Why J.D. Vance being ‘weird’ is not a bad thing

For almost two weeks, the Democrats have had only one term in their word cloud when it comes to J.D. Vance: “Weird.”

On Sunday, Vance finally responded to the charge, on CNN’s State of the Union, calling it: “fundamentally schoolyard bully stuff.” “No, we’re not ,” Trump had told a rally in Montana, a couple of days earlier. “We’re very solid people.”

Yet on it goes. From dawn to dusk, the CNBC/USA Today/NPR message machine has been pumping out the same word in the mouths of different commentators. This is no accident. The “weird” meme is supposed to have started with Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s VP pick, during an appearance on the TV breakfast show Morning Joe. 

Never mind the disastrous overall failure of the Democrats, their capacity to get everyone pumping out the same line — be it “Biden is in the form of his life” or “Vance is weird” — has never been better. 

The recent repetition by Walz of an obviously false meme about how Vance “has sex with couches” is the point at which “weird” loses its attack value, and becomes a potential T-shirt slogan for the VP candidate himself. 

It’s easy to see why the Dems felt it to be potent. The Kamala team’s strategy is evidently to polarize the election on a darkside/lightside axis. Kamala herself is clipped on the net running around being giddy with folksy normality. The vibe is that of the openings of Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show, where Ellen would come out and dance for five minutes with the studio audience.

Meantime, Trump and the manboy goon he keeps in a basement are out there being “weird.” They want to set up a dichotomy between Dark America and Positive America. After all, “I just want everyone to get along, to be positive” is the proto-political opinion of the core voter soccer moms and cat ladies the Democrats will need to turn out. 

In one sense, Vance is about as normal as they come: difficult childhood in working-class America, lawyer, three kids, religious. 

But the feeling Democrats are trying to set up is that there is something beyond that. In truth, Vance stands accused of two great American crimes: introspection and intellectualism.

America has often been characterized as an anti-intellectual nation. The intellectual is a bad pose for the US politician, because the politician’s job is to go out and grab hands. The politician, in this reading, must show that his hands are clean — that he is not hiding anything deeper than the persona he presents.

No one could accuse Joe Biden or Donald Trump of having rich inner lives. Obama perhaps. But not George Bush, or even the supremely intelligent Bill Clinton. 

Vance is indeed a weirdo, because he seems to be interested in first principles, deep reading, and picking up ideas from unusual places. Much has been made of his interest in the online right, in the amateur political theorist Curtis Yarvin, or the many tendrils of the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. 

To the likes of Kamala and her outriders, this is basically him sitting in his mom’s basement with a two-liter bottle of Pepsi and Final Fantasy VII: a card-carrying “incel.” They haven’t had the software update as to what the online right is now, and they have only a lo-res vision of their opponents’ psychology, and not much curiosity. 

Had they bothered to engage fully with his intellectual biography, they’d find the online right is even weirder than their caricature. There’s an emphasis on wellness fads that seldom stack up — from raw milk to the sunning of the scrotum, to plenty of overly-deterministic evolutionary psychology. Many of the self-professed hard men who propagate these ideas are, in reality, a kind of analogue of the antifa types, in that both would be dead within five minutes of a real conflict breaking out. All parlor game, no street smarts.

The Kamala meme is right in that Vance is intelligent enough to be interested in ideas — and intelligent people often sometimes glom onto bad ideas. The salon debates of intellectuals created the French Revolution; ordinary people are not wrong to be suspicious of them. 

But then, they also created the American Revolution. In those times, a self-starting weirdo crank like the pamphleteer Thomas Paine published his Common Sense anonymously – and struggled to find a publisher for a work aimed towards toppling the Empire. These days, he’d have an ironic anime avatar and 15,000 followers. 

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