Are You Weird Or the New Normal?

I’m writing this in summer 2024, when the left and right in the United States are debating who is more “weird.”

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and her allies have found a new favorite line of criticism against her Republican opponents. They’re “weird.”

Unsurprisingly, Trump and his supporters are quick to counter with examples of how weird the other side is. ‘We’re actually just the opposite’: Trump says he and Vance are not weird.

I’m not primarily in politics here. I’m just using this as a jumping point to explore how notions of “weird” and “normal” have changed over the years.

The Evolution of Weird

Two American cities, Portland, Oregon and Austin, Texas, have a slogan encouraging people to keep their city weird. They even argue about who said it first. Richard Linklater’s cult classic Slacker first celebrated Austin’s weirdness. Later, the show Portlandia did something similar for Portland.

The modern celebration of weirdness, quirkiness, or unconventionality is partly an outgrowth of the 1960s counterculture, the Beatniks of the 1950s and, going back even earlier, to the bohemian subcultures of Paris, London, and other places in the 1920s. Celebrating weirdness aligns with an artistic, individualist ethic, one…