Why Weird Won

The necessity of Trump

Last night, I happened to walk by the Trump International Hotel on Columbus Circle. I briefly paused to take in the scene. What seemed notable was that there were no other passers by along that busy stretch of Broadway who seemed to notice the name emblazoned on the building or think much of it. I cast my mind back to the times I passed by the same spot after the 2016 election, when barricades and police were usually deployed to protect the property from the protesters who were a constant presence in the city back then. Another small piece of evidence, I thought, for Ryan Zickgraf’s prescient diagnosis of America’s “new politics of nothing.” “If hyperpolitics really is dead,” Ryan wrote back in 2023, “we will know as we draw closer to the 2024 election.” I think we have our answer.

A few days earlier, as the scale of Trump’s victory was becoming evident, I of course cast my mind back to 2016. Like many, I experienced that election as a reality-breaking event. On a late night subway ride from Manhattan to Brooklyn after watching the results come in at a friend’s apartment, I saw quite a few people openly weeping and spontaneously commiserating with strangers. (The route passed near the Javits Center, the infamous scene of the Clinton campaign’s Waterloo, and I think a few traumatized attendees boarded at one point.) Already on the next day, and for many days after, the shock and horror were channeled into street protests, most of which seemed to culminate in cathartic primal scream-fests outside Trump Tower. The mood in the city in those weeks was apocalyptic. Although I had to conceal it from most of my social circle at the time, I found it all sort of exhilarating. 

“We’re not going back” was a phrase Kamala Harris’s campaign seized on, trying to capitalize on the public’s exhaustion with Trump-era hyperpolitics. The problem was that many may have been less exhausted by Trump than by the antics of the Democratic establishment: the hysterical, sanctimonious style, the ludicrous self-fashioning as an anti-fascist #resistance. Harris leaned into this approach in the final weeks of the campaign, bringing on Liz Cheney to revive the party’s unpopular front with the moribund George W. Bush GOP. After 2016, it was Democrats and never-Trumpers—joined eagerly by much of the left—who very much did want to “go back,” to shovel up and dispose of the “garbage,” the “weird shit”—Bush’s phrase to Hillary Clinton at Trump’s inauguration—of Trumpism. But the weird shit won, yet again.

Why? The simplest answer might be: America is pretty weird, and often likes weirdness. The fact that Tim Walz became a Democratic star for calling conservatives “weird” says a lot about how managerial liberalism conceives of its mission: enforcing norms by, as Ashley Frawley puts it, “manag[ing] ordinary life, set[ting] cultural tastes, and oversee[ing] social care.” Some of the norms being enforced themselves seem pretty, well, weird—yet once rolled out, they are treated solemnly, as holy writ. This is why, as Frawley observes: “Trump’s rhetorical offenses may have helped more than they hurt his campaign in the end; the coarser the talk, the more it sticks up the middle finger at the performative kindness of the social-problems class.” 

Along similar lines, Christopher Caldwell notes in his post-election column: “In the course of the campaign Trump and Vance left an impression of rebellion, improvisation, openness. Their formless, fun, often highly intelligent multi-hour rallies … were more like parties. By contrast Harris and Walz, both of them awkward without a script, looked cold and humorless.” So much for “joy” and “freedom.” Moreover, in tension with Harris’s effort to project her fun side was her highlighting of her prosecutorial record and her opponent’s criminality. As Caldwell writes, she “enjoyed using the epithet ‘felon.’ But so flimsy was the evidence of a crime that neither she nor any participant in her campaign ever even tried to explain what his offense was.”

In addition to Caldwell and Frawley, we’ve run a truly stellar roster of writers on the election this week, including regular columnists Ryan Zickgraf, Batya Ungar-Sargon, and Darel Paul, and guest contributions from some of the sharpest analysts of contemporary politics out there: David Bromwich, Daniel McCarthy, John B. Judis, Zaid Jilani, and Slavoj Žižek. And on local politics, Compact friend and contributor Seneca Scott offered a dispatch from Oakland, Calif., just before the city’s mayor and DA were successfully recalled. Now that the results are in, it’s clear the Oakland backlash against progressive governance is a microcosm of a broader revolt against the often disastrous way Democrats have run their states and cities in recent years. 

In his epic post-election essay, Žižek writes: “Hegel wrote that through its repetition, a historical event asserts its necessity … [Trump’s] first victory could still be attributed to tactical mistakes, but now that he has won again, it should become clear that Trumpian populism expresses a historical necessity.” What are the deeper roots of this necessity? And how will it come to manifest itself going forward? These are questions Compact will continue to ask in the weeks and months to come. We are running a post-election subscription sale through the end of the day. If you’re not a subscriber already, please consider taking advantage of this discount to support our work and read everything we publish in what’s sure to be an interesting year.