Some say Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 because, during the run-up to the election, she put Donald Trump’s supporters in a basket of deplorables. In response, MAGA masses started self-identifying as deplorables. Clinton electrified her opponent’s base, boosting turnout. Either something changed about the electorate, or maybe Kamala Harris is not learning from her predecessor, because this year, too, the Democrats are running not just on smearing their opponent and his family, but his supporters, too.
Democrats are gearing up to what might just become the most negative campaign in American history. That this election season is going to get ugly was obvious from the first official video released by Kamala Harris after she was anointed head of the Democrat ticket. Flashing images of opposition—Trump, January 6, Vance—Harris narrated the mean girl message to American dissidents: “There are some people who think that we should be a country of chaos, of fear, of hate. But us, we chose something different.”
Maybe attacking Trump feels stale to the Democrat electorate circa 2024, or perhaps his running mate J.D. Vance gave too memorable of a convention speech, because the latter is now finding himself the prime target of lefty vitriol. Among the first salvos directed at him was the social media gossip that his autobiography contains a passage about making out with a couch—which some Democrat voters apparently believed.
J.D. got some verbal lashing for his old comment about Democrats being the party of childless cat ladies. He is right on substance; the sex gap in political preferences is huge—men vote Republican, married women are more or less split, and unmarried women overwhelmingly prefer Democrats. The comment was impolitic and unoriginal, but in this day and age, when young politicians like Vance go on many podcasts, they should be presumed to be on record saying something sharply offensive.
That comment appeared to give rise to the “J.D. Vance is weird” media message. Right-of-center commentator Dave Rubin posted a compilation of politicians, talking heads, and ordinary people mouthing the line with envious discipline. The blitz was immediately countered, proud deplorable-style, by countless social media accounts posting creepy pictures of leftist and leftist politicians tagged “J.D. Vance is so weird.”
The junior senator from Ohio is not the only Republican vice presidential nominee to get hysterically negative treatment. Pretty much all of them did, especially Paul Ryan and, above all, Sarah Palin. What the three have in common is their youth—the media can’t let a charismatic young conservative with an appealing message dominate the race.
Vance is particularly threatening because he’s a stand-in for a marriageable white dude. Not even 40 and coming from humble beginnings, he is greatly accomplished—a war veteran, a Yale Law graduate, a venture capitalist, and a writer with a feature length movie made out of his autobiography, he is the dream type for any American woman. He is married, of course, and his wife is gorgeous and accomplished, but Vance represents an enduring ideal of an American man without which the American Dream is impossible.
The cartoon of Vance, the couch abuser, was quickly followed by weird Donald panic. In a campaign speech, Kamala’s surrogate, the Pennsylvania governor and rumored vice presidential pick Josh Shapiro, talked of the 45th President’s real eccentricities as a weird thing he does. The NeverTrump Lincoln Project, whose co-founder Steve Schmidt had to step down in 2021 amidst a pedophilia scandal, found the Orange Man just old and really f*cking weird.
At one point the Left proudly embraced countercultural differences. It made heroes of artists and thinkers who dared to express their innate weirdness in opposition to social pressure. With few exceptions, these figures, from Timothy Leary to Bob Dylan to Steve Jobs, were white men. Expressing one’s weirdness was considered the key to authenticity, while suppressing deviance in the name of conformity was believed to lead to neuroses, sexual hangups, and spiritual cancer.
Today’s progressive political climate is feminized and conformist. Drag queens might ridicule Leonardo’s The Last Supper at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, but this aesthetic has been mainstream for decades. In the sixties, the counterculture toyed with the idea that the crazies were actually the normal ones, and today, with money and power on their side, they willed it into reality. Green manbuns and pink pussy hats are the norm and weird is the worst insult one can hurl at an opponent.
People adhering to these cultural norms are judgmental, and they never miss the opportunity to let the dispossessed know. The pro-Harris Won’t PAC Down created to target the youth vote produced an ad with sweaty, rapey white men talking about banning abortion, birth control, and porn. The pro-Kamala PAC stereotypes white men as schizophrenic sexual predators and serial killers—weird is an understatement in relation to the characters in the video (and what self-respecting actor agreed to play them?).
The target audience for the cringe commercial has to be white girls who’ve been taught that the white patriarchy will take away their bodily autonomy and that sexual normalcy is a mask for psychopathy. It’s the demo that learned about the Arab-Israeli conflict from TikTok and is currently being advised that Kamala is brat. “Weird” is a word firmly implanted in the teenybopper vocabulary; they use it more prodigiously than other sex and age groups.
This kind of cultural messaging is designed to speak to the repulsions of barely legal female voters. Unfortunately, if internalized, it will ensure a continuation of the trend of young women remaining single way too long and feeling resentful as a result. They won’t date the men in their own community, because they’ve been taught that they are not good enough, and cultural differences will keep them from forming lasting relationships with others.
Most importantly, the message is designed to otherize white men. It’s not just a single comment like Hillary’s, but the entire structure of the campaign that relies on telling the nation that the very demographic that gave us the idea of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and who built our American home are repulsive, perverted incels.
It also preempts a possible attack on Harris’s own dating history. With the GOP is weird tagline seared in voters’ heads, slut shaming is weird is but a natural conclusion. Never mind that the problem with Harris is not her body count but that she’s been with one particular man—the former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown—who still wields considerable power in California and is genuinely weird.
I don’t know if the plan to turn out young women will backfire. Regardless of the election’s outcome, it may have the benefit of changing the demographic composition of the Unite States, something that the party in power is already doing via illegal immigration. Young men and their parents and grandparents—and women too—have every reason to be outraged. I hope they remember the weirdness the first Tuesday in November.