The freaks come out da Right

I told you conservatives were weird -- now Democrats are catching on

Soon, very soon, the Democratic Party and her adherents will be forced out of the pink cloud stage. It’s been great riding the high that comes with a new, energetic, and appealing champion and the related poll shift, but there’s a lot of shit to slog through yet. We can all predict what Republicans will try and the dying-cult hysteria with which they will try it (and how the Prestige Press will continue to run interference for them).  It gets harder from here.

But like I said last week, there are reasons for optimism. And one I’ve been picking up on is that people with some influence have begun to push a view of modern conservatives that — ahem — I’ve been holding for years: Namely, that they’re freaks.

Look, here’s Minnesota governor and vice-presidential contender Tim Walz:

We’ve been hearing similar approaches from Pete Buttigieg (“[Trump’s]  rambling about electrocuting sharks and Hannibal Lecter ... we don't have that kind of warped reality on our side”) and even from the candidate herself (“some of what [Trump] and his running mate are saying, well, it’s just plain weird”). The New York Times, among others, has picked up on it: “Democrats Embrace ‘Weird’ Messaging on Trump.”  

I’m pretty sure a big part of the stimulus for this has been J.D. Vance. Dick Cheney and Mike Pence weren’t exactly cuddly, but Vance is, not to put too fine a point on it, a freak. (I was onto him early, too.)  

Vance is an obvious fake whose stiffness on the stump probably has less to do with his lack of experience than with a lack of actual deeply-held beliefs that might animate his delivery. Even his misogyny, which in so many Republicans is clearly sincere, is unconvincing — he can’t put over a women-drivers-am-I-right sort of sexism even in front of a sympathetic audience because he thinks it’s a philosophy he has to explain rather than a punchline, and when he explains it people see how freakish he is. Take how he directed his bizarre woman-hatred at TV actress Jennifer Aniston and then made it worse by trying to make it look like he was really talking about child care tax credits; I’m not sure whether the maladroit chucklefuck was trying to emulate early Trump, or whether his brain is just so soggy with tradcath misogynist culture-war sludge that he thought belittling a woman who’s artistically talented and childless was a twofer.

Whatever Vance’s major malfunction might be, he’s weird and normal people recoil from him. And Democrats may also sense that, outside of his committed but relatively small core audience, Trump isn’t exactly endearing himself to voters either, as he gets loopier and more overtly fascist in his public appearances.

Plus, to give Democrats some extra credit, they may have discovered that it’s easier to convey the weirdness of Republicans’ Project 2025 agenda by associating it with the weirdness of the Republicans themselves. I mean, it’s one thing to give lectures connecting the dots between the modern GOP and rightwing think-tanks, but it’s another to just say: See Blake Masters, Kari Lake, and all those other, obviously mentally ill people? They want to ban measles vaccinations for your children.

But, like I said, I caught their act long ago.

When I was first writing about how fucked up these guys were, I focused on conservative bloggers, conservative magazine writers, and other fringe figures more than I did on the credentialed big shots — Bush and George F. Will and David Brooks and like that — because the outsiders were more up front about their noxious beliefs than the suits were. They could afford to let their freak flags fly; in fact it behooved them to do so, because part of their popularity, such as it was, came from their willingness to say the weird shit out loud.

But over the years those noxious beliefs have become a big part of the conservative public image — sometimes in strategy documents that have to be uncovered and publicized by their enemies, as with Project 2025, but often by their lunatic candidates and spokesmen themselves.

For example, back in the day you had to go off-road to guys like James Lileks, Rod Dreher, or deranged street preachers to hear how fundamentalist Christianity should be the law of the land, that Halloween is Satanic, or that Democrats were persecuting Christians by making them pay for their employees’ birth control.  Now Republicans from Mike Johnson and Donald Trump Jr. on down are screaming that the Halloween-esque Paris Olympics theatrics were an assault on their personal religious beliefs; GOP Congressmembers like Marjorie Taylor Greene are praising Vladimir Putin as a defender of the faith; and Senator Josh Hawley is declaring himself a Christian Nationalist.

Not to mention all their super-unpopular abortion policies.  Weird.

Conservative weirdness has gotten harder to ignore in recent years. Take the pandemic, for example; while President Trump was shitting the bed by strangling the government’s response and spreading folk cures, most “mainstream” conservatives were talking about basic public health measures such as masking and quarantine as if they were Soviet oppression. And the Republican politicians who can’t admit Trump lost in 2020 still can’t let on that inoculation is a positive scientific development lest their voters abandon them. I can’t imagine normal people now look back at the screaming freaks in supermarkets and statehouses, and their defenders in the conservative press, as the sane ones in the situation.

For a long time Democrats didn’t seem to have the heart to mention that their opponents were increasingly out of their minds. Part of the problem was that, in olden times as now, conservatives were accustomed to accuse their opponents of what they themselves were guilty of — as observed in this short post from me in 2003:

Daniel Henninger [at the Wall Street Journal] weeps that “our politics has never seemed more polarized.” In his investigation of this sad phenomenon, he does not mention Rush Limbaugh, NewsMax, FreeRepublic, Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, or the yobs yelling “Shut it down” and “Get out of Cheney’s house” in 2000. He does mention the ACLU, Roe v. Wade, and the bad people who made fun of religious maniac Jerry Boykin.

Thus they masked their weirdness by imputing it to liberals. But the bigger problem, as I see it, is that since Reagan turned so many of them into neoliberal careerist simps, Democrats have been afraid to refer to the opposition too unkindly, because they’ve developed a fear that the voters don’t really approve of their beliefs and would run away if you reminded them that Democrats aren’t just slightly less embarrassing Republicans.

Maybe, as I mentioned, the opportunity became too obvious to ignore. Maybe the Biden crisis scared them straight. Maybe more Democrats are not afraid to be Democrats. Or maybe, finally, enough people began picking up on what I’ve been putting down since the turn of the century to turn the tide. I’ll accept a statue in the park, but really, I’ll be content if we can just ace this election.