The ‘weird’ allegations go transatlantic

Where American left-liberal rhetoric leads, British left-liberal rhetoric invariably follows. Hate speech, reparations, decolonization, white fragility; there is no intellectual fad so inane that it will not be enthusiastically mimicked, with childlike credulity, by journalists, academics, civil servants and broadcasters, regardless of whether it even makes sense in a British context. The impression you get is of status-conscious provincials seizing, herd-like, on the latest fashions and conventional wisdom from the imperial centre. 

The accusation of weirdness is a striking example of the decline of political rhetoric

So it is that barely a month after the Democrats and their allies in the US media adopted “weird” as their attack line on Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, some on the other side of the pond are trying their best to make it a term of derision in British politics. The Guardian reports of research by the think tank More in Common which allegedly shows that some voters are beginning to regard the Tories as “weird.”

This output is extremely unsurprising. More in Common is a classic blob outfit. Their money appears to come almost entirely from grant-making organizations totally captured by progressive activists. Their key purpose seems to be what some commentators call “consensus laundering,” i.e. giving the appearance of popular civil society support for policies which are in fact the pet projects of dogmatic elites, and command minimal popular enthusiasm.

The accusation of weirdness is a striking example of the decline of political rhetoric. We have, sadly, left behind the old expectation that politics should consist of robust rhetoric and agonistic debates, conducted without lasting personal animus, in favor of what you might describe as a Mean Girls culture. 

In the new dispensation, passive-aggressive digs and snarky attacks are the order of the day, backhanded attacks on reputation rather than straightforward exchanges of ideas. “Weird” is a fundamentally juvenile and thoughtless insult, redolent of the cruel ostracism faced at school by children who look or speak or behave differently to the crowd. 

It also has no real content, because even if we take it more seriously than we should, as an honest attempt at description, it simply means something like “incongruent with the norms of a particular group or institution.” So from the perspective of the Biden-Harris White House, which hosts parties for men who pose topless with fake breasts, and which briefly employed a “kink activist” who was later charged with stealing women’s clothes at airports, then J.D. Vance — a married conservative and observant Catholic with three children — probably does seem very weird. For Mr. Vance himself, I would imagine that things look a little different. 

Similarly, in the UK, promoting the idea that Tories are “weird,” presumably because they are well-spoken or well-dressed or well-educated, feels like nothing more than pandering to anti-intellectualism or reverse snobbery. And frankly, the last thing we need is a race to the bottom, where any politician who wants to look the part, or discuss complicated matters, or choose his words with precision, faces the accusation of being out of touch or strange.

There’s an inescapable element of projection in the charge, too. Britain’s progressive rulers espouse all sorts of beliefs and attitudes which would seem entirely bizarre not only to previous generations, but to most people in the world today. That a man can become a woman is the most obvious of these, but there are others: net zero fanaticism, disdain for the history and traditions of their own country, ferocious adherence to the diversity cult. None of these things are really “normal” or popular, but they are the unquestioned axioms of the ruling class so their sheer strangeness is under-discussed. 

Of course, organizations using dubious data to paint the Tories as oddballs might have another purpose, namely to narrow the Overton window, to limit the range of policies that can be openly discussed. There is a growing sense on the right of politics that a new radicalism is needed — on energy, on borders, on free speech, on national identity, on crime, on parliamentary sovereignty. 

Hence the attempt to force the idea that it is “weird” to want to abandon net zero, or to reform the UK Human Rights Act or the Equality Act, or to abolish the various committees that have assumed enormous quasi-judicial power over MPs without any of the due process protections that true courts offer defendants. The Tories must not let themselves be bamboozled into accepting this account. The “center ground” is a chimaera, an illusion. Attempting to occupy it is like trying to catch fog in a net.   

There is no point at all in simply trying to avoid the appearance of weirdness by embracing the pre-emptive defensive crouch. The trick is to render the claim nonsensical and trivial with a laser focus on fixing Britain’s problems.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.