Weird

 This summer, Tim Walz secured his status as Harris's inevitable VP pick by delivering his immortal diagnosis of the Trump-Vance campaign: "These guys are weird." It was all-but universally conceded to be a great line—one that defined the campaign going forward. As messaging, it was brilliant. It got us out of the high-minded, lofty rhetoric that had already worn thin for people, and risked becoming a cliché, and brought us back to some awareness of the gut-level ick factor that Trump and Vance evoke. 

But there's also a potential problem with it. Namely—who ever said being weird was a bad thing? A lot of Americans bear the term with a sense of pride. Molly Ball, writing for the Wall Street Journal, profiled a big-tent right-wing conspiracist event this week, bringing together every possible variety of crank, eccentric, and oddball in the country, and she notes that many of them treated being "weird" as a badge of honor. "I consider myself a weirdo," one of them told her—in a particularly telling line. 

Trump and Vance didn't pick up on this. Instead, they played right into Harris and Walz's hands by trying to disavow the label. In the weeks after Walz made his "weird" critique, both Trump and Vance responded with some version of the line: "We're not weird; they're the weird ones"—cutting against the grain of perceptions, that is, which is always bad positioning. What they should have done—if they understood their business—was to own it. "Yeah, well, you know, we are weird—Weird and proud of it!"

After all, Ball includes the rather astounding statistic in the article that fully half of Americans self-identify as "weird" for one reason or another. "Weird," after all, is another way of saying "non-conformist," which just about everyone purports to aspire to be. Our whole national mythology is based around the concepts of Romantic Individualism, with all its trappings of the misunderstood genius, the innovator ahead of their time. In this country, it would seem, weird is normal; and vice-versa. 

If Trump and Vance ever did start wising up to this strategy—and simply owned the weird—would Harris and Walz then be defenseless? Hardly. Vance is, after all, trying to impose a type of social conformity of his own. I think this is the stronger argument to make against him—and one that Harris and Walz have also gestured to, with their language about "freedom" and people "minding their own business."  Trump and Vance don't actually stand for non-conformity, after all, but for foisting a way of life on others. 

Vance's most notable policy view, after all, is that people must be discouraged from living outside of traditional family structures. The future that he and Trump envision is not actually one where people can be proud of their weirdness and let their freak flag fly—it is, quite to the contrary, a world where people are confined by order of the state to enact a limited set of gender roles and conventional social expectations. Vance and Trump are the ones trying to impose conformity, not the Democrats. 

Walz and Harris should make this point too: if you're weird, you're one of us. Vance and Trump are the ones trying to extirpate nonconformity. They are the ones who—as Yeats put it—"must to keep their certainty accuse/ All that are different of a base intent." They are the ones who, in the words of an A.E. Housman poem, are trying to "wrest their neighbor to their will." The Democrats, therefore, should be the ones to remain what they long have been—the natural rallying-point of the misfits and oddballs.