Breaking the Weird
Unsettling powers, in our politics
I like weirdness. I’m susceptible, perhaps more than most, to what Erik Davis calls “high weirdness.” I’m preternaturally open to things that put pressure on realism, and I’m curious about things that deviate from what’s taken to be a norm. I leave a lot of room open for fictions, and speculations, in my imaginative landscape. I suppose that weirdness (rather than something more norm core, like God) is the reason why I ended up with a PhD in theology. Gods, and other divine or supernatural phenomena, are weird.
So I wasn’t immediately lured in, when Tim Walz called Trump weird. I was bracing myself for an anti-weirdness campaign. But this hasn’t really materialized. Rather, I have to concede to those like my friend and colleague Adam Kotsko who’ve argued that, more than anything else, calling out weirdness is the Democrats actually doing politics again. It’s the end, Adam has recently written, “of a certain fatalistic defensiveness” and a kind of return to actually doing politics—which is, ultimately, a power struggle. They are refusing to let Trump and the conservatives set the terms of the conversation anymore, which has left many of us feeling a bit refreshed.
It’s also made me a little more curious about weirdness—about what, exactly, it is. Weirdness isn’t simply a personality trait or characteristic. It is that, of course. There are weird people. But it’s also a phenomenon that’s a little more cosmic. Weirdness can be something in the water, or the air. It can make things feel uncanny or strange. It can capture or inspire us, because it’s essentially a more than human power. It can get into us, we can be drawn to it, some of us might capture more of it than others. But it’s not simply a character trait.
The etymology of the term, in Old English, seems to bear this out. Past use of the term pointed to phenomena that were odd, uncanny, even supernatural. And people who were weird were those who seemed to have tapped into the powers of weirdness, who could control it in some way and so could control the way that supernatural phenomena acted upon us. They could shape fate, and destiny.
The three Weird Sisters in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, reminiscent of the the three Fates, illuminate this dimension of weirdness. They introduce both a magical and a horrific element into weirdness. Although, apparently, in the first published version of Macbeth they weren’t weird but wayward sisters. Only later did they accumulate their weirdness. Nevertheless, I think it’s interesting to see weirdness and witchcraft dovetail so seamlessly in these figures.
I suppose it’s also made me even more reticent to think of Trump as weird. Maybe it’s more fair to say that Trump is trying hard to be weird—he’s working to seize that kind of power, to have that ability to control and shape the vibes toward his own (I would call them demonic) ends. And maybe he would have become weird enough to get us. But then, in came Walz with a bit of political theater (maybe, since he’s working with and against more than human powers, we could even call it a bit of spiritual warfare) to break that curse of the weird. Or to break Trump’s pretensions to weirdness. It was a shift in feeling.
It’s part of the way that the Harris campaign appears—at least on the surface—to be running almost entirely on feeling, at this point. We haven’t really seen Democrats do this since Obama’s hope campaign. That campaign probably left us with a massive hangover, when the hope lost its power to sway us. Maybe that’s why collective feelings, and the power they have in the struggle of politics itself, took so long to re-emerge in Democratic politics. So there’s a sense in which tapping into our collective feeling does play like a kind of political genius, in this particular moment. I think the Harris campaign is trying to do something hope-like with joy, right now: to ride on positive feelings, like Obama did. But the fact that the campaign is also trafficking in weirdness demonstrates a more astute awareness of the complex and textured dimensions of collective feeling and affect. They’re tapping not just into joy, but also contempt and meanness. And they’re taking collective action against weirdness.
What remains to be seen, and what will be much more difficult to tangle with than weirdness, is what the Harris campaign will do with all of the anger. There’s an incredible sense of agony and collective anger, on the left, about Harris’s complicity in what’s happened in Gaza on Biden’s watch. And the only approach the campaign has yet showed us, to this anger, is an attempt to shut it down. Weirdness is thin, it exists at the edge of things. It’s easy to break. Anger is different. It doesn’t just break. It’s much more radical; it gets right to the heart of things, it sits at the roots. Anger is difficult to appease, and won’t be transformed unless it is—at a minimum—seen and acknowledged.