AMERICA IS A WEIRD society, in the full sense of the notion of weirdness. It is large, diverse, dynamic, but those are just cliches that everyone from Tocqueville on has observed. What it truly is is weird, in that its society doesn’t necessarily obey sensible or regular laws. Compare: anyone who has ever gone doorknocking for a political campaign in Australia will know that the spectrum of things that people believe is extraordinary, and well, well beyond the boundaries of what’s sensible or supportable by evidence, sometimes even what’s tolerable, but mostly there’s a lot of weird shit. If you start talking to people in unstructured conversations, you’re going to get very strange ideas bubbling up. People in Australian electorates are weirder than we think, maybe weirder than we can think. As odd as Australia can be, America is magnitudes stranger.

There’s a well-recognised and very old overlap between esotericism and the extreme Right, which, since the American extreme right is now simply the Right, is also now common. Donald Trump launched his official 2024 campaign in Waco, Texas, the city that was the site of the 1993 Branch Davidian siege, a cause celebre of the 1990s paranoid right. For anyone with memory of the time that’s a brutally unsubtle statement, and an implied endorsement not only of the violent affect, but also of the conspiratoria that grew up around it (and that of Ruby Ridge), which, not coincidentally, came to fixate on the Clinton family. The American political Right has gone all-in in its approach to media of, in Steve Bannon’s words, ‘flooding the zone with shit’; meaning of course information that’s untrue or unfalsifiable, racist, misogynist, and hateful, but mostly tending toward some kind of occult or weird conspiracy. Since we now have so few common sources of media and so many unreliable social ones, it’s easy spread for the strange and the eerie. RFK believes in raw milk. Tucker Carlson believes in demons. Well, why not?

The Left also has a forgotten tradition of this weirdness. It’s not just in the occult features of anarchism, but also in the quasi-scientific scientific-socialisms of the twentieth century, that all seemed to develop into personality cults, in the mischief-centric Situationist movement of very serious bullshit, and the slapstick gags of the Yippies, Reichian sexual liberationism, New Religious Movements, funny-money fixations like MMT, and, I am sorry to say, variants of the same tedious anti-semitism that crop up whenever someone thinks too hard about capitalism without proper adult supervision. In the later twentieth century the centre-left moved away from all of this towards a sensible, official, liberalism of order, of Fukuyaman institutionalism, of—-and I spit at the words—-‘evidence based policy’. If the American election in 2024 is anything, it’s a popular vote against order and for chaos. For weirdness.

Things are going to be extraordinarily bad, for our American friends and for the world. They’re going to be violent and nasty. But they’re also going to be very, very weird.

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