Most Democrats don’t know how to fight culture wars, let alone win them. Their instinct when confronted with a culture-war provocation is to either change the topic or disengage altogether.

But the social web is still bursting with reminders that, for a brief moment, just about a year ago, they almost figured it out. The evidence is in this picture, and the millions of variations that have been created or generated since.

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The baby-faced JD Vance memes that float across your screens, and that may have prompted customs officials to detain and remove a Norwegian tourist earlier this year, have origins in this Twxtter thread, which included the prompt, “For every 100 likes I will turn JD Vance into a progressively apple cheeked baby.” JD Vance Babyface evolved into canonical form after his debate with Minnesota governor Tim Walz, but only became ubiquitous after Vance ambushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, demanding he say “thank you” to the United States for past military aid. With a bit of comedic license, “thank you” became “pwease and tank you” and a meme was born.

Why did internet jokers think to transform Vance into a giant baby? It’s hard to peer into their minds, but just a couple months before baby-JD was born, grown-up JD had become the object of a crude satire, in which he’d supposedly (not actually) confessed to a sexual fetish for sofa cushions.

And that gag had its origins in something real: A successful but fleeting Democratic effort, brought mainstream by Walz, to depict right-wing Republicans and their social and cultural fixations as “weird.”

It turned out Vance had left a lengthy trail of bizarre, officious comments about—well, a lot of things, but particularly female fertility, and childlessness. He referred to childless women as “a bunch of…cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.”

During the “weird” boomlet, all of progressivism became hyper-attuned to the bizarre conduct of the professional right. It made an impression on one of the most popular people in the world, who signed her Harris-Walz endorsement, “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.” And it fed fleeting but intensive mainstream scrutiny of rightist views on abortion and female subservience.

I say “fleeting” because Democrats quickly spooked. That August, Kamala Harris’s pollster, Geoff Garin, reportedly advised Harris to “stop saying, ‘We’re not going back,’” because it didn’t look to the future, and advised Walz to “lay off all the ‘weird’ talk — too negative.”

The candidates briefly resisted Garin’s advice, but by the next month they’d been tamed.

BENEFIT OF THE DOUTHAT

Vance’s snipe at “cat ladies” wasn’t Swift’s introduction to right-wing weirdness. It was more like a capstone.

One right-wing reactionary daydreamed that if Swift were to marry and procreate with her partner Travis Kelce—a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs—it would prefigure “the greatest spike in weddings in American history,” as “mimetic desire [grips] the hearts and minds of millions of millennial women” yielding “a tsunami of heterosexual romantic happy endings,” and, thus, a baby boom.

In November 2023, the Vance-aligned New York Times columnist Ross Douthat half-endorsed the fantasy, writing that “it would be delightful, for them and for us, if the burgeoning Swift-Kelce courtship went the distance, giving us a celebrity wedding and perhaps a royal baby.”

Other rightists, offended by Swift’s basic decency, and Kelce’s pro-vaccine advocacy, took aim at the couple. They theorized that the Swift-Kelce relationship was an act, part of a put up job that would culminate in a joint anti-Trump presidential endorsement. They even mused conspiratorially that Kelce’s all-star performance, and the Chiefs’ victory, in Super Bowl LVIII victory were rigged.

This stuff, too, was incredibly weird.

It’s weird to be paranoid, or to feign paranoia as part of an elaborate performance to manipulate rubes. Harboring concerns, even religiously inflected ones, about the population of the country is one thing; opining on what other people’s reproductive organs owe the world is back-away-slowly cringe.

A more mission-oriented progressive media apparatus, with help from elected Democrats, would have homed in on all of these interventions. On Douthat and the tradcon movement and their deep ties to Vance, and on how the pseudo-Darwinistic tech right embraced and infused their ideas with delusions about the gift of high-IQ semen.

In September 2024, Elon Musk offered to impregnate Swift with perhaps his 100th offspring. But by then the weird wave had crested. You can thank the pollsters.

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CHURCHILL TO DIE ON

There’s more to the right and it’s weirdness than its fixation on other people’s sex lives.

There’s the overlapping world of incels, and the world of fascists and groypers and neo-Nazis, which overlaps onto that.

Turning these people into stand-ins for elected Republicans, and making Republicans answer for them, isn’t beyond the capability of Democrats and progressives. Their failure to do it is mostly a matter of missing conviction. The necessary elements—nutpicking, performance of anger—make them feel icky, and in any case they assume in advance that their efforts would fail or backfire.

They need fewer pollsters reinforcing these instincts, and more critics telling them to get over themselves.

Twenty years ago, I watched Republicans and Fox News transform the leftist professor Ward Churchill into a stand in for the Democratic Party. It was a formative political moment for me. Churchill had called the financial professionals and Pentagon officials who died on 9/11 “Little Eichmanns” for their complicity with U.S. imperialism. Republicans got wind of it and pounced. It didn’t matter to them that leftists like Churchill hated Democrats, and Democrats’ defensive votes for the Iraq war didn’t provide them any cover from right-wing ascriptions of guilt by false association. Republicans had a template, and they deployed it.

By contrast to Churchill, Vance and Douthat and Musk and Nick Fuentes and Peter Thiel and Stephen Miller aren’t small fish, and they aren’t fake Republicans. They’re the real deal. Miller may, at an operational level, be the most powerful person in the world. Today’s GOP is chockablock with actual little Eichmanns like him. But Democrats practically never gesture to them and their dead-eyed, shiver-inducing antics, except occasionally to accuse Republicans of hypocrisy when Republicans pretend to stand against antisemitism. To end where we began, they don’t know how to fight culture wars, let alone win them; so they change topic or disengage altogether.

This imbalance explains why the politicians who’ve mentioned or alluded to Sydney Sweeney this past week are all salivating Republicans, but their weird, public horniness comes at no political risk, while Democrats, in stunned silence, lose another culture war.

Democrats can upend this pitiful dynamic whenever they want. But first they have to stop listening to people like Geoff Garin.

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