“Weird” conservatives and the end of whiny self-righteousness

In the wake of Biden’s withdrawal from the race and Kamala Harris’s shockingly rapid and decisive ascension, I have begun feeling emotions that I haven’t allowed myself to feel in connection to politics in a long time: hope, excitement, even enjoyment. As many commentators have noted, there is a joyfulness, even a level of fun, to Harris’s campaign that is an almost shocking contrast to what came before. The fact that they are playing along with the JD Vance couch meme may be the clearest sign that they are in tune with contemporary culture, but the more general pattern of calling conservative leaders “weird” and “creepy” feels like a major turning point — not just in terms of political tactics, but in terms of liberal political culture. It marks the end of a certain fatalistic defensiveness on the one hand, and also of the joylessly self-righteous habits of policing and shaming allies on the left.

For all my life, conservatives have been the norm. Everybody (who matters) feels at best very uncomfortable about abortion and non-normative sexuality. Everybody (who matters) resents the burden of funding high-quality public service. Etc., etc., etc. Tactical observations from the early 90s hardened into inescapable truisms, even as they became less and less true. This produced a permanent defensive crouch, as Democrats seemed to believe that Republican rule was the norm and they could at best eke out a narrow win to take their turn — at passing a more nuanced and “smarter” version of Republican policies. Priority number one after each victory was to get bipartisan support, as though Democrats didn’t believe it was legitimate for them to legislate on their own. Attachment to the fillibuster rule among the older cohort of Democratic senators is the most destructive example of this built-in defeatism.

So the new confidence of the Harris campaign is refreshing, as is the contempt and puzzlement they express at conservatives’ increasingly unpopular and downright bizarre beliefs. More specifically, what is refreshing here is their willingness to be mean, to insult, to reduce their opponents to sputtering speechlessness. I cannot emphasize enough how much of a break this is with the joylessly self-righteous policing of language that has been the norm among liberals and leftists for my entire adult life. From that perspective, the parody responses write themselves — “we shouldn’t kink-shame JD Vance…” or “Republican leaders won’t read your post calling them weird, but your friends who could be viewed as weird for completely unrelated and totally harmless reasons will…” — and the fact that it’s so easy to come up with them shows how that mode of engagement has reduced itself to self-parody.

A key shift for me when I saw a white man worrying aloud about the tendency to refer to Vice President Harris as “Kamala” — there is of course a whole history of belittling people by refusing the respect of their last name, it’s especially fraught since she’s a Black woman, etc., etc. And I will be honest with you and say my first response was that this person should simply shut the fuck up. “Kamala” is a very distinctive name, whereas “Harris” is not. Her own social media team is called “Kamala HQ.” We do not need to get out ahead of the supposed “victim” herself.

More broadly, though, my strong gut reaction reflected my belief that we have just got to be done with this style of whiny preemptive strike against any hypothetical offense that may one day be perceived. Political correctness is a strategy that has failed. Aside from eliminating the grossest slurs and overtly bigoted jokes — which even conservatives themselves know not to share in mixed company — it has produced only irritation and insecurity.

People like to present it as simple common sense, but the euphemism treadmill and, more than that, the constant incentive to find ever more nuances of linguistic “oppression” ensure that the politically correct linguistic norms can never actually settle into a coherent common sense. It produces bristly defensiveness in those who can’t keep up and an unhealthy and counterproductive readiness to be offended among the avant-garde. My favorite example of the counterproductive nature of such language policing is the fact that disability activists are more or less singlehandedly keeping alive the etymological association of words like “moron” with disability. Linguistic usage moves on — take the win! But no, etymology is destiny when it gives you something to nitpick and alienate potential allies over.

Related here, I think, is the culture of constantly nitpicking headlines from the New York Times on social media. Again, the belief is that politics will take care of itself if everyone agrees to speak in just the right way. Obviously, the New York Times is a bad actor in many ways and the media establishment is artificially propping up Trump through the application of double standards. They are worthy of critique, but the obsessiveness and detail-orientation of the critique is what raises my hackles. It bespeaks a whiny wounded entitlement, as though we all believe that the New York Times should be a liberal actor or that a simple description of reality would automatically favor our politics.

In reality, to do politics, you have to do politics. The media is not an umpire, it is a terrain of struggle. The Harris campaign is engaging that struggle much more effectively than Joe Biden ever could because it does not embrace the false premise that the New York Times is or should be on her side by default. And she has received overwhelmingly favorable coverage! Not 100% — there is always something to whine about, of course. They don’t always put the word “falsely” in the headline, and sometimes they take too long describing Trump or Vance’s claims before debunking them. They achieved that not by whining about how unfair the Times has been, but by actively setting the agenda and setting the tone.

And that tone is mean. It is contemptuous. It aims to harm Trump and Vance and their reputations. It aims to make them personally angry and make people question their loyalty to such deeply flawed men. To achieve these goals, it is not overly concerned about petty details like whether JD Vance really engaged in an elaborate form of masturbation involving his furniture and described it at length in his memoir — much less whether other furniture-masturbation enthusiasts might be collateral damage of the joke. The joy and humor and fun of the Harris campaign, the way that it acknowledges the Republicans as enemies without setting them up as all-powerful, hopefully marks a decisive end to that kind of idiocy. From now on, entitlement and prickly defensiveness can remain in its more natural home — among the washed up losers who have coasted on white male privilege so long and spent so much time in the “safe space” of their ideological bubble that they don’t realize how pathetic they appear to anyone halfway normal — because eventually everyone complaining about unfair media coverage and moaning about how they aren’t being shown the proper respect will realize that… they sound like Trump.