Why we should all bully Republicans for being weird

After a rough couple of months, the Democrats have hit on an invigorating new strategy: bullying Republicans for being weird. The trend was kicked off by comments Minnesota governor Tim Walz made during a news interview last week, where he described his opponents as “weird people” and made fun of Trump’s bizarre habit of eulogising “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.” Since then, the Democrats have seized on the term: on Friday (July 26), Kamala Harris’s team sent out an email calling JD Vance a “creep” and “weird”, several other Democrats have followed suit, and a campaign group released a video where actors playing sinister, leery-eyed Republicans bragged about their plans to intrude on the American public’s most intimate lives.

This is a new spin on the playground’s most devastating rebuttal: I know you are, but what am I? Republicans have spent the last five years depicting their opponents as bizarre, deviant and freakish. Now, the Democrats have turned the tables and hit back with, “I’m rubber, you’re glue, everything you say bounces off me… and sticks to you!” 

It’s true that there’s nothing inherently wrong with being weird, and that activists have long resisted the effort to make queerness or disability ‘normal’ (i.e. reshape them in line with conservative principles). It’s also true that the concept of normality has often been bound up with all sorts of regressive ideas about race, gender, neurodivergence and class. But there isn’t anything inherently wrong with using “weird” as an insult. To make the charge stick, you just have to raise one set of definitions above another – “normal” as easygoing, affable, tolerant of others and capable of minding your own business; “weird” as prudish, fanatic and overbearing.

Republicans would argue that it’s weird to support LGBTQ+ rights (maybe making the case by linking to an hour-long Rumble video about children’s genitals or the Soros network); I would argue that it’s weird to be so obsessively preoccupied with the bodies and lives of other people, just as it’s weird to believe in race science and eugenics, or to spend your life attacking minority groups and writing fan fiction about Donald Trump on the internet. Calling them weird could be a particularly good strategy when applied to issues like abortion, contraception access, and no-fault divorce, where the views of many senior party figures and right-wing pundits are wildly at odds with the electorate. Based on the views of the majority of the US public, it is objectively very weird to view romance novels or recreational sex as matters which should be legislated by the state. 

By picking someone as unappealing as JD Vance for his running mate, Trump has walked right into the Democrat’s new line of attack. It was clear from the beginning Vance was a terrible choice for Vice President, and his favorability ratings have only got worse since his announcement (worse, according to some polling, than any other VP candidate in history.) His history as a media pundit is coming back to haunt him in a big way: every other day, the Harris campaign is resurfacing a clip of him saying something terrible on a right-wing podcast – remarks about  “childless cat ladies” went far beyond triggering the libs, upsetting many conservative women and swing voters alike. Another resurfaced audio clip showed Vance advocating for a “federal response” to prevent women from travelling out-of-state to get an abortion, which – in a nod to anti-semitic conspiracy theories – he suggested was currently being funded by George Soros. 

But what really cemented his status as weird was the excruciatingly unfunny speech he delivered at the Republican convention last month. “Democrats say that it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too!” he joked, to deafening silence, before punching the air and adding “I love you guys!” It was like being trapped inside the stress dream of a stand-up comedian (it’s comforting to think that this is the best the American Right have to offer as a successor to Trump. Maybe everything is going to be OK?) 

Describing the Republicans as “weird” might sound minor, but it gestures towards some of the party’s greatest vulnerabilities. There is a long tradition of authoritarian moralism in US politics, but there is also a more relaxed, ‘live and let live’ tendency, which doesn’t respond well to scolds, busybodies and curtain-twitchers. The Republicans have spent years trying to frame the left in those terms, with their talk of “woke Nazis” and the oppressive chill of cancel culture, but when it comes down to it, they are the ones banning books and tracking women’s menstrual data. They’re the ones driving the culture war; perpetually offended, consumed by ever more niche online discourses and promoting ever more absurd lifestyle trends, from all-meat diets to testicle tanning; melting down over-representation in films for children and writing letters of complaint to the Paris Olympics because its opening ceremony – with its heavy metal music and drag queens – was too outrageous.

I’d guess that the average swing voter in the US finds the culture wars boring in either direction, but it really is the Right who are pushing it hardest.  Republicans know that their views are not popular, that the “silent majority” they once claimed to speak for has evaporated and that democracy is no longer on their side (they haven’t won the popular vote since 2004.) This is why they are increasingly trying to exert power through voter suppression and Supreme Court rulings, rather than by winning hearts and minds. The Republicans are a party committed to minority rule and their leaders are more extreme than ever. Calling them “weird’ is not a terrible way of emphasizing that point.

It‘s also likely more effective than condemning them in moral terms – Democrats have been sounding the alarm about Trump’s threat to democracy for so long now that it wouldn’t be surprising if people had started to switch off. Any line of attack, however justified, loses power with repetition. But after years of “when they go low, we go high” and “Love Trumps Hate”, mean-spirited mockery is a novel approach for the Democrats and, for the time being, it seems to be resonating.

Making fun of people can be a great way of cutting them down to size – the “weird” accusation seems to have enraged Republicans far more than being denounced as fascists, racists or misogynists, which is rhetoric they can either embrace or brush aside.  They are still emotionally invested in believing themselves to represent mass sentiment, and don’t like being reminded of how unpopular they really are. Many figures on the Right have reacted in such a defensive, sneering or earnestly outraged way that they’ve made themselves look even more weird in the process. The Democrats will need more than playground insults if they want to win, but electoral victory isn’t everything: laughing at bad people and hurting their feelings is also important.