A few weeks ago, economist Tyler Cowen wrote on his cult-favourite blog Marginal Revolution about “changes in vibes.” By this he meant that right-wing policy and politicians were on the ascendancy in advance of the upcoming American presidential election. His arguments were compelling and, unsurprisingly for an almost painfully analytical thinker, about a lot more than just vibes.
But as prescient as his post seemed at the time, it also seemed to stale-date quickly. Almost overnight, the momentum the Republicans had following President Biden’s atrocious debate performance and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump shifted, with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over-performing expectations and her selection for vice president, Tim Walz, striking effective blows against Donald Trump and Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance.
Only a few weeks after he published his first blog, Cowen posted again, asking whether the vibes had in fact shifted back. And he’s right to argue that the conditions he’d previously enumerated for the ascendency of the American Right remain compelling. But he’s wrong about the vibes. Trump and the Republicans have lost their mojo, and until they understand why, they won’t be getting it back.
So much has been written now about the moment in a television interview when, before he was chosen to be Harris’ running mate, a loose, laid-back Walz described the Republicans as weird. But while it was a high-impact campaign moment, it seems to have been mostly misunderstood. Overwrought analysis and clumsy attempts to copy Walz’s move either mistake it for ideological vindication (“my policies are good, and other people’s policies are weird!”), or assume it’s a pivot to centrism (Walz is a folksy midwestern moderate!).
But the magic of the Walz “weird” moment, and the approach he and other Democrats have successfully applied to his Republican adversaries in the days following, isn’t working because the family policy espoused by his opponents is unpopular (in fact, the opposite is true), or because he and Harris have moderated themselves (they haven’t), it’s working because it achieves what the best kind of political framing must: it presents a clearly defined worldview and convincingly (and cheerily) asserts it to be utterly mainstream and normal.
As Cowen points out in his original blog post, the American issue environment—hell, the global issue environment—should favour the Republicans. Persistent inflation, out-of-control immigration, a backlash against woke culture and policy—these are not conditions that favour the Democrats. And it’s not just a matter of events. Cowen points to the Trump Republicans’ command of social media and increasingly strong intellectual movement as potent tools to exploit already fertile public policy and public opinion territory. But as internet character Edmund Smirk has been pointing out on X for over a year, this rich issue territory and the young activists emerging from the right-wing new media and think tank movement may be curdling from confidence into hubris. Anyone with a passing interest in Republican politics will have noticed their online feeds going sideways as so many leading American conservative voices have transformed into what Smirk refers to as the Freak Right, losing touch with what he calls Swiftian Normality. They express their worldview in increasingly inaccessible, negative terms. They revel in their tribalism, performing for an audience for whom orthodoxy, stridency, and often cruelty are evidence of legitimacy, seriousness, and purity. They are almost purposefully rejecting the mainstream, mistaking normalcy for softness, indifference for stupidity. Mind you, conservatives don’t have a monopoly on going freakish. Indeed, Canada’s own Pierre Poilievre has taken great advantage of our Liberal government and left-wing establishment’s propensity for weird. A similarly hyper-online contingent of Canadian progressives has developed entirely new vocabularies with which to reject normal people, though they tend to reject the mainstream not for its supposed stupidity and softness but for its purported bigotry and greed. Indeed, the tragedy for Republicans in the U.S. is that Democrats and the American Left have their own fair share of anti-normal behaviour. Whether it’s supporting or sometimes participating in the deeply unpopular and often antisemitic, anti-Israel protests and campus encampments, advocating for defunding police only to see major American cities descend into violent rioting, advancing soft-on-crime policies that see violent criminals walk free, embracing radical “safe-supply” programs that flood the streets with drugs, encouraging record-breaking illegal immigration, or pushing racist DEI policies, it’s not so much the policy priorities as it is the way the Democrats’ own activist class talks about the values these policies reflect. Just as Walz has portrayed JD Vance and a certain kind of Republican as weird, with some discipline and focus, the Republicans could likewise tie Harris to the worst excesses of her movement’s most freakish behaviour (much of which she herself has participated in). Surely Trump can’t pull this off, though, right? Mr. Freak himself? But it wasn’t that long ago that Trump surprised almost everyone and won the 2016 election, not because of his strange quirks but because of his relentless revealing of the weirdness of the elite status quo. Trump’s breaking of the elite consensus was so powerful precisely because more and more mainstream Americans felt gaslit by Democrat and Republican leaders alike promoting weird, alienating policies and messages all the while calling anyone who questioned them crazy. Think free trade with unfair China meant some lost American jobs? Crazy. Think endless illegal immigration might be suppressing wages and hurting the social fabric? Insane. For all his antics, Trump told regular Americans they were the normal ones, just as his opponents were doing all they could to marginalize them. This is what the never-Trumpers get wrong. They think the problem with the Freak Right is that they’re too “Trumpy,” or that Americans can finally be trusted again to make the smart choice and reject his and his party’s irksome ways—all they needed was folksy Walz to call them weird. It may be true that Trump simply isn’t up to the disciplined political performance required to take back the momentum and win the presidency, but if he doesn’t, it won’t be because his worldview is inherently freakish. Nor will it be because the Left was forced to moderate themselves to be appealing. Indeed, Walz is having quite a bit of success standing by his record, by simply talking about it in a way that’s appealing to mainstream Americans. Rather than running to the middle, he’s bringing the mainstream to him, telling his supporters: “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values. One person’s socialism is another person’s neighbourliness.” And unlike Biden, who wanted to make the election about threats to democracy, he and Harris seem to understand that hyperbolically attacking Trump’s policies can backfire (as it did in 2016), so they’re increasingly taking the approach of diminishing Trump’s import, rather than overstating it, marginalizing his relevance, and pushing him to the sidelines, not because his policies are bold, but because…he’s sort of just a weirdo.
Ginny Roth is a Partner at Crestview Strategy and a long-time conservative activist who most recently served as the Director of Communications on Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative leadership campaign.
