The How and Why of "Weird"

In July Joe Biden announced his decision to step aside and endorse Kamala Harris for the presidency. Given that the announcement came so close to the start of the Democratic National Convention in August, Harris had roughly two weeks to decide on a running mate. According to an NBC News' insider account of the Harris campaign, 

"Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was a dark horse from the start, left off early lists of potential running mates. But no one used the 16 days since President Joe Biden stepped aside more effectively than Walz, who charmed Harris and national Democrats alike with a Diet Mountain Dew-fueled media tour that labeled the opposition as 'weird' and won him a spot in history."

Labeling former President Trump, GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, and MAGA doctrine in general as "weird" represents a rare instance--since 2015 at least--when Democratic messaging has actually put the Republicans on the defensive. The Associated Press looked to George Washington University professor of strategic communications David Karpf for some insight. He said that labeling Republican comments as "weird" is "the sort of concise take that resonates quickly with Harris supporters." Equally important, according to Karpf, is that the "weird" label "frustrates opponents, leading them to further amplify it through off-balance responses."

The archetype of the kind of "weird" position/rhetoric that Walz and other Dems have in mind is this verbal diarrhea by J.D. Vance from his 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson:

"We're effectively run in this country--via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs--by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too . . . It's just a basic fact -- you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC -- the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children . . . And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it?" 

Vance made those statements while running for the US Senate in Ohio. We know that hack politicians will say anything in the heat of a competitive race. Still, it is somewhat shocking that a published author with a law degree can so easily confuse his opinion with "basic fact." Imagine if I said, "it's just a basic fact--J.D. Vance is a moron." That millions of people agree with the statement does not make it a "fact." 

When called out, Vance doubles down and claims that he is not criticizing childless people, but rather the Democratic Party for being "anti-family and anti-child." Sure. 

Weirdness, of course, is largely subjective: one person's "weird" posture is another's "principled stance."  The problem in the Trump-dominated GOP is that the MAGA worldview--which features an unhealthy mix of QAnon conspiracy theories and Trump's unhinged rants-- is objectively weird. At some level Mr. Trump knows this to be true; why else would he so quickly distance himself from Project 2025, a far right-wing wish list of reactionary ideas about which "weird" is probably the kindest thing that could be said? 

How did the GOP get this "weird?"  And why does the "weird" label have so much rhetorical force for Democrats? 

To explain how the MAGA era GOP got weird, let's first take a step back and think of our family lives. Suppose you're at a family barbecue and uncle J.D. shows up. Uncle J.D. is a midlevel manager at a midsized corporation who was recently passed over for a promotion; they gave the job to a single, childless woman. While everyone's enjoying burgers and hot dogs, uncle J.D. goes off on a rant about the childless cat ladies who run his corporation who passed him up because they wanted "one of their own" in the position. You know, "the ones who are miserable at their own lives and so they want to make everyone else miserable too." 

Even though it usually ends up ruining the party atmosphere, in that situation you would probably get at least a few family members who would probe uncle J.D. for more information and/or pushback against his hostility: "how do you know that's why you didn't get the promotion?" "Why are women without kids miserable?" "I don't have any kids and I'm doing just fine," etc. etc. etc. Maybe after a few drinks, the usually quiet uncle Tony tells uncle J.D. to do everyone a favor and "shut the fuck up." 

What has happened in the MAGA GOP is that it exists in a media environment in which uncle J.D. gets no pushback. "Weird" statements get responded to with either approval and/or even more extreme weirdness. The late Rush Limbaugh's radio program for decades mastered the art of having an authoritative sounding figure (i.e. Rush) make a series of weird claims with full knowledge that the callers' initial responses would be "ditto." Rush was the first nationally known media personality to thrive in the post-Fairness Doctrine era, in which one-sided political programming with zero pushback became the norm. 

If you look at the actual interview in which Vance made the "childless cat ladies" statement, it was a classic example of what I'm talking about. As Vance uttered a stream of inanities, Tucker Carlson sat there with his typical dumbfounded expression (what the Daily Show's Michael Kosta once described as "looking like Frankenstein walked in on his parents having sex."). No pushback. No counterpoint. No prodding for evidence. And of course absolutely no attempt to interview one of the targets of Vance's creepy ire. 

If you would like a more academic explanation of how our public discourse became so harebrained, philosopher C. Thi Nguyen's "Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles" (2018) is worth your time. Inspired by a number of authors including legal scholar Cass Sunstein (who coined the expression "echo chamber") and activist Eli Pariser (who wrote an important book on "filter bubbles"), he writes: 

An epistemic bubble is a social epistemic structure in which other relevant voices have been left out, perhaps accidentally. An echo chamber is a social epistemic structure from which other relevant voices have been actively excluded and discredited. Members of epistemic bubbles lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. 

With the MAGA movement we have what is probably the most toxic mix of an epistemic bubble and echo chamber in the digital age. When a movement refuses to hear relevant voices while actively undermining others, the discourse that results cannot be anything other than confrontational, aggressive, and self-righteous. Governor Walz's characterization of MAGA leaders and discourse as "weird," while clearly a political attack, is actually quite mild compared to the vicious vitriol that is more typical of contemporary political language. 

Why have Walz and the Dems gotten so much mileage so far out of labeling MAGA "weird?"  I think John McWorther's New York Times opinion piece on "The Hidden Grammatical Reason That 'Weird' Works" (behind a paywall) provides some useful insights. He argues that "Applying 'weird' to MAGA is a great debate team tactic, a deceptively complex rhetorical trick that uses the simplest of language to make a sophisticated point: that the beliefs that MAGA is supposed to be getting us back to defy expectation, usually for the simple reason that they’re false." For example, "The idea that a single woman without children is less qualified to lead is jarring even amid the trash talk flying throughout our political landscape."

McWorther is a Columbia University linguist and political conservative who regularly chides the political left for its abuse of language and woke excesses. But he's equally appalled at what MAGA has done to the political right, and sees the application of "weird" to it as a winning political strategy: 

"Weird" pegs MAGA as a detour, a regrettable temptation that  serious politics ought to render obsolete. Calling it "weird" is deft, articulate, and possibly prophetic. . . It's also an example of the power of language, in particular a kind of grammar that too few people are taught. Wouldn't more kids take interest in the subject if they knew they could use it to shut down a bully.

I would go further and say that part of the appeal of "weird" is that it protects listeners from having to confront blunt, harsh statements about reality and instead gives them a comforting euphemism. What I mean is that since 2015 Democrats have been hurling labels like "fascist," "authoritarian," "misogynist" and "deplorable" at almost everything that comes out of the mouths and social media posts of Trump and his enablers. Much to the chagrin of Dems and other anti-Trump activists, those labels tend to repulse the average American, or make us feel like we could somehow be stupid or irresponsible enough to elect a dictator. 

Hurling the term "weird" at MAGA allows us to express disagreement with the basic tenets of the movement without implying that its followers are fundamentally evil, anti-American, or desirous of ending democracy. As the late scholar Kenneth Burke might have put it, "weird" is a comic frame that portrays opponents as mistaken, whereas "fascist" is a tragic frame that portrays opponents as debased and rotten. 

Obviously it's going to take much more than a clever euphemism for Harris/Walz to score a victory in November. The supremely weird and outdated Electoral College method of electing the chief executive means that a very small number of voters in a handful of states will be deciding the election--and those states are populated by large numbers of voters who inhabit the MAGA epistemic bubble/echo chamber. 

But regardless of what happens in November, we still owe kudos to Governor Walz for bringing the comic frame back to American politics. We sure as heck need it.