The Normal Ones

Religious fanatics and phrenology aficionados obsessed with women's fertility and schoolchildren's genitals and ages of consent and hording guns in anticipation of enacting revolutionary Patrick Henry fever dreams ahead of the coming rapture need you to know that they are not a bunch of creepy weirdos. It's very important to them that you understand that they are extremely normal, and to prove it they'd like to show you several of the thousands of pictures they keep in their phone of perfectly nice trans people who are just living their lives, which they will brandish at you in a performative show of disgust meant to establish their own comparative normalcy.

I should back up. There's been a discourse around the word "weird." This discourse unbelievably only started about a week ago, even though it feels like it's been at least a month given how much chatter there's been—yet another example of how I'd need to write daily to keep up with things in the age of Too Much News, and even then my hot takes would probably come off as lukewarm. Time used to be a flat circle but now I think it's more like a burned pancake. Nevertheless, at the risk of being late to the party, I'd like to write about "weird."

What happened is the Governor of Minnesota, whose name is Tim Walz¹, was being interviewed on television, as governors and people who might become vice president tend to be, and when he was asked about Republicans and their policies he dismissed both as "weird," citing Republicans' strangely sweaty-minded and invasive desires toward their fellow citizens in the medical exam rooms and libraries of our country, to name just the two examples he gave. Democrats, who often have trouble recognizing a winning talking point even if it flies directly into their open mouths, nevertheless picked up the Weird ball and ran with it; and this one word—weird—seems to have entirely unhinged the conservative establishment from the man on the street to talking head on the teevee to elected official.

So for a week the whole discourse seems to have been a tug-of-war over who the real weirdos are. Conservatives believe it is everyone but them, and to prove it, they issue sneering statements about the existence of everyone but them, which seem predicated on the idea "hey look at this fucking weird person who shouldn't exist but does," and then suggest what sort of punishment is appropriate to ensure that such people are excluded and punished. Regular decent people, meanwhile, have noticed that demanding an exclusive license on normalcy is some real weirdo shit to demand, and sneering about the existence of diversity to secure that license and use weirdness as an excuse to punish people is some real weirdo shit to do, which is probably why Walz's framing has taken hold.

"Listen to them speak," Walz said in the interview, "listen to how they talk about things."

It's a good idea, really. We should listen to conservatives in general and Republicans in particular. They've been calling their political opponents vermin and saying they've been poisoning the blood of the people and promoting the vile antisemitic replacement myth and many other pieces of direct Nazi propaganda, and in recent months their long-tied piss-haired reality-show-pretend-billionaire candidate for president has carved out some of the time he usually uses for praising dictators to blather relentlessly about Hannibal Lector, almost certainly because he doesn't know the difference between political asylum and an insane asylum. And yes, they're saying that Kamala Harris isn't really Black and not really a parent, and that her husband is a "crappy Jew," and frothing at the mouth because they've decided that an Olympic boxer who is a cis woman isn't a cis woman, and they talk about passing laws forcing sex to stop being about fun and start being about consequences, and if that's not enough for you, here comes their large fermented Cabbage Patch doll of a vice presidential candidate, Junior Development Vance. The veep hopeful has been attacking single women and childless women and just women in general, though we must be fair and admit that he's affirmed he loves his wife even though she "obviously isn't a white person," and that is awkward since he is a top leader of a political movement that wants to end birthright citizenship and enact mass deportations, and is pretending to not understand how mixed-race identity works. Vance has been going after childlessness in general, which could make sense given that he belongs to a political movement that wants to force nine-year-old rape victims to give birth and to ban all contraception and treat all women as nothing but an empty vessel for a future fetus, but is bizarre when you consider he is representing a political movement that wants to ban fertility treatments like IVF; and he's also a big proponent of fun new conservative policies like state menstrual surveillance of all people who can give birth, and restricting their travel to ensure their compliance with anti-abortion laws, and, again, all of this is simultaneously just loonbat flappywing bugshit weirdo shit and also deeply authoritarian and creepy and unpopular with most people and also very much within the mainstream of Republican political intention, and also exactly the sort of thing that crowds of well-fed comfortable pink-faced people waving signs that say MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW really seem to love. And honestly I could go on for three times as long, four times, ten times. It's just a relentless stream of vile supremacist bigotry and misogyny and hypocrisy and counterfactual nonsense, and has been for years and years and years, and I mean my god who besides fascist sickos aren't sick of it up past their eyeballs by now?

"Weird" works because the behavior of conservatives in general and Republicans in particular is all extremely weirdo shit, it's nothing that normal people who are just living their lives want, yet conservatives in general and Republicans in particular just can't stop saying they will deliver it, which is itself weird. They have a disgusting leader, and a revolting party, and their adherence to it is disgusting and perverse and revolting to decent people everywhere.

So yes, it's instructive to listen to how they talk about things.

More specifically, we can just look at the conservative reaction to being called weird, which is itself deeply weird, and suggests why it is that "weird" seems to damage their psyche so badly.

That's the thing I really want to talk about—the why.

It's a matter of license: who gets to have it, and who gets to issue it.

This is something that's changed quite a lot over the years.

My book of essays, Very Fine People, is now available. Click the link for signed personalized copies or direct purchase.

Not so very long ago, it wasn't normal to be trans or gay or even nonconforming to very strict gender roles in any way. It wasn't normal to be a woman with a powerful job. It wasn't even normal to be a woman with a paid job of any kind. It wasn't normal or even legal to be a woman with a bank account. It wasn't normal to be a woman who could just chart their own way in life, and make their own decisions about their bodies and their lives for themselves. And it wasn't normal to be Jewish, it wasn't normal to be Muslim, it wasn't normal to be Hindu, it wasn't normal to be an atheist; nor was it normal to be Black, or Asian, or any identity in a category called "nonwhite" that people used without really thinking about it. It wasn't normal to be chronically sick or disabled, and it certainly wasn't normal to expect to be treated as a full member of society if your way of being was not normal. And there were many many other ways of being that weren't normal either. They were different, other—weird.

Some of these ways of being abnormal were permitted to a degree, others were not. They were permitted by The Normal Ones, who had the license to decide what identity was, and to establish the strictures within which the identity they have defined as permissible must remain, outside of which that identity could not stray. And not so very long ago, one of the main requirements for anyone with a "weird" identity who was receiving from license for that identity was that they would agree that The Normal Ones had the right to bestow such a license, because they and only they were truly normal.

It was normal to be white. It was normal to be a Christian. It was normal to be a man with a job, and it was normal to be a woman who was a man's property. It was normal for children to be viewed as property of the parents, which (see previous point) meant the property of the man. It was normal to be straight and cis. It was normal to be able-bodied and employed. More importantly, though, these were the only normal things to be. To not be those things was to be abnormal, and to be abnormal was to be at the mercy of The Normal Ones.

Abuse—by those who were normal, of those who were not normal—used to be normal, and not ever acknowledging how all the most normal forms of abuse actually *were* abuse was most normal of all. It was perfectly normal to be racist, misogynist, a religious bigot, as a way of defending and maintaining normalcy, which was a way of defending who did and who did not have the right to make decisions about what identities would be permitted, and to what extent the permission would be allowed. So rape was normal, and bigotry was normal, and exclusion and threats and punishment and murder of those who committed the offense of trespassing the established boundaries of what ways of being human would be permitted by normal people was normal.

I fooled you. All of that is still normal. But increasingly, more and more of us are moving on from all that. We're done with it.

Imperfectly, to be sure, haltingly, no doubt. Sometimes it feels as if we've been scaling a mountain face and only recently passed through some clouds, allowing us a view, previously obscured, of what lay above—and so the distance we've come often only affords us a better view of how much further we have to climb. I know some would like to use the daunting climb looming above us to claim that we haven't climbed at all. But, if we are attentive and look downward long enough, we can see, peeking through the clouds, the vast prospect of rigid and supremacist normalcy we've left behind. We can see all the ways of being a human that used to depend upon normalized bigotry for permission to exist but which now give themselves their own permission to exist, without seeking any other. We can see more and more identities that are now considered normal, and more and more of the abuse that once was granted as normal is now recognized, from loftier vantage, for the abnormal perversion it is.

Increasingly, normal people celebrate difference and diversity and uniqueness. Being called "weird" doesn't bother normal people, because their worldviews are big enough to handle weirdness.

But "weird" is a massive problem for The Normal Ones—people who depend on supremacy, and depend on the abuse that protected and enforced it, for their fortune and their identity. They can't be weird. The suggestion that they might be terrifies them, because they believe if they are "weird" it means they will be punished ... which they believe because punishment is what they deliver to those they deem weird. They hate the report of the view we give them. They'd like us to climb back down the mountain face. If we won't climb down, they'll jump, if only for the pleasure of making the rest of us, who are still tethered to them, fall.

Let me give you an example of the climb.

Kamala Harris is Black woman with mixed racial identity who may well become President of the United States. She has ties to our industrialized punishment complex that we can and should discuss at another time, as we think about the best ways to navigate the climb still before us; however, those markers of her identity present us with a string of facts, which, within living memory, would have made the notion of her candidacy absolutely impossible, laughable abnormal, wrong, even dangerous—that somebody who had been so abnormalized simply because of who she was would so impertinently exceed the boundaries of permission granted to her by The Normal Ones.

In fact, so recently was this the case that there are still people who believe it, and can't stop saying so, attacking her race and the fact that she is a stepmother instead of a real mother, and dozens or hundreds or thousands of other increasingly angry attempts—aimed at Harris and millions of other targets—to reestablish the right of The Normal Ones to license other people's identities, increasingly desperate attempts to reestablish their right to bestow permission to exist and punish infractions upon those boundaries. So they sneer and jeer and wave their saved pictures of perfectly nice people just living their lives as evidence that next to these weirdos they are The Normal Ones—even though doing so exposes them as deeply perverse and strange and wrong.

What recent discourse is exposing is something I’ve been trying to say for years now, which is that there is little The Normal Ones who call themselves "conservative" and rally around the Republican banner care about more than being recognized as the only normal ones by everyone else, specifically because it is this recognition that powers their supremacy. They demand that license, and they’ll use bullying and the threat of punishment to get it, and all too often they receive it from a cowed opposition and a lazy public.

So there's a danger to "weird," as some are pointing out, because exclusion based on abnormality is what supremacy runs on. We will probably do well to move on from "weird" in due time—both for this reason, and also because conservatives are doing what they always do whenever they face a new line of attack, which is to simply co-opt it and swamp it until the sheer volume of I'm-rubber-you're-glue makes the word start to sound like nonsense.

However, there's a real value to "weird" right now, because it cancels the normalcy of our nation's white supremacists and Christian patriarchs, not because of who they are, but because of what they do, which is to abuse others for identity and profit, demanding to be known as The Normal Ones specifically for their exclusion and bigotry, and to threaten punishment and abuse to any who refuse to comply with the strictures upon identity they define, or to recognize their license to grant permission. What makes "weird" so useful for the moment is that by framing supremacists as the abnormal ones, it triggers the exact behavior from them that is so fucking weird, reinforcing the framing, creating differentiators between those who celebrate weirdness and those who would eradicate weirdness, in ways that even complacent and unaware people can grasp.

What saying "weird" means in this context is that it's normal to want government to help people, and it is abnormal to want it to harm people. It's normal to be part of and to celebrate an ever-increasing diversity of identity, and it's abnormal to want to control and define everyone else's identity. And, crucially, it is dismissive of supremacy. It says to supremacists, "If you are going to behave in such a topsy-turvy and indecent manner, I will oppose you, but I will not take you seriously."

The trouble with trying to beat The Normal Ones by debating them on policy is it frames the nature of the fight as a policy disagreement, obfuscating the real problem, which is that, underneath their steaming hillocks of bullshit and hypocritical rationales and bizarre conspiracy theories, they are cruel bullies with strange hang-ups and violent intentions.

And here's what I think it all means: The Normal Ones—Republicans and white evangelicals and neo-Nazis groups and other allied groups of supremacists—are losing their license to bestow normalcy, and they know it. They remain a threat, and a serious one, because they appear not only willing but eager to wage war to save their power from the loss of the license, but the license is being revoked even as they fight.

We still have a long way to climb. But take a minute; peek down through the clouds. In more and more ways, it is no longer seen as normal to be an abusive supremacist bigot. It just isn't. It used to be normal in almost every way, and now, in more and more ways, it isn't.

I write in my book, Very Fine People, that our society is a natural human system. Natural because it utilizes value found in the natural world. Human because it is modified by humans to generate even more value than can be naturally found in ways that are automatic and inextricable. System because these modifications are mediated through systems that humans devise, with effects that humans inherit. And I think that supremacy is an unnatural perversion of a natural human system, which attempts to steal for itself all the value natural human systems generate, while avoiding any natural costs of repair and improvement, and passing the much higher unnatural costs of brokenness to those who are deprived by supremacy's theft.

I think the way to counter such a perversion is by repairing brokenness, which we can only do by becoming people of repair. And repair is a natural process, which begins with entering awareness of what is broken, which leads to conviction that what is broken should be repaired, which leads to public confession of this awareness and conviction, which leads to a systemic realigning of priorities toward that repair, which leads at last to the actual effort and cost of repair ... and the repair will lead to awareness of the next thing to repair, because every act of repair is just another handhold, another 12 inches up the stone face, and we are nowhere close to finished with our climb up this mountain.

Supremacists, opposed to all repair, attack each step of repair's process. They attack awareness with ignorance, conviction with complacency, confession with denial, realignment with oppression. And they respond to any act of actual repair with war—literally, war. Americans who want to kill Americans are thick on the ground these days. Just read their signs, and you'll know.

But here's the thing: It's not necessary for supremacy to focus on manufacturing complacency—not unless awareness has broken through ignorance. It's not necessary for supremacy to engage in relentless denial, unless the truth is being widely proclaimed. It's not necessary for supremacy to legislate forms of oppression, unless the oppression that naturally comes from ignorance and complacency and denial is breaking down, and people are actually aligning themselves toward repair. And supremacists won't wage war against repair unless repair is actually happening, because bullies hate getting punched, and avoiding the danger of getting punched is what the bullying is for.

What does this mean? It means that the supremacist desire for war we see from The Normal Ones is evidence that repair is happening. Their new oppressive laws are evidence that more and more people are repenting of supremacism and aligning with repair of what supremacy has broken. Their denials mean they are hearing accusation. They manufacture complacency because they face increasing conviction. They're lying so much because the truth is out there.

Republicans and neo-Nazis and other types of fascists and supremacists aren't ready to wage war because of their great strength but because of their growing weakness. They'd be defending democracy if democracy still upheld their supremacy perfectly, as it used to do, if democracy wasn't on the verge of making them irrelevant. They're ready to demolish our system because, even though it is still accommodating them to an alarming degree, it's no longer working well enough for them to be thought of exclusively as The Normal Ones, and so they sense the diminishment of their advantage.

We've long lived in a world where bullies are normal, and to an alarming degree we still live in that world. But awareness is growing that it is supremacists and other types of bullies who are weird, perverse, wrong, in a way that being gay or trans or femme or butch, or a Black woman of Jamaican Indian heritage, or any other previously abnormal and constraint identity, never was.

So we keep climbing, fingers numb, limbs aching, perfectly willing to leave behind those opposed to upward movement, to detach our lines from those who would rather jump and die just for the satisfaction of making the rest of us fall. We'll keep climbing until we no longer have to hear their weird bullshit in our ears, not because we hate them, or fail to recognize that they are humans too, but because we've come too far, and we're done with all that abnormal bullshit.

Sometimes, on sunny days, it really does feel as if we may have broken through the clouds. When we squint, we think we might just see the summit.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries, and the essay collection Very Fine People, which are available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He's an alligator, he's a mama-papa coming for you.

¹ Walz recently came to public attention for passing a bill that ensured that schoolchildren would be fed, and if that sounds like a good thing to you, congratulations! you have a normal and healthy reaction to hungry children. You may or may not have noticed that feeding hungry children is the sort of thing that Republicans refer to as a moral catastrophe. This is part of Republican's decades-long general opposition to government—which is the way human beings organize their shared life together in a natural human system— doing anything at all to make life easier for human beings. If you doubt me, find a Republican, and ask them what they think of governments helping people. My prediction is they'll use their favorite laugh line about government helping and the scariest words in the English language. Since the 1980s its been a reflex as predictable as the one with the rubber hammer on the knee bone.