Start, as we often do nowadays, with the words of Mark Fisher. Here he is in the introduction for 2016’s The Weird and the Eerie:
What the weird and the eerie have in common is a preoccupation with the strange. The strange – not the horrific. The allure that the weird and the eerie possess is not captured by the idea that we “enjoy what scares us.” It has, rather, to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience. This fascination usually involves a certain apprehension, perhaps even dread – but it would be wrong to say that the weird and the eerie are necessarily terrifying. I am not here claiming that the outside is always beneficent. There are more than enough terrors to be found out there; but such terrors are not all there is to the outside.
The problem with the American right is not, and has never been, that it is weird. Or at least that is not what is wrong with it per se. Any honest look at its past and present will reveal how insufferably obsessed it is with normality. From red scares to moral panics, it is clear that all ilks of conservatism and right-wing thought in America cling to the normal like a liferaft and a truncheon. It is both weapon and salvation to them. This is a lineage of political praxis that cannot tolerate deviation.
Still, Fisher’s definitions do help explain something about the contemporary right. His taxonomy of the weird and the eerie – both forms of the uncanny, the unheimlich – is plain. Both are defined by the slipstream between existence and absence. The eerie mostly pertains to that which should be but isn’t – think of how an empty street late at night makes you feel uneasy – while the weird is that which shouldn’t exist but, for some reason, does.
In this sense, there is something weird about the contemporary right. Think of the reports that Grindr was overwhelmed with traffic during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. If the correlations are as close as we think, then we find something that is both ludicrously tragic and very weird in the Fisherian sense. The archetype of the closeted gay conservative, filled with equal parts moral indignation, sexual repression, and deep-seated self-loathing, is a familiar one by now. To him, same-sex desire is a deviancy to be shunned, but it is also something that shouldn’t be there, but very much is.
So much of the American experience, then, is defined by the weird. There should not be white people here, but there are. There should not be a country this rich with this many homeless, but there is. On the flipside, from the perspective of the straight-laced and self-righteous, there should not be any immigrants crossing the border, but there are. The key factor here is repression. As long as there is repression, the repressed will find a way to return. This is neither good nor bad, but a simple fact, spoken plainly and without any hidden agenda.
Which is why the sudden Democratic Party penchant for labeling Donald Trump and his supporters weird strikes me as rather lame. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s sudden virality after doing so was at least partially behind the decision to tap him as Kamala Harris’ vice president. In the eyes of Democratic strategists, it likely reads as media savvy. Now, with him officially part of the ticket, the idea of Trump as weirdo is probably going to be permanently in the ether for at least the next three months.
Some on the left applaud the rhetorical move, and I can see why. But there are a few things to say about this newfound emphasis. First, it is going to get old very quickly, and therefore lose most of its bite. Second, it smacks so loudly of the Democratic playbook of the past few election cycles, which is to put a premium on just the right series of never-ending soundbites in the hope that they can drown the Republicans in rhetoric the same way Trump and company have the Democrats. Discussion of actual politics, of a quickly collapsing social reality, is treated like a complement to the style rather than the other way around.
In short, it is spectacle, the simulacrum of politics disguised as actual politics. Which puts it very much in line with politics as usual in this country and also, perhaps ironically, rather eerie, fitting seamlessly into the uncanny valley of the American political scene (where there should be substance, there is instead plenty of rhetoric). That Walz has been picked as Harris running mate is itself a surprisingly smart move, and one which will drum up enthusiasm among progressives and even some sections of the socialist left. It is probably predictable that Fox News is trying to fire back at the Harris camp by turning the weird label on his offhand, vaguely positive comments about socialism. But one wonders how long it takes for some of the solid stances Walz has taken as governor of Minnesota to get absorbed back into the wall of noise ordering us to vote Democrat. The presence of Walz means we can somehow accept the defeat of Cori Bush by a vicious Welsey Bell carting wheelbarrows of AIPAC cash.
Worrisome in a different way is how labeling the right as weird warps our sense of the possible. This is something taken up in an editorial for an earlier issue of Locust Review, written in the wake of the events of January 6th, 2021. As we wrote then, the Capitol riot/attempted putsch/whatever you wish to call it was “a fight between two normals, the normal of a recent status quo and a ‘new,’ insurgent normal.” If the right wing is hung up on normality as identity, then much of establishment liberalism seems preoccupied with normality as performance. It’s made of the same haughty and puritanical disavowal, and isn’t even pointed in too different a direction.
Recall the way in which liberal commentary pointed to the hunting gear and trucker hats among so many of the rioters, an implication that it was the vague-but-menacing “white working class” to blame. That an outsized proportion of them were in fact, from the middle and upper stratas of society – cops, small company owners, managerial types – was obscured. The message was clear, though: the outlandish buffalo horns were of a species with the camouflage jackets and Nazi garb. Transgression, evidently, comes in many styles, but only one substance.
The mistake, made once again here, is that by conflating all of the above, it narrows the field of acceptable engagement with the spheres of politics, culture, and life. To look beyond this narrow scope is the real problem, not its narrowness. As if such a wide and equitable range of existence is possible within it. As if the darker transgressions would have emerged in the first place if this were true.
There is, of course, another side to the weird, the embrace of the unknown in the name of liberation and human fulfillment. It has driven much of what is still rightly looked at as a leap forward in one sense or another – social, political, aesthetic.
“Modernist and experimental work often as weird when we first encounter it,” writes Fisher. “The sense of wrongness associated with the weird – the conviction that this does not belong – is often the sign that we are in the presence of the new. The weird here is a signal that the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed are now obsolete.”
Pulling back the focus, it is obvious how desperately we need a new framework. Sure, sometimes an offhand turn of phrase is just an offhand turn of phrase. Other times it’s another link in the chain of the spectacle separating us from a history crying out for a change in course. Whatever breaks this spectacle, it will at first come across as deeply, unabashedly weird. We have yet to encounter it, and it’s probably not going to be waiting for us in the voting booth in November.
Header image is from Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996).