, “weird” is often used as a slur, and often against neurodiverse people. When I look back on my childhood, it seems likely that a lot of kids we called weirdos were on the spectrum in ways that weren’t diagnosed yet, or were just different mentally or physically in ways that, in the bad old days, we made fun of. That sucks, I was guilty of it, and it’s not okay in any way. I don’t want to minimize the way the term ‘weird’ can be stigmatizing or ableist, and, in playfully exploring how it’s being used against Trump, Vance, et al, I’m aware that this use can perpetuate that stigma.
Which is part of how I intend to rescue it.
2.
There is a crucial distinction between the Right’s weirdness and mine: they don’t admit it. On the contrary, they insist that they are normal, and represent everything good, wholesome, and American. They hate weirdness, completely oblivious to how weird they actually are. There is only one good way to have a family. There is only one kind of American – or, as Vance put it in his RNC speech, there’s only one primary kind of American, with everyone else here (including his wife) being a kind of newcomer. And it’s perfectly fine, in this view, to use the power of the state to enforce the way things ought to be.
And the rest of us? Well, we’re “childless cat ladies” or people who “hate America.”
This is the antithesis of self-accepting, self-aware weirdness, which is necessarily pluralistic. Sure, as a fan of weird 1970s kosmische music, I may think my taste is pretty cool. But if you’re nerdy and weird about 1990s-era country-rock, well, Goddess bless! Letting your own freak flag fly necessitates the acceptance that everyone’s flag is a little different.
Not so with these weird conservatives. Their particular set of religious beliefs – which, by any objective measure, are quite weird – are supposedly objectively true for everyone on the planet. Their narrow conceptions of the good life are similar. This is anti-weirdness.
And it leads to oppression. JD Vance says that having children is the only way to be happy – and so he works to take away reproductive rights, to stigmatize people who make different life choices from his own, and to propose absurd ideas like giving parents extra voting power. The hetero-normie breeder lifestyle may not be for me, but I’m not going to try to legislate it out of existence. Yet Vance insists that progressives must be miserable because we don’t like or believe the same things he does — and he tries to force us to be like him.
3.
But let’s be clear: these people are really fucking weird. MTG is still at it with the Jewish space lasers, Vance (whose very weird ideas I explored here two weeks ago) just endorsed a book by the Pizzagate conspiracy theory guy (which, among other things, says that progressives are literally not human beings), half of the party is in deep denial of Covid science, climate science, evolutionary science, and any other science that runs afoul of their religious or hedonistic preferences.
Meanwhile, MAGA cult members are flying all kinds of weird flags (including the American one upside down), holding clearly counterfactual beliefs about the 2020 election, and inventing a whole new aesthetic of white American weirdness that makes NASCAR look like a sushi bar. They say outrageous, incendiary, preposterous things about “the world liberals want” while we scratch our heads and make fun of their clothes. Really – just turn on Jesse Watters at any moment and listen to him describe progressives and liberals, with our wokeness and gender ideology and hatred of America. If you know even a single progressive person, you know this is bizarre. Let alone Tucker Carlson, with his testicle tanning and adoration-tour of a Moscow grocery. These people are really weird, or at least pandering to weirdos.
And yet they insist that they’re the normal ones.
And then, of course, there’s Trump. Trump’s weirdness may now be a sign of advancing dementia, which is no laughing matter and which I won’t focus on here. But he was weird even years ago, when he (like now) bragged about having the biggest crowds at his rallies, the biggest fortune, the biggest ties, even the biggest penis at the 2016 presidential primary debate. Then and now, his rambling remarks are incoherent and incomprehensible (praising Hannibal Lecter at the RNC?). His apocalyptic rhetoric about the end of America is a far cry from Ronald Reagan’s sunny patriotism and more suited to incel boards on 8chan. His hair is weird, his tanning cream is weird, his ill-fitting suits are weird. He cheats at golf. He stole classified files and put them in his bathroom. He has fake “Man of the Year” magazine covers framed in his homes. This is all extremely weird!
No one knows this more than conservatives. I know several, in my family and with whom I work at CNN. They cannot believe what’s happened to their party: the weirdest, wildest fringe of the movement is now running the whole operation and cancelling anyone who protests. I sympathize with their pain; after all, these are the people who, unlike me, really loved normal America, with the Little League and apple pie. They never imagined those patriotic symbols would be distorted into a weird, dystopian hellscape.
4.
In other words, what’s weird about MAGA Weird is that it insists it isn’t weird and seeks to impose its vision of normalcy onto everyone else – and yet it is really fucking weird. It’s like a David Lynch caricature of America, all the horror of mass deportations and The Handmaid’s Tale under a field of gigantic American flags. It has as much in common with normal American decency as steak tartare has with a hamburger.
And here’s the thing. Since the bully is, at heart, an insecure and wounded boy, what really works against him isn’t calling him out as a bully – he loves that, it gives him power – but calling him out as a weirdo. This, I think, is part of why Donald Trump has been so disoriented for the last few weeks. Standing next to Joe Biden in June, he looked almost normal. But now, next to Harris and Walz, he and his running mate look like freaks. He’s entered, as
put it, quoting Thom Hartmann, the “Fat Elvis” phase of his career, replaying pathetic versions of his old hits (Kamala Harris isn’t really black, Barack Obama isn’t really American) to die-hard fans. Suddenly, it seems, the mask is off.And they can’t seem to help themselves. Elon Musk just can’t shut up. Neither can JD Vance. Laura Loomer and Dinesh D’Souza just amplified the literally insane conspiracy theory that Kamala Harris’s crowds were generated by AI, even though they were captured on video from multiple angles by multiple news organizations, including conservative ones. At a certain point, we may have to stop using ‘weird’ because these people are showing actual signs of acute mental illness. They may become so weird that we can’t call them weird anymore.
But I’m going to for now.
Thanks for allowing me to share some weirdness with you, hopefully in a non-weird, that is, consensual and boundary-appropriate, way.
I’ve been back on my Antisemitism Industry beat, first breathing a sigh of relief that we won’t have to endure months (years?) of right-wing antisemitism against Josh Shapiro, then clapping back at right-wing accusations that it was antisemitic not to pick him. The first piece was referenced by the New York Times and (negatively) by Alan Dershowitz on his podcast. Achievements unlocked?
On another and weirder note, I posted an excerpt from a short story of mine, The Enlightenment of Rabbi Yosef of Chernobyl, on Instagram: it’s a heretical sermon given on the Jewish holiday of Tisha B'Av, which is today.
Some great Substack pieces this week:
The invaluable
on how much chicanery Elon Musk is engaged in to help Donald Trump win the election, and on Musk getting high on his own supply (of internet insanity). Also, talks about Musk’s scammy plan to harvest voter data .Two
pieces, one on Trump’s dementia, the other about what MAGA supporters get right about the system being rigged.
I love August, maybe my favorite month, though I’m already a little tinged with melancholy that summer is waning. I’ll be on vacation next week but will post from sunny Fire Island during the DNC. I’m the worst Buddhist ever!
This message came to me just in time. I had been feeling less positive about being weird. I am a Democrat in a very red part of Tennessee. That's weird enough, but sometimes I'm weirder even than the other Democrats, and I feel as if I'm the only person like me in the world sometimes. Which is obviously true of everybody!
I think children until about the age of 12 are more accepting of the fact that everybody is weird. It's when you get to be about 12 or 13 that it starts to be important to be "normal." People reject their Weird Inner Child Artist and become normie bullies.
Erich Fromm wrote that the most important guiding value for our lives should be: human solidarity. But how can we have this kind of human solidarity with people who think we are too weird to be even human? (Yes, that book "Unhuman" is really scary.) How long should you be loyal to the humanity of people who hate you? They're human; the most important value is human solidarity; but they definitely don't agree with you on that. Their most important value is: we're right, we're normal, you're wrong, and so we deserve all the power and all the space in the world.
I think it's naive of Democrats, liberals, and Buddhists to try to keep being Braver Angels in the face of this; to keep trying to "see the humanity" of the haters. We are the only ones doing this. What did the Ukrainians do when the Russians launched an unprovoked attack on their democracy? They just fought back. No regrets, no second guessing themselves. They just did it. That's what we have to do. We just have to do it somehow while retaining our belief in human solidarity, and the sacred value of the Weird. It's going to be hard to remain ethical while fighting this war. Sometimes I just want to run away to some place where the war doesn't exist, like another country, or a place so small and quiet that it's off the radar screen of the gun nuts.
My greatest fear is that it turns into an actual shooting war, not like the last Civil War, but more like Northern Ireland in the 1970s. But until then, it's a kind of cold war for hearts and minds.
Great piece, Jay! I'm with you in weirdness, but of course the guys Walz has tagged are weird as in dangerous. And the label is effective for many reasons.
I'm thinking you might really enjoy the piece that the connoisseur of weird, Erik Davis, put out on Substack today. He, too, has to give up the word -- for a while at least -- and as the author of the excellent book High Weirdness, he's got something at stake.
https://www.burningshore.com/p/political-weird