I’m Umair Haque, and this is The Issue: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported publication. Our job is to give you the freshest, deepest, no-holds-barred insight about the issues that matter most.

New here? Get the Issue in your inbox daily.

Hi! How’s everyone? Today we’re going to discuss…why calling them weird’s working.

In the wake of Kamala’s ascension to nominee, a new phrase has emerged. A new…way of speaking…about the far right. The side of democracy’s begun to call them, simply, weird.

And weirdly, it’s proving to be devastating. The anti-democracy’s side rattled, and meanwhile, the pro-democracy’s jubilant, because this is an attack that’s registering in ways that none have so far. This one. Little word.

Now, there’s criticism from the left—isn’t there always—that this isn’t hard-hitting enough. Calling someone weird is giving them a free pass on racism, bigotry, and so on. I don’t know if that’s true. What I do know is that the leftist style of communication—which is about denunciation and renunciation—has proven ineffective, not just this time around, but in general.

Here, we’re trying to win an election and preserve democracy.

So.

Why is this one word—“weird”—proving to be so effective?

The answer to that goes deep, if you ask me. And it begins like this.

It is weird. It’s deeply weird to want to control people’s lives in such intimate ways, right down to their bodily choices. It’s doubly weird to obsess over it, these choices of people you’ll never meet, and have nothing to do with. It’s profoundly weird to be this up in people’s business.

Weird how? It smacks of a kind of grandiose infantile narcissism. I am the World’s Biggest Baby, and the World Must Revolve Around Me. Psychoanalytically, there’s all kinds of weird at work here. The only people’s sex lives we’re this obsessed with, in any normal sense, are mommy and daddy, and that’s when we’re children.

Grandiose infantile narcissism, of course, is the psychological inner life of authoritarianism and fascism. The Nazis were the ultimate grandiose infantile narcissists, constructing a Thousand Year Reich around their all-powerful father figure, in which the true believers were literally superhumans.

And that gets us even closer to the heart of why “weird” registers. Beneath all this is the assumption, or belief, nakedly, aggressively, that these weirdos are superhumans, and the rest of us are subhumans, which is the only way, really, to get to “I control your choices, right down to what you can do with your body with your loved ones.” Superhumans, perhaps, should have that power, and subhumans shouldn’t.

And it only gets weirder from there. Because if you pursue that line of thought, you’re left staring into a certain abyss. If the weirdos think they’re superhumans, and the rest of us are subhumans, or at least if they get to decide who possesses what level of personhood to what degree—then of course they’re obsessed with reproduction, because that’s how you control these lineages of superhumanity and subhumanity, and of course if you’ve already decided that’s what people are, then, just as every good fascist believes, the point is to produce a world of superhumans.

So all that’s why they’re utterly obsessed to the point of being consumed with what the rest of us do in between the sheets, particularly women, how women’s bodies are used, whether for reproductive labour or not, what bodies and human interactions and human intimacy is all for. Because of course this is all—when you think about this deeply, which isn’t very deeply at all, even—a nakedly fascist project of controlling lineages and degrees of personhood.

And all of that is incredibly, profoundly weird.

Because most of us aren’t like that. And more to the point, none of that’s normal for modernity.

What is “modernity,” anyways, this word that I throw about every so often? Well, it means something like: the modern idea that we can throw off ancient forms of dispossession, the most basic of which was that some people weren’t people at all. The heart of the Big Idea of Modernity is that each and every one of us can and should be liberated and emancipated from ancient notions of order and fixity, which turned out to be repression—women were to be baby-makers, this kind of person was a slave, that kind of a person was a warrior, only this kind of person had “noble” blood, and only this kind of person could own all the rest.

Modernity was a great cleavage in history. And it occurred through a series of revolutions, ones in intellect, and ones of the more physical kind. France beheaded its nobles, famously, and abolished feudalism. The Enlightenment championed rationality, even as it laid the groundwork for empire and enslavement, by creating a ladder of personhood.

Modern institutions began to be born. Like what? Democracy. Science. Art. Literature. Think of all that lies inside those little words. How long was the journey towards suffrage? That in itself took a series of revolutions. How many great minds thrumming with the name of science and reason were struck down, from Socrates to Galileo? How long did it take to accept the idea that women could be writers? On and on the story of modernity goes, and it’s a story that hasn’t remotely ended yet.

Because we’re still a world that’s worlds away from the ideals of emancipation and liberation for all, from all the old demons, whether poverty, violence, hate, spite, or deprivation. But what we did, remarkably, through this idea called modernity, was begin to change history.

Because for too long, history didn’t change. The world was what it was, and it was, almost universally, a place where this truly weird idea took hold, that went like this. Some people were chosen, usually divinely, to have “noble” or special blood, and thus, they deserved to own everything and everyone else in society, to control their choices, right down to the last thing each of us have, our bodily autonomy, what kinds of breaths we take, with whom, for what reason.

For too long, history—and most people just accepted it, because this great idea called modernity hadn’t been born yet—never changed. And it’s names were just feudalism, or empire, or caste-ism, etcetera. We have many words to describe those pre-modern forms of social order, but what’s universally true about them is…

How weird they seem to us today.

Imagine stepping back in history five, ten, or twenty centuries. Suddenly, you’re in a world where people don’t have rights, but some people have divine privileges, of life and death, over the rest, and that’s how it is and always will be. There’s no idea of progress. There’s no grand democratic ideals of equality, justice, liberty, truth. The idea of human goodness itself doesn’t exist—life is just a sort of binary thing, where those with better blood are capable of virtue, and those with bad blood aren’t, rendering them only fit for labour, whether manual, reproductive, or maybe even just slavery. And because of all this, “history” isn’t—it’s just an endless cycle of war, to control all this, by the divinely privileged class.

That, to us, is weird. It’s odd, in so many ways, but most of all, because we know none of it’s true. Nobody has “special blood,” much less divinely privileged blood. Nobody’s really inherently born a king or emperor or anything else, inherently deserving of controlling the choices of countless others—that’s just a myth, propped up by fairy tales. Count, Baron, Lord—these are all just slightly comedic titles in fictional ranks of “nobility” of blood. No, people aren’t born in different castes of warriors or laborers or untouchables, “naturally.” We are all the same.

To our modern eyes, minds, ears, it’s all false. And in that sense, history was a prison, because by recounting these myths, the average person, perhaps, actually came to believe in their own repression, morally, socially, and culturally, that it was the right thing, the best thing, the only thing. To us, that’s the weirdest thing of all, the most discordant note of this crazy symphony, because today, almost none of us really believe that.

That’s why weird works.

Because it carries this subtext in it. You see, every message has a subtext—what doesn’t have to be said. It just sort of hovers around in our unconscious. But it’s very much there. If I say “king,” you already sort of think “throne” or “scepter” or “crown.” And in this context, to say “weird,” carries this incredibly powerful message. Of how weird all this is in this deepest of ways, historically so, and how much we’ve changed what normal should be.

No, of course it’s not “normal” anymore to think of women as reproductive vessels, or this kind of person as a certain caste, or to imagine that some people are only good for this or that—because history has taught us that all that is eminently false. These are all just myths, which were used to not just repress people, but worse, make people believe in their own repression.

And so when we understand that this is how far back in history such malign figures want to take us—that’s what weird really begins to say. These dudes are odd in that sense. Not just eccentric, or funny, or a little strange, but weird, in the way that they want to turn the clock back on centuries of progress, and make us all believe in the sinister myths and fairy tales that made history a prison for so long.

Why would anyone want to do that? Because they must either be almost unbelievably ignorant, deeply pathological, man-children standing not just athwart their own maturity, but history’s. Those so completely removed from, and so disinterested by, the idea of modernity, that they’ve come to violently oppose it, asking us the rest of us to, as well, just so they can have the infantile-narcissistic reassurance of comfortable myths of being superhumans with superpowers.

And that, my friends, is incredibly…weird.

❤️ Don't forget...

📣 Share The Issue on your Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

💵 If you like our newsletter, drop some love in our tip jar.

📫 Forward this to a friend and tell them all all about it.

👂 Anything else? Send us feedback or say hello!

UMAIR HAQUE

Why Calling Them “Weird” is Working, and What…