What is “weird” and what is “normal” in America?

Democrats are, finally, asserting their right to define the boundaries of normalcy – and their claim to be defending the nation’s true ideals against the reactionary assault

“These are weird people on the other side,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said in a Morning Joe interview just after Joe Biden had announced he was not going to seek reelection. About two weeks later, Kamala Harris chose Walz, a man who would have seemed an extremely unlikely pick even just a month ago, as her VP.

The fact that he authored this immensely popular attack line is certainly not the sole reason behind Walz’ rise. Aside from being a white man from the Midwest to “balance” the ticket according to more conventional campaign wisdom, it really matters what Democrats in Minnesota achieved under his leadership. His ascension should be read as a statement of intent: Look what we have done in Minnesota – yes, that’s what we want for all Americans.

Republicans are certainly trying to transplant to the national level what they are already doing in “red” states: Impose a reactionary vision by increasingly authoritarian measures. This has been the biggest advantage for Democrats over the past few election cycles. Rightwingers can talk about the dangers of “woke” radicalism all they want. But Americans see, in “red” states, what GOP rule means, as Republicans are rolling back fundamental rights, installing vindictive reactionary regimes. Walz represents the positive counter to that. Not just “We reject the Right’s vision for the country,” but “Here’s what a fairer, more egalitarian pluralistic America looks like” – not just in theory, but in the form of actual legislation, and based on narrow majorities too.

But let’s be real: Walz also emerged because he is singularly responsible for launching a change in Democratic messaging that both captures and also catalyzes a rather dramatic vibe shift. “These guys are weird!” Everyone has been saying it: Democratic politicians, operatives, pundits – but most importantly, it’s become a rallying cry for ordinary (small-d) democrats across the country who do not want to live under Trumpian rule. Walz has captured the moment and energized the Democratic base as much as the party machinery.

The substance of “They are weird”

Not everyone likes the “weird” messaging. Some Very Serious Commentators, mostly self-regarding centrists and center-right figures, have been scolding Democrats for indulging in what they deride as juvenile name-calling. “I cannot think of a sillier, more playground, more foolish and more counterproductive political taunt for Democrats to seize on than calling Trump and his supporters ‘weird,’” Tom Friedman, for instance, raged in The New York Times. According to Friedman, this messaging is destined to further alienate the people who, supposedly, truly matter, the “white, working-class, non-college-educated men and women,” who, as Friedman reminded us, already “feel denigrated and humiliated by Democratic, liberal, college-educated elites.”

And while most people on the Left, broadly defined, are fully on board with this new messaging and often ecstatic about Kamala Harris choosing Walz, a different critique has emanated from some corners of the Left: “These guys are weird,” the thinking goes, is just empty rhetoric, detached from the bread-and-butter issues that really matter.

Both lines of criticism are missing the mark. Friedman, for instance, doesn’t actually hold a principled line against “name-calling.” Just four days before he scolded Democrats for the “weird” messaging, he called Trump and Vance “bullies” and asked: “What is wrong with you people?” That doesn’t seem too far off from what Tim Walz – and everyone adopting his line – has been expressing. Friedman’s “I get to call them out, you don’t” stance is a useful reminder of the opportunistic nature of “civility” discourse in American politics. As one of the nation’s best-known columnists and stalwarts of “centrist” or center-right “reason,” Friedman likes to claim the position of a “Have you no decency?” moral guide, a role he believes is reserved for elite pundit oracles like him.

It’s also been evident that leading commentators from the center-right to the center-left regard Tim Walz’ ascension as a threat, as they interpret it as evidence that the Democratic Party is moving away from them and further towards the “Left.” Never mind that it’s quite bizarre to paint Walz, someone who held a purple district as a moderate figure when he was in Congress, has governed as a liberal in Minnesota, and has been enthusiastically endorsed as VP from across the political spectrum that makes up the Democratic coalition, from AOC all the way to Joe Manchin, as a raging lefty. But it is true that the Left likes Walz and what he has achieved in Minnesota. And for someone like Jonathan Chait, for instance, that is the only thing that matters, it is what defines his political analysis: If it makes the people on the Left who Chait despises, those pesky “wokesters” and “activists,” happy, it must be opposed aggressively. This type of reflexive positioning against a nebulous “Left” is the defining feature of reactionary – rather than substantive – centrism or (self-regarding) liberalism.

The saltiness with which some elite centrists have reacted to Tim Walz’s rise has a lot to do with this ongoing struggle over status and power within the Democratic coalition. That is not how Tom Friedman wants us to interpret his intervention, however. Instead, he frames his critique as an above-the-fray concern about discursive standards (civility!), electoral consequences (because who could be more in tune with how this will play with working-class Americans!), and how out-of-touch liberal elites are (says Tom Friedman, man of the people!).

The idea that attacking leading figures on the Right as “weird” obscures a more substantive discussion about the issues that really matter in favor of empty campaign rhetoric is similarly misleading. The attack hasn’t just been directed at weird mannerisms, rhetoric, or superficial stylistic features – it has been directly tied to policy. What’s weird is the Right’s obsession with controlling women’s bodies and subjecting children to full-body inspections before letting them do sports; what’s weird is banning popular children’s books; what’s weird is abandoning all attempts at figuring out how to solve collective action challenges via public policy because you are too busy propagating conspiracies about the evil forces that have supposedly taken over all the institutions of American life. The official thrust of the Harris campaign has been seamlessly building on that: What these weird guys want to do is take away fundamental freedoms that most Americans agree should define the nation – but we are not going back to that dark place to which they want to take us.

Democrats – and by extension: (almost) all the people who, for better or worse, rely on America’s sole (small-d) democratic party to fight back against the authoritarian assault – are feeling relieved. They are on the offensive. They are, dare we say it, having fun. The reactions from the Right have been immensely helpful too, as rightwingers have reliably lost it and freaked out in ways that are really not doing much to dispute the impression that they are weirdos (witness Christopher Rufo’s rather unhinged tirades against Walz, for instance). The Right desires to project strength and intimidate those who dare to deviate from the reactionary vision; “you guys are just weird” directly undermines these assertions.

Another reason for the immediate success of this messaging is probably that it provides a way to attack the Right’s aggressively bigoted political project without calling them racists, sexists, or homophobes. If that is indeed the case, I feel somewhat ambiguous about it. The tendency in the mainstream political discourse to discard terms like “racist” and “sexist” – or fascist! – as merely slurs, rather than analytically correct assessments of core elements of the rightwing worldview, and to consequently regard those who call out racism and sexism with as much suspicion as the discriminatory structures and behavior that we urgently need to call out, is a disaster. Given this frustrating reality, however, it’s good to have found a way to circumvent those taboos to some extent, in a way that doesn’t give an inch to the rightwing agenda on substance. Tim Walz himself plays a crucial role in this respect: He is modeling a white male masculinity that is not either obsessed with its own power over others and/or consumed by whining about its own frailty, but confidently focused on using the power and privilege that comes with being a “normal” white Christian man to improve the lives of others.

The “weird” messaging might still fade before we get to the election. Right now, it’s everywhere – and we should expect some wear-out effects from that alone. This line of attack also channels a certain exuberance among those who want to see Trumpism defeated, and that feeling may not necessarily last all the way through the fall. Most importantly, let’s not get carried away with rosy assumptions about the message’s effectiveness in an electoral sense. There is simply no way of knowing if, and to what extent, this may affect actual voting behavior.

Who speaks for “normal” America?

Regardless of its potential electoral effects, however, the Democratic “You are weird” offensive marks a significant moment. First of all, it crystallizes the key question that has in many ways defined a central fault line in American politics: Who gets to decide what is “normal” – and therefore: acceptable – in America?

Since the late 1960s, Republicans have successfully weaponized the idea that they represent the norm that should define the nation. This assertion (in)famously crystallized in the “silent majority” notion Richard Nixon popularized early in his presidency. In his address to the nation on the war on Vietnam in November 1969, Nixon spoke to – and, as he claimed, for – “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans.” Nixon presented himself as the proponent and defender of these normal, everyday Americans, of “the quiet voice in the tumult and the shouting,” as he had put it in his speech accepting the nomination at the Republican Convention in August 1968: “It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans – the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators.” These Americans, according to Nixon, were under assault from the loud radicals, the protesters, the young hippies, and the Black people causing “unrest.”

Nixon’s “silent majority” was unmistakably white, it was older, it shared conservative or even reactionary sensibilities. He precisely captured the trajectory of the Republican Party, both ideologically but also in terms of the demographics and self-perception of its supporters. The civil rights legislation of the 1960s had acted as a catalyst for a longer-term process of party realignment or partisan sorting. The result was a profound reconfiguration of the two major parties, ultimately uniting those opposed to egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy in the GOP. Their voices have dominated the Republican Party since at least the late 1970s.

The mainstream political discourse – and far too many Democrats as well (more on that in a second) – has accepted and perpetuated this assertion of a white conservative Christian norm that is supposedly shared by the majority of Americans for far too long. It manifests, for instance, in the pervasive “heartland” idea, which isn’t a place as much as it is a heavily ideological concept implying a status of belonging in “real America” for some people in certain regions, but not for others. This ideology of “real Americanism” is also apparent in the way white Christian conservatives are coded as “regular folks.” A silent “white” is regularly accepted as the norm that defines the nation. Think of the way angry white reactionaries who storm school board meetings are described as “concerned parents” – but Black parents are special interest groups and progressive educators are “activists.” Or think of the way “working class” is often just shorthand for “white people with certain reactionary cultural sensibilities” – as in: “The working class rebelled against the establishment and voted for Trump” – often entirely detached from the actual socio-economic status. This serves to perpetuate one specific idea of what America should be: A nation of and for white Christians, in which white Christians get to define who does and does not belong, and where the interests and sensibilities of white Christians reign supreme.

But this idea of the conservative white Christian norm – and by extension, the GOP’s claim to power as the party embodying and representing this idea – has come under enormous pressure. Over the past few decades, the country has moved away from this vision of what America should be – politically, culturally, and most importantly, demographically. America has become less white, less Christian, more pluralistic. As a result, the constituency for the rightwing promise of white Christian patriarchal rule has shrunken considerably. But instead of adapting to this situation by embracing a more inclusive vision of America, Republicans have entirely given up on the idea of winning over and representing the majority of the country as it exists in reality, silent or otherwise. This has to be one of the most consequential developments in recent U.S. history. While the idea of “compassionate conservatism” in the Bush years or the Republican National Committee’s famous “Autopsy” report after the 2012 election that called for moderation and outreach to traditionally marginalized groups were still driven by the belief that it was both possible and necessary to reform the conservative political project in a way that would attract democratic legitimacy, today’s Right has openly turned against majoritarianism.

How do rightwingers justify their absolute claim to power then? As they have fully – and even rhetorically – abandoned the idea of representing the majority, they have turned all the more aggressively to presenting themselves as an endangered minority of virtuous “real Americans” who embody the essence of the true nation and the will of the people. De facto, however, they have been elevating figures who appeal mostly to the more extreme factions of the rightwing coalition, who embody and exacerbate the long-standing anti-democratic tendencies on the Right. As a result, the chasm between the traditional Republican assertion of representing “normal” America and the assortment of extremists, fraudsters, and, well, weirdos in positions of influence and power has become brutally stark.

Democrats are, finally, taking on the conflict

For the longest time, most leading Democratic officials and lawmakers were unwilling and/or unable to really pounce on this drastic discrepancy between the Republican claim to power and the GOP’s descent into extremism and its embrace of reactionary minority rule. A distinct asymmetry in the way the two sides treat each other has defined the political conflict: While the GOP has been engaging in an escalating authoritarian assault on the political system and Republican leaders could not have ben clearer about the fact that they consider Democrats the “Un-American” enemy within and Democratic governance fundamentally illegitimate, powerful Democrats have acted as is politics as usual is still possible and a return to bipartisanship and cross-party consensus, to “normalcy,” imminent. One of the most visible manifestations of this dynamic has been Joe Biden’s insistence on emphasizing his personal friendship to Mitch McConnell, even as McConnell was busy cementing his place as one of Trumpism’s key enablers and one of the crucial gravediggers of American democracy.

What is behind this frustrating “Beißhemmung” (a German word, meaning: inhibition to bite/attack)? There is certainly an element of political strategy in all of this. Democrats are eager to present themselves as a force of moderation and unity. But leading Democrats have not simply been strategically performing restraint. One important explanatory factor is age: Many Democratic leaders came up in a very different political environment, when there was indeed a great deal of bipartisan cooperation in Congress – and they are longing for a return to the days of amity across party lines. When California senator Dianne Feinstein hugged her opponent, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, at the end of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, it was a bizarre throwback to those days in the midst of a naked Republican power grab.

Crucially, this inability to grapple in earnest with the post-Obama reality in which Democratic politicians are almost universally considered members of an “Un-American” faction by most Republicans also has deeper ideological roots beyond institutional tradition and personal familiarity. The way many establishment Democrats have acted suggests they feel a specific kinship with their Republican opponents rooted in a worldview of white elite centrism and a status-quo ideology that transcends party lines. It is precisely because they, as predominantly white, predominantly male elites aren’t affected in the same way as people who happen to *not* be part of the established elite that their perspective on the threat of a white nationalist reactionary regime is different. The Republican dogma – that the world works best if it’s run by wealthy white folks – has a certain appeal to wealthy white elites, regardless of party.

Ideology of “Real Americanism”

Finally, many Democratic elites have also been all too willing to accept conservative ideas of who is and who represents the “real America,” and they seemed to operate from that Nixonian (and, of course, much older) premise of defining the sensibilities and interests of white Christian conservatives as the American “normal.” As conservatives are dismissing Democratic numerical majorities – as they supposedly don’t count because they are based on a coalition of people whose status as members of the body politic is, at best, considered provisional – many Democrats have had a hard time shaking such ideas of who does and who doesn’t count as “real America.” And so, they were reluctant to embrace a commensurate response to Republican hostility towards both Democrats and democracy, unwilling to properly fight back against what was supposedly the party of “real” America, opting to go against the interests of their own majority coalition instead.

But – maybe, hopefully – no more. The significance of “These guys are weird” lies in the fact that it disputes and rejects this claim of “real American” white Christian conservative “normalcy,” and with it the Right’s justification for minority rule. As of this moment, Democrats seem to have abandoned the idea that acquiescence and appeasement could form the basis for an adequate response to the authoritarian threat.

Last week, this profound shift manifested in rather extraordinary symbolic fashion at a democratic campaign rally in Wisconsin. Three members of the band Bon Iver, whose frontman Justin Vernon is from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where the event was held, played a rendition of “Battle Cry of Freedom” – one of the most popular, feistiest Civil War songs, an anthem of abolitionism, written in 1862.

“We’re gonna close out with a nice, old patriotic song that’s been roaming around in my head these last few months,” Vernon said, before starting:

Oh we'll rally round the flag, boys, we'll rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom,
And we'll rally from the hillside, we'll gather from the plain,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

Then Vernon launched into the chorus:

The Union forever, hurrah! boys, hurrah!
Down with the traitors, up with the stars;
While we rally round the flag, boys, we rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

Vernon then sang the third verse – “And although he may be poor, no man (a variation from the original ‘he’) shall be a slave” – before closing with the chorus one more time. “Shouting the battle cry of freedom.”

I don’t know how much coordination there had been between the Harris-Walz campaign and the musicians – although it seems safe to assume that Bon Iver would have mentioned, and received approval for, their plan to play the song. It captures this moment, and a Democratic leadership that is, finally, aggressively asserting a different patriotism, one that opposes the Right’s claim to the red, white, and blue. We are the Union, we represent a nation that is defined by egalitarian ideas of multiracial, democratic pluralism – and we are willing to defend it against those who betray and sully those ideas and the vision of finally realizing the America that never has been yet.

Will it work? I don’t know. But it is certainly better than preemptively conceding ground to the Right’s claims that they deserve disproportionate power as representatives of “real” America. Whatever concrete messaging form or symbolic expression this underlying shift in Democratic attitude may take: For democracy’s sake, I hope it will last.