Number 26
One thing that has gone almost unnoticed amid all the talk of how “weird” the right wing/MAGA/GOP set are, is how ironic it is for them to even be called that. Where does this irony “reside”? Well, first we’ll tell you where it doesn’t reside: It doesn’t reside in the fact that the people calling those weirdos “weird” are in fact the real weirdos. Because they’re not. No, it resides, in lavish comfort, in the fact that the ones being called “weird” have spent the last sixty years telling themselves, and us, that they—and no one else—are “normal.”
As we said: This has gone almost unnoticed. One person who has noticed it, though, is the excellent Thomas Zimmer, a history professor at Georgetown University. Zimmer has the annoying habit of being from Germany but writing, in English, better than most Americans. But never mind that. In his newsletter Democracy Americana, he regularly observes, analyzes, and comments on our political scene. On August 13, in a long and fascinating discussion of who, in America, gets to call whom “weird” and who can claim to be “normal,” he cites Richard Nixon’s use of the term “silent majority” as being the genesis of the Republican Party’s effort to define its members as being virtuous and to stigmatize and other-ize everyone else.
What are the characteristics of the normies in the Republican world view? As if you didn’t know. Yes, the usual. White. Christian. Straight. And, when it comes down to it, male. Everyone else (and thatsa lotta people!) is a deviation from the proper, the legitimate, the correct.
And, per Zimmer, White Christian men aren’t the only ones who feel that way:
The mainstream political discourse – and far too many Democrats as well…has accepted and perpetuated this assertion of a white conservative Christian norm that is supposedly shared by the majority of Americans for far too long. It manifests, for instance, in the pervasive “heartland” idea, which isn’t a place as much as it is a heavily ideological concept implying a status of belonging in “real America” for some people in certain regions, but not for others. This ideology of “real Americanism” is also apparent in the way white Christian conservatives are coded as “regular folks.” A silent “white” is regularly accepted as the norm that defines the nation.
Now, when Tim Walz described Trump, Vance, and the other Republican plug-uglies as “weird,” we weren’t particularly electrified. (For years we’d been referring to Republicans, as a group and in specific instances, with a delightful variety of more colorful, sophisticated, and damning names, including “fuckhead,” “asshole,” “dickwad,” “shit-for-brains,” and the surprisingly-satisfying “numbnuts.”) But many people responded to “weird” with a burst of delight. It landed in the midst of the political conversation as not so much a grenade as a water balloon. It managed to diss and dismiss what Zimmer might call “the Trumpian project” with a one-syllable put-down that even schoolchildren understand and can use without getting into trouble.
Moreover—and this may be the first time, in 26 installments of this newsletter, that we’ve used the word “moreover”—it brought with it some (probably unintended) nuance. Unlike, say, “racist” or “homophobic” or “anti-Semitic,” “weird” is not a precise term. As we’ve been pontificating in the comment sections of several other blogs and newsletters (not that there are any), it’s an aesthetic term. As such, we react to it, at least in part, in our subconscious. Everyone sort-of knows what it means, but probably no two people would agree on exactly what it means. So everyone reacts to, e.g., JD Vance’s weirdness, in a different, entirely personal way. Which is as it should be.
All this highlights how Democrats and Republicans have been playing two different games deceptively conflated as “politics.” Dems have been pursuing what we might call “capitalism politics”—you create a product, you offer it to the customer, and hope the customer buys it with his/her vote. Of course, the Dems’ famous problem is that they have a lot of different customers with different items on their must-have lists.
Republicans, in contrast, have been pursuing identitarian politics: They offer nothing to the voter except tribal membership. Their appeal to the voter is via flattery and scare-mongering. “We ‘get’ you. You’re one of us. Everyone else is our enemy.”
The masters of the GOP, who care only about money and power, seek to appeal to the rank and file by claiming they’re “the real Americans.” Everything liberals do is illegitimate, if not treacherous. That’s why “we” have to “take our country back.” And if that means rejecting majoritarian rule and imposing a far-right authoritarian state—well, how can it be otherwise? Our country is overrun! You’re being replaced!
The use and effectiveness of “weird,” therefore, represents a rare example of Democrats giving Republicans a taste of their own medicine. “You want tribalism?” it implies. “Okay, fine. Your tribe is weird. We’re the normal ones.”
Which brings us, as all things do, to the Road to Splitsville. All roads lead to the Road, as it were.
Suppose all your life you’ve heard, and believed, that you, your family, and your friends are the real Americans. Liberals, Democrats, people of color, non-Christians, gays—they’re deviates. Everybody in your world—Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, hate radio, Elon Musk—affirms this. Your hero, Donald Trump, had his head literally blown off by an assassin’s bazooka, but then miraculously re-attached by a surgeon guided by an angel (or maybe there wasn’t even a surgeon involved), as proof of it.
Now suppose the Democrats win both houses of Congress and the presidency. The entire national government is illegitimate. You have to wake up with it, every morning, and pay taxes to it. Oh, sure, the Supreme Court is dependably reactionary and bribe-able. But it’s not enough. Meanwhile, a Black woman is President. Her husband is Jewish. Somewhere, some first-grade kid is getting a free breakfast at school—and you have to live with that fact.
Or do you?
Given that nightmare—and probably also given that Trump, sometime between Election Day and Inauguration Day, will have devolved into a stumbling, quivering mass of protoplasm nattering on to crowds of a dozen at VFW-hall “rallies” about “the Democrat hoax,” “my friends in Venezuela,” and how “sharks use windmills to kill our beautiful birds, a lot of people don’t know that,” and will be unable to lead a revolution to restore his rule—why wouldn’t you urge your red-state legislatures to leave the wicked, illegitimate USA and start a new, really real America?
Weird!
Brilliance.