When the Weirdos Take Over
The promise and peril of making the election a contest over what and who is normal
The presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, inspired by an offhand comment from Minnesota Gov. (and Harris running-mate finalist) Tim Walz, has decided the right approach to take against its Republican opponents is to call them “weird.”
Will it work? Hell if I know.
What I do know, from observing Twitter/X over the past week, is that the very-online center-left gets a kick out of pointing to statements from Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance and labeling them weird. I also know that many Democrats are tired, after multiple election cycles, of insisting that Trump constitutes an existential threat to “democracy.” Many of them believe it’s true. But many others on their own side show by their actions (like, for example, boosting Trumpy primary candidates in the hope that they’ll be easier to beat in general-election contests) that they don’t take the warnings very seriously, but rather deploy them to gain an electoral advantage.
Rather than pointing and screaming about the civic horrors the MAGA movement supposedly aims to perpetrate, maybe it makes more sense to mock it, laugh at it, and point to its ridiculousness.
Then there’s the argument Matthew Yglesias made in his Monday Substack post about how taking aim at the weirdness of the Trump/Vance ticket puts the Democrats in the position (by way of contrast) of implicitly endorsing normalcy. He thinks that’s a good thing because it will move the party closer to the moderate middle on both policy and tactics. That’s something I can get behind, too.
Though Yglesias’ way of talking about the “weird” approach to campaign messaging also gestures toward what I find unfortunate about this way of talking about and criticizing the populist right.
The Downside of “Weird”
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