Where to go from “strangeness”

We don’t throw a party out of love
But we like to hold hands and cast spells
We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy
Just like hippies do in San Francisco.

If there is promise in Democrats calling Trump a weirdo—and I think there is—it is not in the word ostracism itself. A weirdo is not a threat; he is simply a loser. Calling Trump a weirdo is a mild way of expressing contempt, but it is still contempt. We have no information about whether the public—as opposed to the chattering classes—is responding positively to Weird Wave because it is too new. But the Blueprint poll found related messageand the result was not promising. The message was that Harris is “one of the few politicians who acts, talks and thinks like a normal person, because she actually is.” The conclusion: Unlike Donald Trump, Kamala Harris is not weird! This message was not a flop, but it was not a hit either. It was about halfway between the top and the bottom (where you would expect average).

The useful message Kamalot encounters when he calls Trump and Vance weird is: Stop being afraid. No one cowers at the sight of a kid in the corner eating glue out of his hand. (Maybe should(but that’s another, darker story.) No one cowers in fear from a paper tiger that you crumple up and throw in the trash. By extension, while Trump and Vance certainly want to run the country in a reckless and authoritarian manner, we will not cower from them; we intend to defeat them. It is part of the word “weird” worth preserving.

The master of this style was Franklin Roosevelt, who famously said:We have nothing to fear except fear itself..” Roosevelt was referring specifically to the financial panic that was closing banks, but he displayed the same exuberant confidence during the Great Depression and World War II, when fascism posed a much more tangible threat. Ronald Reagan’s happy demeanor masked a frightening detachment from the day-to-day responsibilities of government that would later turn into a numbness, but there’s no doubt that this was a political good. One of the many reasons I regretted not seeing Hillary Clinton elected president in 2016 was because I admired her ability to disarm hostile lunatics with cheerful disbelief. I think especially of her appearance before the Benghazi Commission in 2015. It was a master class in how to shrug off demagogic fools. Trump is the most demagogic fool in the history of American politics, and while Clinton did a pretty good job of sparring with him in the 2016 debates, it sadly didn’t seem to matter. Still, it would have been worse if she’d shown fear.