What are those oddballs in the US Republican Party up to now? It’s all “Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips”. If it’s not that it’s “Finger of birth-strangled babe”. Or so their opponents would have you believe. The preceding quotes are from the Weird Sisters in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Some bright spark in the Democratic Party has decided to make “weird” the word of the presidential campaign. And, if ruffled feathers are any measure, it seems to be working.
A week or so ago, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota (who may, by the time you read this, be Kamala Harris’s running mate) attracted attention by describing Donald Trump and JD Vance, his potential vice-president, as “just weird”. Harris, at a fundraiser, declared that “some of what [Trump] and his running mate are saying, it is just plain weird”. This campaign moves so quickly it is already hard to remember a time when the W-word was not being bandied. “Listen to the guy,” Walz said of the former president by way of explanation. “He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and just whatever crazy thing pops into his mind.”
Vivek Ramaswamy, former candidate for the Republican nomination, was among the Trump supporters getting their underwear in a tangle. “This whole ‘they’re weird’ argument from the Democrats is dumb & juvenile,” he said on X. Dumb and juvenile? The Dems could be forgiven for responding with a playground “I know you are, but what am I?” After all, Trump’s most notorious – and, to be fair, amusing – electoral technique has involved the coining of puerile nicknames. Ron DeSantis was “Ron DeSanctimonious”. Joe Biden was “Sleepy Joe”. It’s not exactly the Gettysburg Address.
The ‘weird’ stratagem reduces the opponent to an eccentric aunt who insists on singing Lydia, the Tattooed Lady at every family get-together
Anyway, “weird” is not an obvious word for the centre left to wield aggressively. The world teams with contented oddballs who happily thus self-identify. In Anglo-Saxon times the term was connected to conversations about fate and destiny. The First Folio of Macbeth describes the witches merely as “weyward”, and the eventual preference for “weird” has as much to do with the sisters’ prescience as with their eeriness. Even if that were not the case, the current fashionableness of witches – greatly celebrated in less-formal feminist circles – would still consolidate the outsider appeal of the weird life.
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In the 20th century, the word became increasingly associated with horror fiction. The great US pulp magazine Weird Tales, which celebrated its centenary two years ago, published such acclaimed writers as HP Lovecraft, Michael Moorcock and Robert E Howard. Since the 1990s, successors such as China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer have been associated with a “New Weird” movement. Yes, the word has sinister implications, but it also suggests originality, exoticness and dark romance (just ask any goth). Tim Burton wouldn’t have a career without it. “If the label works it works,” Guy Lodge, a film writer for Variety, posted last week, “but personally I always think of weird people as interesting”. Fair point.
So why sling it at the Grand Old Party? And why is it so proving so effective? We have, in recent years, become so used to the notion of supposedly rogue conservatives – men in horned hats attacking the Capitol – that it has become easy to forget the core vote remains, in theory, those who pride themselves on sticking to the American normal. The Republican strategy has, since the 1960s, had much to do with defending the hard-working interior from decadent, drug-crazed weirdos on either coast. The current right-wing obsession with “woke” (whatever they take that to mean) has only increased their desire to depict the average Republican politician as a three-dimensional escapee from a Norman Rockwell painting.
Merle Haggard, the rightly celebrated country singer, said it all in Okie from Muskogee more than 50 years ago. “We don’t make a party out of lovin’, but we like holdin’ hands and pitchin’ woo,” he sang. “We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy like the hippies out in San Francisco do.” It hardly matters if, as has been suggested, Haggard wasn’t being entirely serious. The song is usually read as such, and it argues that the left are the weirdos and the Oklahomans are the self-declared “squares”.
There is something else. To this point Trump’s opponents have, understandably enough, focused on a perceived threat to democracy. Comparisons were made with all the usual dictators. (Even JD Vance, before a later conversion, worried Trump might become “America’s Hitler”.) All properly frightening. But also suggestive of strength and power. The “weird” stratagem reduces the opponent to an eccentric aunt who insists on singing Lydia, the Tattooed Lady at every family get-together. Harris, Walz and the rest have, so far, got the tone just right. This is not the scary sort of weird. It’s the embarrassing, pathetic sort of weird. Nobody wants that.
