Are the Democrats and Republicans Switching Around Again?
It seems that they take turns in being the weirder party
This US Election season keeps getting more and more interesting. In particular, the attempt by Democrats to paint their Republican opponents as 'weird', inspired by their Vice Presidential nominee Governor Tim Walz, has got me thinking. After all, I have recently called for everyone to actively embrace a 'normie' politics again. By painting their opponents as 'weird', the Democrats are signalling that they are the 'normal' ones, thus implicitly signalling that they intend to embrace the position of the normie. Whether they actually end up running a truly normie campaign all the way through to November is still to be seen, of course. If they do, then I think it would conclusively prove that the Democratic Party is a truly different party from the 2010s version.
Thinking about it, American politics, and Western politics in general, seem to actually alternate between which party is the weirder one. Twenty years ago, the Republicans were definitely the weirder party. They opposed everything from rap music to video games, and wanted a constitutional ban on gay marriage, something that didn't even exist in most places back then. They wanted to keep anti-sodomy laws on the books as a purely symbolic thing, even though those laws had already been struck down by the Supreme Court. Many of them even wanted schools to teach 'intelligent design' in science classes alongside evolution, which they said was 'just a theory, not proven fact'. They also believed that President Bush was sent by God to keep America and the West safe from terrorism, and everyone opposed to his 2003 Iraq War, from the Dixie Chicks to the country called France, were the enemy. Not only did they run one of the biggest cancel culture campaigns ever against the Dixie Chicks, they even changed French Fries to 'Freedom Fries', because they wanted to cut ties with France! While John Kerry didn't win in 2004, he seemed to at least embody the normie's worldview, where people can disagree peacefully, and France is not the enemy. Many aspects of the American Right's weird extremism were also felt in other Western countries like Canada and Australia, although to a lesser extent. Overall, I think it was clear that, back in the aughts, the right were the weird ones. I also think the fact that the right behaved weirdly during the Milliennials' formative years is one of the biggest reasons why we, as a generation, aren't moving to the right like previous generations did after their mid-thirties.
A decade later, however, it was the left's turn to be weird. From the mid-2010s right up to the end of 2020, the left was pretty weird. Even the rise of Trump on the right arguably didn't surpass the left in terms of weirdness. The left was challenging long-standing linguistic norms, it was actively de-platforming speakers, and it was mainstreaming previously fringe ideas from postmodern critical theory all the time. Even those on the left had a hard time keeping up with the new taboos, which were evolving like every year. Long-standing values like free speech, valuing individuals based on merit, colorblindness and objectivity were cast aside, and theories explaining why they were 'unjust' or even 'oppressive' were upheld as the new truth in certain circles. Meanwhile, the right in the 2010s was often seen championing the case in defense of these values, while putting their religious-authoritarian obsessions aside temporarily, which made them look reasonable to many people. Some influencers on the right even made the point that, while back in the 1990s the right was pro-censorship and the left was pro-freedom, it seemed to have flipped to the other way around in the 2010s. While I think Trump himself has always been quite weird (Walz certainly has a point here), the weirdness of the 2010s left made Trump look relatively normal by comparison. I think this was a major factor why many people came to accept Trump despite his unusual manner of speech and behavior. In normal times his antics would have been unbecoming for a president, but in the 2010s he was certainly not the weirdest thing out there. I even think the fact that Trump looked more normal than the 2010s left to many people could have significantly contributed to his unexpected victory in 2016.
In the Trump era, certain circumstances led to wokeness becoming an even bigger part of Democratic culture, even as mainstream backlash against wokeness was building rapidly. For example, the interaction between the Hillary and Bernie campaigns in 2016 normalized previously fringe ideas rooted in postmodern critical theory. Hillary was otherwise centrist but she embraced identity politics, and while Bernie himself was not woke, some of the further left activists supporting his campaign were highly sympathetic to postmodern critical theory. Bernie's campaign allowed these activists to gain mainstream attention, and Hillary's campaign normalizing identity politics provided fertile ground for these activists to promote their ideas. Later on, in the 2019-20 primary, many candidates chose to run in the woke lane, because the moderate lane was already taken by Joe Biden, and the socialist lane was already taken by Bernie Sanders, and no new candidate could realistically hope to defeat these household names in their own lanes. Thus there were multiple candidates who voiced varying levels of support for woke ideas, further normalizing these ideas in the Democratic mainstream. For a while, it really looked like wokeness was here to stay in the Democratic mainstream.
In recent years, I think we might be seeing the beginnings of another reversal. As many commentators noticed, wokeness had significantly receded by around 2022, at least from the more mainstream part of the left. At the same time, the right began embracing ideas that would have been considered extreme just a few years earlier. They began going to war with Disney over Don't Say Gay, singling out 'woke corporations' like Bud Light and Target to attack, attacking academic freedom in universities, and passing draconian abortion bans and drag bans. Earlier this year, things took another turn for the worse, when they began to attack IVF, and mandate religion in public schools again. Even 'intelligent design' appears to be back on the table. Meanwhile, a new group of right-wing intellectuals began to literally call for 'regime change' in the West, and openly state their admiration for the ideas of previously fringe far-right thinkers like Curtis Yarvin, Yoram Hazony and Adrian Vermeule. While they mostly still call themselves 'conservatives', they look not to the recent past of the English-speaking West, but to Eastern European countries like Viktor Orban's Hungary, famous for pioneering 'illiberal democracy', as the blueprint for their policy making. A few of them have even admitted to being radicals rather than conservatives. It is in this environment that the extremely-online, culture war obsessed, and totally out of touch Presidential campaign of Ron DeSantis was born. It is in this environment that such extremist policy documents like Project 2025, which appears to be too extreme even for Trump, were born. The failed DeSantis campaign and Project 2025 demonstrate the fact that many parts of the right have now become too weird and extreme for the average normie. Trump's choice of JD Vance as his new VP candidate just further cements the perception that previously fringe ideas are becoming normalized on the right.
All this, I think, is why the Democrats' 'weird' attack is landing so well. It speaks not just to the antics of Trump (which was probably what Walz was originally describing), but also to a broader problem on the right (which, let's face it, is much weirder and much more extreme than Trump himself). The weirdness of the right is not just limited to America either: it is the right that are mainly behind the riots in Britain, for example. The normie surely doesn't want to see rioting in their streets, no matter what the reason is. The fact that right-wing commentators on both sides of the Atlantic are making excuses for the riots really turns the normie off.
If the Democrats truly embrace a normie politics again, it would complete the reversal. This would be much needed right now, because there needs to be at least one normal party, and the Republicans don't appear to want to fulfill that role anymore. The early signs so far are promising: even as Kamala Harris, a black woman, has taken over from Biden, there has been no resurgence of the identity politics seen during Hillary's 2016 campaign. From what I see, most Harris supporters appear to be happy with this choice too, having finally accepted that identity politics likely played a role in Hillary's defeat. The choice of Tim Walz, a 'normal' suburban dad from the Midwest, further consolidates the Harris campaign's image of normality. There are also suggestions that Harris intends to run a law and order campaign, drawing from her experiences as a prosecutor. Just a few years ago, woke activists might have complained about all this. They actually complained loudly that 'Kamala's a cop' back in 2020 when she was selected as Biden's VP. These days, you don't hear much of that anti-cop talk anymore. The woke revolution is clearly over, even if the Democrats don't say it as loudly as some might want them to.
From my other newsletter:
This is How to Take Back the Woke Skeptical Movement
We can still repel the Populist Right's ideological invasion
…But firstly, how would the woke skeptical movement have turned out, in my ideal world? My hope was that it would have been the beginning of a culture where people actually looked at issues in a thoroughly rational way, where independent thinking and good faith discussion were encouraged, and where skepticism to established narratives were the norm. The worst aspects of wokeism were slavery to unsound philosophical theory, irrationality, a lack of free speech, conformity with the in-group, tribalism, and seeing everything as a power struggle, which justifies bad faith arguments. The reaction against wokeism would have been the catalyst for the coming together of people who rejected these things, thus forming a community with the opposite kind of culture. Or so I hoped. If this was successful, then the new community wouldn't just be critiquing wokeism, which would be quite limiting anyway. We would critique all sorts of bad ideas in the same way, whether they came from the left or the right. This would also fit nicely with my philosophical commitments as a Moral Libertarian: allowing free speech without the fear of cancellation would be an important part of upholding equal moral agency for every individual, and a truly free and fair marketplace of ideas would allow the best, and most moral, ideas to win out…
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory and The TaraElla Story (her autobiography).