Some toxic waste from a far-away land
Makes you turn green and lose control of your hands
These toxic chemicals got me feeling, super weird man
Super weird
– Viagra Boys, “Research Chemicals”
Tuesday August 6, Vice President and now presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris went to Pennsylvania to introduce her new running mate for the 2024 election – Tim Walz, the Democratic Governor of Minnesota. I had personally preferred Josh Shapiro, the Governor of Pennsylvania, not only because the NotTrump Party needs Pennsylvania to win the Electoral College, but because his race for Governor in 2020 revealed him to be a common-sense moderate with a lot of appeal to the kind of moderates and cross-over Republicans that Democrats need. It’s been said that this same not-leftist posture, along with his Jewish/pro-Israel identity, alienated a lot of the Arab-Americans and “progressives” that Harris will also need, but in any event Walz, with his grinning first appearance and regular guy demeanor, made a big hit with the Pennsylvania audience, even as the Harris campaign continued to score huge gains in fundraising and in head-to-head polls with Trump. The two running mates actually used the word “joy.” When has anybody associated that with an American presidential campaign? But for the first time, it feels like the non-Trump majority in this country has cause for … hope.
As Stephen Colbert said recently, “I’m a little worried. Because for the last few days, I haven’t been worried.”
There were several reasons why Harris preferred Walz to Shapiro. Walz is a Midwestern governor who is on balance fairly moderate. During the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests, Trump was on a conference call with various governors and said “I know Gov. Walz is on the phone, and we spoke, and I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days,” adding Walz was an “excellent guy” – which Trump doesn’t want anybody to remember now, so a whole bunch of media brought it up when he started bashing Walz this week. At the same time, once Governor Walz got a more liberal majority in his legislature, in January 2023 he signed a bill to confirm abortion rights at all stages of pregnancy in Minnesota, and in June of this year he signed the Minnesota Debt Fairness Act, which prevents health care providers from denying medically necessary treatment because of outstanding medical debt and prevents medical debt from affecting credit scores.
But it seems a big factor in Harris’ choice of Walz over Shapiro or other potentials was his ability to change the momentum. Even before he was announced as a running mate finalist, he did a talking-head interview on MSNBC and said in passing, “We do not like what has happened, when you can’t even go to Thanksgiving dinner with your uncle because you end up in some weird fight that is unnecessary – and I think- well, it’s true. These guys are just weird.” And it seems to have suddenly taken off. I say, suddenly, because it ought to go without saying that when an alleged billionaire buys his skin care regimen from a paint store and his entire party treats him like Jesus only with less doubt, that’s weird. But it’s like everybody finally noticed it. And the more people noticed it, the more Republicans started to object.
On Facebook, a friend quoted a guy named Kevin Marks, who stated: “The reason calling MAGA weirdos weird works is Wilhoit’s Law: ‘Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, and there must be out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.’ If you tell them they’re the out-group their entire worldview collapses and they imagine what it would be like if they were on (the) receiving end of habitual cruelty.”
I think it’s both more and less complex than that.
Wilhoit’s Law definitely describes where conservatism is now, if not for all time. And it also goes to explain why some people think of themselves as both libertarians and Trump supporters. Because just as most of the Right now embraces the Left’s caricature image of the movement, the Right now seems to embrace the leftist definition of libertarianism as “I don’t want the government telling ME what to do, but I’m totally fine with them telling everyone ELSE what to do.” Which in a way makes sense. Because government is totally about telling other people what to do, and if you acknowledge that we all need government at some point (for say, infrastructure, or national defense) then it’s just a matter of who gets told what to do, and nobody wants to be those people. But the new Right goes beyond even that. An actual libertarian would define freedom as being able to live your own life, without interference, and minding your own business. These people think that freedom means not being in control of your own life, but being in control of government, and that means being in control of other people. And this is perfectly “libertarian” to such folk, because they think a government that would push around the people they hate would never do the same thing to them. And if you try to remind them that in a republic, the unaccountable power they give government to use under their favorite party could just as easily be turned on them if another party is in charge, they have a great solution for that: Just make sure they never lose an election again.
Every government prior to the (classical) liberal experiment of the American Revolution was like this, where you had an aristocracy that used the majority as a resource and only considered the common interest for the sake of their own preservation. The main thing that social-democrat liberalism still has in common with classical liberalism was the idea of rule of law, and the idea that the law is supposed to both bind and protect everybody. And that is also the main thing that conservative parties have had in common with leftist parties in representative government, meaning it was one thing that Democrats and Republicans still had in common. Had. Now, the Republican party is taking its cue from Hungary, Russia and (ironically) Venezuela, so-called illiberal democracies where you have the functions of a republic and multiple parties but only one is really allowed to do anything, and that one party is usually controlled by one guy. They call this sort of thing “post-liberalism” but it is in fact pre-liberalism, and the liberalism it rejects is not that of FDR, JFK and LBJ, it’s the liberalism of Franklin, Jefferson and Hamilton.
That is malicious and obsessive. In a word, weird.
To say that these people are “weird” is no news, not even to them. In fact, they, especially Trump, embrace transgressiveness and rebellion against normalcy. Which is not necessarily bad. Americans have a tradition of rebelling against authority and conformity. But just as being against the majority doesn’t mean that you’re automatically wrong, it also doesn’t mean that you’re automatically right. When the premises of establishment Democrats were the given and Trump was running against Hillary Clinton, the only national candidate more incompetent and unpopular than he was, he got some cachet from defying the Democrats’ premises and insulting people to their faces. But then he got elected, and at the end of his term he gave us Trump Virus (TM) and if there was anything more destructive to liberty than closing public places and making people mask up, it was pretending there wasn’t a crisis and spreading the disease to maximum extent so that the maximum number of people would die. And that was just DURING Trump’s term. After Trump grudgingly left office, the Supreme Court he created gave us the Dobbs vs. Mississippi decision, and that gave Republican states the opportunity to regulate or prohibit abortion, and among many other things, this made women across the country realize they might have to leave their own states simply to have control of their own bodies. That was not normal before, and it should not be normal now. But liberals saying “this is not normal” for four or eight years didn’t catch with the American public. Saying they’re weird does. Why? Because there’s no better term for it.
Supporting the Second Amendment is not weird. Going to the Republican National Convention in 2024 to buy a replica AR-15 cause it’s the same weapon that shot Trump is.
Saying abortion is the same thing as murder is disagreeable to a lot of people, but it IS the doctrinal position of the Catholic Church, so in that sense, it’s not weird. “Weird” is opposing a bill to stop authorities from using a search warrant to track your menstrual periods.
“Weird” is Trump doing an Atlanta rally this week and saying:
“She [Harris] said that a 70 to 80% tax hike is “A bold idea that should be discussed.” Oh, that’s nice. She co-sponsored the $100 trillion green new scam. She wants to abolish all oil and coal and natural gas. “We want to work on wind. Wind. We want to have wind blowing.” She vowed to ban fracking. She wants the government to stop people from eating red meat. She wants to get rid of your cows. No more cows. No more cows. Oh, it’s serious. In Europe, you smile and you think about it, but in Europe, they’re sort of doing it. They don’t want any cattle. She wants to get rid of gas-powered cars and replace them with all electric. They don’t go far. They cost too much. They’re all made in China. Other than that, they’re fantastic. And I’m for electric cars. I have to be, because Elon endorsed me very strongly, Elon. So I have no choice. But he knows. “
Dude. That is a Waldorf word salad. It had apple slices and mayonnaise and everything.
The point is not whether fans of Drag Queen Story Hour think that Republicans are weird. The point is whether the swing-state independents, moderates and conservatives that Republicans have always relied on think that Republicans are weird.
And when you consider that in 2023, the Republican Party in Ohio foisted an (unsuccessful) referendum vote to increase the threshold to allow ballot initiatives to succeed, specifically timed to take effect before a special election to ratify abortion rights, you can see how popular the party directors think their own agenda is with their favorite demographic. In Ohio, where the Democratic Party might as well not even exist.
When you tell the Trumpniks that they’re “weird” it works not because they see themselves as the out-group. They are in fact proud of being the out-group versus the liberal establishment. It works because it causes them to see themselves as others see them. I have frequently mentioned that the “conservative” love affair with Donald Trump could be compared with the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where Dr. Jekyll sought to indulge his evil impulses while still retaining his respectable life by using a formula to change not only his personality but his being so that he would have a secret identity. The problem of course was that Jekyll developed a tolerance and the Hyde personality became the default, and it became harder and harder to turn back into Jekyll, just as the Trumpniks embrace their Leader “because he fights” and projects the combative attitude that they want in their Party but are taught to see as un-Christian – blanking out the fact that continued tolerance to Trump has made their religion more associated with him, and them, than to its positive virtues. When you tell the MAGAts that they’re weird, you are showing them a mirror. You are showing the Trumpnik that he IS a monster, that he has turned himself into a monster, and it may be too late to turn back.
In that regard, there’s another aspect of this campaign that I need to go over in particular. JD Vance was picked by Trump as his running mate largely because he is a young, aggressive, articulate spokesman for the new Right version of Republican politics, and since the Republican Convention, he has been making that clear, for better and mostly worse. And in the last couple of weeks we have, in addition to the “weird” campaign, had this raft of jokes saying that JD Vance is, well, a couchfucker.
According to Vulture/New York Magazine, “Last week, Twitter (Okay, X…) user @rickrudescalves posted, “can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, Hillbilly Elegy, pp. 179-181).” And since most people don’t have a copy of Hillbilly Elegy on hand, they didn’t have a way to verify (maybe people just watched the movie.) They also could’ve read the tweet and felt it was probable enough to believe, or more realistically, they realized they had to worry about bigger things like President Joe Biden dropping out of the race. Either way, JD Vance did not have sexual relations with that couch, at least not in the book and none that anyone else can prove as fact. Why can’t outlets firmly deny the couch allegations? One (outlet) tried and deleted the article. Associated Press posted a piece titled, “No, JD Vance Did Not Have Sex With a Couch,” getting straight to the point. But it did not last very long as it was eventually retracted. AP confirmed to Semafor reporter Max Tani that the article was removed as “this story didn’t go through the wire service’s standard editing process.” Or, as one X user speculated, AP couldn’t confirm that JD Vance has never, ever in his life had sex with a couch. Or if the couch was velvet, leather, polyester, a love seat, a sectional…”
In his coming-out speech with Harris, Tim Walz invoked this joke when he said “I can’t wait to debate this guy (Vance) … that is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up. …See what I did there?”
It ought to go without saying that this rumor isn’t true, and that it certainly isn’t anywhere in Vance’s autobiography. But as the article says, you can’t prove a negative. And the question is, why does this joke have such traction? Well, because JD Vance is a drip and nobody likes him, probably including Republicans. One news article said, “Vance seems determined to prove correct the allegation that he’s “stalking” Harris. On Wednesday, Vance pulled an unsettling stunt. He spotted Air Force Two on a Wisconsin tarmac and chased it down in a faux attempt to “confront” Harris. Thankfully, she had left the airport already, avoiding questions about whether it was time to file for a restraining order. But his behavior did create another round of reminders that JD Vance is a nosy creep. Recall that he has even demanded that local police have access to women’s medical records so they can know if patients are or may be pregnant — and can use state force to keep them that way.” And when one journalist on campaign tried to throw Vance a bone and ask “What makes you smile? What makes you happy?” Vance smiled through his teeth and responded, “I smile at a lot of things — including bogus questions from the media, man.“
The joke works not because it’s true but because one easily could believe it.
As James Fell told journalist McKay Coppins, when Coppins complained about how many smart people believe “the couch thing” is real, maybe you should do a post about how many MAGAts still say that the 2020 election was stolen, even though everybody knows it wasn’t, probably including them.
The point of the rumor isn’t that anybody believes in it. The point is to change the mental furniture. This tack is similar to, if not identical to, the “Big Lie” technique where the Nazis would say the same lie, no matter how obvious it was, so often that people started to believe it because that was the data being discussed. And as we see, Republicans have been doing this for years and years, even before they deliberately emulated Nazis. It’s not necessarily ethical to do these smear campaigns with “weird” and the couch thing, but by the same token these aren’t the same stakes as denying the legitimacy of a lawful election. They’re just jokes. Hey, Republicans, remember when we could still tell JOKES in this country without people getting all offended?
With this tack on Vance and the “weird” campaign, basically, Democrats are slowly but surely learning how to fight like Republicans. And it seems that Republicans don’t know how to deal with it.
But don’t feel so bad, Republicans. Cause there’s Republican weird… and then there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. weird.