Theories
- Its literally just because Hillary Clinton sucks so hard and people didnt want to hear that shit from her
- Deplorables is too much of a vocabulary word, weird is a word everyone knows. So deplorable just comes off more elitist, from a woman who is already seen that way. To quote a friend I asked “I think deplorable has a negative connotation that speaks to core personhood, in a way that comes off as both mean spirited and elitist”
- The GOP hadnt gotten unhinged enough yet, so America wasnt ready for a campaign that is dismissive of them and still expected bipartisan respect and shit, but are now because the “weird” shit is so out there all the time
- “Weird” is simply a more effective word to describe the situation at hand
- Deplorables would have worked fine with the young people who can vote now but couldnt in 2008.
- Kamala and especially Walz are better representations of “not weird” than Hillary was a representation of “not deplorable”.
- “Weird” hits them harder, insults them worse, and thus makes them spiral more in a way deplorable didnt
- Deplorable would have worked fine if it wasnt just a one off comment but a sustained campaign message (this one im thinking probably not)
- The Vance effect, he’s just that weird.
- People who are tired of Democrats being respectful like weird a lot
those are all good points, i’d add that deplorable also has a level of moral judgment to it that weird doesn’t and the media balked at hillary saying that trump supporters were bad people. also “weird” is targeting vance and trump specifically instead of just their supporters. i also think that “deplorable” was easy to reclaim for trump supporters in a way that “weird” can’t be. 8+ years of terrible thanksgivings and annoying coworkers/customers/strangers etc also primed non-trump supporters to view them as “weird”, you can only hear about litter boxes in schools and tom hanks being executed in gitmo so many times before you are willing to just brush off anything they say as deranged and, well, weird
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She called “half” of his supporters a “basket of deplorables” which is a lot less targeted than calling the candidates themselves weird.
yeah, the distinction is dems are calling trump, vance, and other republicans weird. hillary was calling voters deplorable, because she’s a fucking genius who fully understands that the best way to get people to vote for you is negging them like some kind of shitty dating coach
Clinton quote:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
Walz quotes:
“That stuff is weird, they come across weird,” Walz said on MSNBC last week. He followed up on CNN Sunday, saying “I see Donald Trump talking about the wonderful Hannibal Lecter or whatever weird thing he is on tonight … That is weird behavior. I don’t think you call it anything else.”
Republicans have successfully defanged the racist and X-phobic terms, so you have to make accusations more concrete. What does transphobic actually mean in plain terms? It means being way too obsessed on whether that girl across the room or on the sports field or in the bathroom has or ever had a penis.
Republicans have successfully defanged the racist and X-phobic term
Not only that, Hillary and her supporters did a lot of the defanging during the primary themselves by falsely accusing Bernie and his supporters of being misogynistic and racist
Straight out of the story of the boy who cried wolf
Its literally just because Hillary Clinton sucks so hard and people didnt want to hear that shit from her
This one has a lot of weight behind it. She’s just that unbearable except to the most brunchy of brunch liberals.
Deplorables is too much of a vocabulary word, weird is a word everyone knows. So deplorable just comes off more elitist, from a woman who is already seen that way. To quote a friend I asked “I think deplorable has a negative connotation that speaks to core personhood, in a way that comes off as both mean spirited and elitist”
Speaking as a former educator, I think this one also has significant weight. Using “big words” among the cool/bully crowd is like a beacon for bullying for the rest of that school year. It fucking sucks, but there wasn’t too much I can do about it, except sometimes using the “big word” myself multiple times after I know what it is sometimes diluted the distinction and directed some of the groaning towards me instead of the bullied kid (I’d rather take groans than have some kid get tormented for standing out too much).
Kamala and especially Walz are better representations of “not weird” than Hillary was a representation of “not deplorable”.
This one’s powerful. I subscribe to this one. As vile as Harris/Walz can be, they’re certainly less creepy than the old
bunch.People who are tired of Democrats being respectful like weird a lot
I’m not a Democrat and I still feel this one, even if I’m worried about “weird” people getting marginalized and bullied for being “weird” in ways that have nothing to do with Christofascist police states or billionaire vampire bloodboy coup attempts.
Chuds revel in being evil. Calling them villains or bad guys or saying they’re a disgrace will have no effect. “Clever” whedonesque comebacks never work because they’re dork shit. You just sound like an elementary school nerd in a crappy TV show trying to outsmart a bully. It never works, even in media.
Calling them creepy freaks works for the same reason it worked in elementary school. It others them and identifies their views as abnormal and fringe. A huge aspect of their ideology is the false belief that they and their beliefs are normal, that they are the bulwark of normalcy fighting against people who want to do strange and unnatural things. Slapping them with a straight-up dismissal of them and their views with a refusal to engage shuts them down entirely.
Clinton was speaking about the supporters and not the leaders. So I’d agree with you that she came off as a snobby out of touch elite who didn’t like the unwashed masses.
There’s also the thing about the conservatives trying to wear the mantle of “silent majority” that calling conservative leadership and talking heads weird seems to be sticking.
It might also be a good way to sidestep getting sucked into a debate bro situation. It’s up to the other person to not be weird, you don’t have to supply a logical argument why somebody else is weird.
Yeah I agree with this and I see it as punching up vs punching down. Even though Trump supporters are genuinely terrible, the appearance of punching down by Hilldog just makes them feel picked on. Calling their leaders weird on the other hand is more effective at peeling off support.
supporters and not the leaders
snap!
she couldn’t effectively deal with trump so she punched down
I… actually don’t give Clinton enough credit to think it was an intentional strategy to punch down.
I honestly believe it was her speaking honestly and nobody in her campaign team either pointed out how shitty it was to say or maybe they, themselves, thought the same thing to such a degree that it didn’t dawn on them that it was a shitty thing to say.
Like, this emote, where Clinton’s walking through a “normal” person’s apartment and she’s looking around in wide eyed wonder/disgust like “why would somebody want to live like this?”
I think that is over thinking it. Republicans don’t mind being deplorable. There is a kind of virtue there. Being hated is a kind of respect.
Republicans are conservative, so they are specifically against being weird. to call them weird is to use a weapon they are weak to. It is just resonant emotionally
I figure whats gonna happen is Dems’ll never get what made “weird” work. It’s not the word itself it’s the dismissal without disdain. “Weird” is different than normal. “Normal” is what fascists claim to be. Is you call them weirdos it ruins their argument, since part of the whole populism thing means they have be seen as normal before they can denounce “the other”
“Deplorable” is as OP says, elitist. Anyone with chops can discount “deplorable” by singin’ “friends in low places” and get right back to vilifying “the other”.
But i don’t think they’ll ever get that. I think they’ll lean on “weird” until it’s lost it’s meaning. My personal guess as to why? They actually are elitist so they don’t get the difference.
It’s not the word itself it’s the dismissal without disdain.
This is basically it. It’s flippant and dismissive, and signals that their argument isn’t worth intellectually engaging with. No debate, just, “Yeah okay weirdo.”
“Shut up, nerd” works so much better than most other tactics against Reddit-style debate perverts, too.
Deplorable is a weird word and not just because it’s a big word
How many of you honestly think to yourselves “that’s deplorable” when you hear about something terrible? I don’t know about the rest of you but when I find out a cop murdered another person or about some nazi shit or about some nonce shit or something like that, my first thoughts are “that’s disgusting” not “that’s deplorable”
Deplorable is an attack yes but it’s a weak attack, it’s an old timey word that has been relegated to academia and devoid of any emotion behind it
Someone calling something or someone deplorable just has no bite to it because you can tell that the person using the word doesn’t actually care about the thing they’re talking about
If Hillary actually hated Trump supporters even half as much as I do she’d have called them disgusting hogs because that’s what they are
“Deplorable” is the kind of word you use to describe out-there behavior that clearly crosses some sort of line. Some guy in the checkout line talking too loud about Trump isn’t deplorable, but he is weird. Deplorable would be chanting “Jews will not replace us”.
If you ignore belief, ignore what people say and only look at what they do; then most people who vote republican live functionally identical lives to people who vote democrat. Most of them won’t go to a rally in Charlottesville or the capital (that’s your outliers, people really plugged-in and feeling strongly about spectacle-politics), but they will have slightly weird answer if you asked them about it. “Weird” describes more of them than “deplorable” ever could.
Instead of “this is a sign of the rising tide of fascism” or “a threat to our democracy” or whatever, “weird” is a more general thing that speaks to whatever the listener is attuned to but generally understands as the off-putting wrongness of these Republican ghouls. It helps that Democrats have finally (by virtue of sidestepping any sort of primary election for their candidate) put Blank Slate Generic Candidate at the top of their Presidential ticket.
Also nobody was interested in hearing Hillary Dang Clinton talking down about any part of the electorate. It reinforced her elitist image in a way that all the attack ads in the world could only wish to do
deplorables has too many syllables
Let’s put it this way: I’m a very smart person, and I can’t give a specific definition for Deplorable. I can’t even think of easy examples. The first thing that comes to mind is Jews in the Holocaust. It’s so complex that to most people it really just means bad. It failed because nobody fucking knows what it means.
Deplorables would have worked fine with the young people who can vote now but couldnt in 2008.
I don’t think Deplorables even works now. It’s unclear what it refers to.
With weird, anyone can instantly think of a million weird things the republicans are doing at any moment.
“weird” has a connotation of impotence/weakness that deplorable, far-right, fascist, etc. don’t
if you were asked to think of “weird” people you knew in high school, you don’t think of the jocks, or bullies, or even the class clowns, you think of the people who were obsessed with anime and didn’t shower enough
The big thing for me is that weird is a morally neutral word, but it can be used in this context to create a moral judgement. Basically, you can claim something is factually weird, but then the audience gets to interpolate the moral value out of it. Requiring audience participation in the moral judgement allows people to feel included in making that moral judgement, and on the other side, you then have to try to either contest if what you are doing is ‘wierd’ or if ‘weird’ is not a morally bad thing, something that Republicans can’t do because they consider themselves ‘normal’, even though they are objectively weird people (as most politicians are).
It’s a good rhetorical play, but it is becoming cringe imo.
