The Romans would have been great at TikTok—perhaps not all of them, but surely the politicians. Long before today’s senators learned to stage viral gotchas in pursuit of internet stardom, ancient orators were experts at playing to their audiences. In his Rhetoric—a bedrock treatise on the science of persuasion—Aristotle writes that a “speaker should endeavor to guess how his hearers formed their preconceived opinions,” and accordingly he should “not argue from all possible opinions,” but only from those that they share. Romans eagerly followed Aristotle’s advice. “The orator who is approved by the multitude,” Cicero writes in his Brutus, “must inevitably be approved by the expert.” Deploying something akin to analog algorithms, these ancient rhetoricians knew well how to accumulate “likes” from like-minded listeners.
The ancient politician’s keen attention to prevailing views anticipates our current moment, in which the word “weird” has emerged as the Democrats’ favorite taunt against offbeat MAGA Republicans. Minnesota governor Tim Walz is often cited as its source. Before being tapped as Kamala Harris’s running mate, Walz appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to observe how “we can’t even go to Thanksgiving dinner with our uncle because you end up in some weird fight.” “These guys are just weird,” Walz continues. “That’s not what people are interested in.” As both Cicero and Walz suggest, creepy ideas can lead to disaster. A bizarre eagerness for dictatorial rule might get you sent, in the case of Thanksgiving dinner, to the living-room couch, or in the case of Rome’s senatorial curia, to an early grave on the Ides of March.
Despite the august tradition of urging people not to be creeps, some pundits have rejected “weird” as a childish barb. In the New York Times, Thomas Friedman says he “cannot think of a sillier, more playground, more foolish, and more counterproductive political taunt.” Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel similarly skewers “weird” as a “flight from substance.” More than just a sophomoric smear, the newly weaponized “weird” is also, at first glance, a retreat from the principles of inclusion and diversity. Any Democratic coalition that embraces the “diverse” and “queer” and “marginalized” should also embrace some notion of the “weird” and even “bizarre,” should it not? If they wish to follow the spirit of John Stuart Mill, one of modern liberalism’s chief architects, Democrats should adopt his “social support for nonconformity” and applaud his “experiments in living.” What is an experimental nonconformist if not a little weird?
Like cholesterol and vibes, it seems, weirdness comes in both good and bad versions. The word enjoys broad application in modern English: a crackpot uncle on the one hand, Austin’s proud self-branding on the other. What separates the good weird from the bad weird? Our ancient predecessors can help us answer this question. Long before Walz, Friedman, and even Mill, Greco-Roman rhetoricians and their avid readers puzzled over how, when, and why politicians might (or might not) stray from the demands of convention. Never offering easy solutions for the push and pull between individual conviction and social pressure, these rhetoricians nevertheless show how a certain kind of obstinate weirdness—like what we see among the MAGA faithful—is a first step to autocracy.
The Greeks and Romans gave us fundamental terms in topics from mathematics to meteorology, and “weirdness” is no exception. In this case, I don’t mean the word itself, which has Anglo-Saxon roots, but instead a broader vocabulary of social awareness into which our concept of “weird” fits quite well. The aforementioned masters of rhetoric—Aristotle and Cicero—are some of the richest sources. While developing their science of persuasion, they crafted a sophisticated terminology to match their technical approach to speechmaking. Alongside their pursuit of stylistic virtues like correct usage (latinitas) and clarity (perspicuitas), Roman speakers also strove to be “appropriate,” or aptus, an adjective derived from the verb aptare: to fit, to adjust, to adapt. The speaker who is aptus or the speech that is aptum is becoming, proper, well-adapted. The Greeks had their own word for this quality—prepon—and the Romans would sometimes use another word more familiar to us today: decorum.
Just as in ethics, stylistic virtues correspond to stylistic vices, and this notion of rhetorical “propriety” is no exception. Ancient discussions of the aptum are often accompanied by warnings against ineptia, the “ineptitude” that undermines decorum. But ineptia—a failure to be aptus—is not exactly “ineptitude” in the sense of clumsiness. Cicero explains in De Oratore that “whosoever fails to realize the demands of the occasion, or talks too much, or advertises himself, or ignores the dignity or convenience of those with whom he has to deal, or in short is in any way awkward or tedious” is beset by ineptia. The most grating example of such ineptitude, Cicero continues, is “the Greeks’ habit, in any place and in any company they like, of plunging into the most subtle arguments.” His example smacks of an ancient jingoism, but he has a point. Not every dinner party needs to become a disputation on the tax code or, worse yet, Platonic metaphysics. Sometimes it’s better—more appropriate, more decorous, more aptum—just to kvetch about the Yankees.
To my mind, a great translation of ineptia is “weirdness.” The “awkward” or “tedious” or “weird” speaker veers into uncomfortable topics. He can’t read the room. And it’s more than an inability to make small talk that makes one inept in this sense. The ancient rhetorical theorists often drew parallels between virtues of speech and virtues of living. Cicero explains how “from ignorance of propriety, people make mistakes not only in life but very frequently in writing.” Drawing on this parallel, he cautions how “the same style and the same thoughts must not be used in portraying every condition in life, or every rank, position, or age, and in fact a similar distinction must be made in respect of place, time, and audience.” He concludes, “the universal rule, in oratory as in life, is to consider propriety.” The rule for Cicero’s Forum Romanum is the same as the rule for the Walz family’s Thanksgiving: try not to be weird.
Like so much “common sense,” these ancient recommendations against impropriety and weirdness stand upon dominant social norms. Sometimes, however, it’s better to buck conventional manners and decorum in pursuit of worthy goals. Is it not often virtuous to bring up an uncomfortable but important topic at an otherwise pleasant dinner? In the particular case of political speech, the principle of the aptum would seem to urge politicians to forgo brave positions in favor of merely popular ones. When Cicero cautions against ineptia, he describes a politician studiously attuned to his moment, careful never to find himself out of step. Seen in that light, Cicero’s principle of decorum seems like cover for flip-flopping. Some of our most esteemed political predecessors, moreover, deserve admiration precisely for ignoring the “convenience” of those with whom they had to deal, and for being “awkward or tedious.” Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and even Jesus were not exactly easygoing, conventional types. So shouldn’t we resist the siren song of “propriety” and choose righteous weirdness instead?
These problems surrounding decorum have had a long shelf life, and inspired by these Greco-Roman authors, several modern thinkers have defended principles of propriety and convention. In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, for instance, David Hume would position “good manners” and “politeness” among virtues like temperance and courage for facilitating “the intercourse of minds, and an undisturbed commerce and conversation.” Others took Cicero’s aptum and ineptia in more openly political directions, recommending that leaders bend to circumstance in the pursuit of expedience and even dominance. Perhaps the most notorious example is Niccolò Machiavelli. Much ink has been spilled about his reputation for cynical politicking—a willingness to say and do anything to maintain an iron grip on the levers of power. In The Prince,Machiavelli’s guidebook for Renaissance heads of state, he infamously instructs his reader to “learn how not to be good.” In Virtue Politics, James Hankins distills Machiavelli’s argument to the following precept: “Following habits of behavior, whether good or bad, as though on a kind of moral autopilot, will bring [the prince] to ruin. He must learn moral flexibility, strategic inconstancy, selective clemency, and cruelty.” Machiavelli’s cool recommendations for violence and duplicity—e.g., “men must be either caressed or wiped out”—have earned him generations of horrified detractors, among them Shakespeare, who alludes to the “murderous Machiavel.”
Like the best works of political thought, however, Machiavelli’s writings resist simplistic summary. He does not just propose a nihilist abandonment of morality. Hardly a committed sadist, Machiavelli urges his reader to avoid departing “from the good if it is possible to do so, but he should know how to enter into evil when forced by necessity.” While he praises the “inhuman cruelty” that made Hannibal “venerable and terrifying,” he nevertheless condemns the Greek tyrant Agathocles for the “inhumanity” of “betraying allies.” One can be too cruel, too inhumane, too evil. Be good when you can, he advises, but not when you can’t.
Instead of flattening Machiavelli into an apologist for thoughtless immorality, we should see him as a realist grappling with “necessity.” It’s a theme that resurfaces in his Discourses on Livy, where he argues that “the reason why men are sometimes unfortunate, sometimes fortunate, depends upon whether their behavior is in conformity with the times.” While the vocabulary is different, his arguments here should sound familiar even to those who just learned their first lessons of ancient rhetorical theory in the preceding paragraphs. Whether Machiavelli speaks of “necessity” or “the times” or “fortune,” he persistently urges rulers to adjust their political calculus—and their moral scruple—to fit their circumstances. In short, leaders need to abide by a realist politics of decorum.
To borrow a phrase from Kamala Harris, Machiavelli did not just fall out of a coconut tree. Specialists in the classical tradition have long noticed, as Michelle Zerba explains, “the essential affinity between the Machiavellian doctrine of princely fraud and the Ciceronian ethics of gentlemanly dissimulation.” The ideas of rhetorical “propriety”—attention to “circumstance,” a sense of the aptum, a knack for fitting the occasion—permeate his political and ethical maxims.When Machiavelli writes, “It is necessary that [a prince] should have a mind ready to turn itself according to the way the winds of fortune and the changing circumstances command him,” he has simply taken to heart Cicero’s “universal rule, in oratory as in life,” to consider the moment. Cicero, of course, was chiefly interested in an apt turn of phrase, while Machiavelli was also interested in the apt turn of a dagger.
There are plenty of reasons to recoil from Machiavelli’s violent realpolitik. From Stoicism to Kant’s categorical imperative, writers have made compelling arguments that we should always obey our moral obligations, not just when they are advantageous. But even if we agree with Machiavelli’s critics, he can still help us articulate the roots of our distaste for “weird” politicians. Just as ancient orators positioned the aptum as one stylistic virtue among many—clarity, adornment, proper grammar—Machiavelli similarly positions “aptitude” among other virtues like clemency and truthfulness. For rhetoricians and politicians alike, these values sit in unstable tension, and trade-offs are unavoidable.
This view of Machiavelli as a theorist of competing values rather than of nihilist violence was perhaps most famously set forth in Isaiah Berlin’s landmark essay “The Originality of Machiavelli.” Berlin sees in these Renaissance texts a novel defense of “political morality,” one that requires leaders to negotiate between their individual ethics and the interests of everyone else. As Berlin puts it, “public life has its own morality, to which Christian principles (or any absolute personal values) tend to be a gratuitous obstacle.” That parenthetical phrase—“or any absolute personal values”—is crucial. He stresses that Machiavelli “does not seek to correct the Christian conception of a good man”; to love one’s enemy and turn the other cheek are, indeed, laudable moral principles. Machiavelli simply wants to convince his readers that “this type of [Christian] goodness cannot, at least in its traditionally accepted forms, create or maintain a strong, secure, and vigorous society, [and] that it is in fact fatal to it.” Machiavelli’s embrace of adaptation demands that leaders occasionally switch off that “moral autopilot” and fudge their dogmas “in conformity with the times.” Any inflexible, “absolute personal values,” however correct, will eventually set one at odds with circumstance. And this ineptia, this weirdness, can only spell political ruin.
It’s no accident that Berlin focuses on religion in his exposition of Machiavellian “political morality.” Religious practice is a key example of Machiavelli’s deference to “the times.” In the Discourses, Machiavelli passes over Romulus, Rome’s namesake founder, and instead credits Numa Pompilius, Rome’s second king, for “turning to religion as the instrument necessary above all others for the maintenance of a civilized state.” In fact, Machiavelli considered religiosity to be a most admirable trait of his ancient heroes. This devotion, he explains, made citizens “more afraid of breaking an oath than of breaking the law.” In The Prince, too, he observes how in “ecclesiastical principalities,” the “ancient institutions of religion” are so powerful that “they keep their princes in power no matter how they act and live their lives.” Always with an eye on political success rather than the salvation of souls, Machiavelli sees in religion a powerful stabilizing force, one that exerts influence on citizens well beyond the letter of the law.
Crucially, these texts talk about religion not just as a set of “personal values” (to borrow Berlin’s phrase) but as a cultural undercurrent—or in Machiavelli’s terminology, an “institution” rather than a “law.” When we speak of “institutions” today, we think of associations and corporations: universities, labor unions, publications like this one. Machiavelli has a more expansive category in mind. Modern translations position his “institutions” alongside “customs,” “habits,” or even “norms.” His examples include education systems, various rituals, and a “fondness for liberty.” For Machiavelli, an institution is best understood as a “pattern of life.” Impressed by the durability of these cultural habits and their imperviousness to legal reform, he confidently claims that “there will never, or but rarely, be a change in [a state’s] institutions.”
By positioning “institutional” norms as something rather different from legislation, Machiavelli gives us a potent framework for understanding why “weirdness” is fatal to aspiring politicians. The public’s entrenched patterns of life are—to borrow another phrase from Kamala Harris—“the context in which we live.” A politician, as Cicero would caution, cannot ignore “the dignity or convenience of those with whom he has to deal,” especially when it comes to society’s longstanding rituals and traditions. Should he fail to consider the aptum in this way, Machiavelli warns, he will set “the public as a whole for his enemy” and will “never make himself secure.”
In short, Machiavelli insists that leaders must avoid drifting outside the “circumstances” of popular institutions, religious practice foremost among them. From this framing, we begin to see more clearly what makes the likes of J. D. Vance and Donald Trump so weird: not nonconformity per se but an arrogant commandeering of the public’s habits and norms. Recent commentary on “weirdness” echoes this Machiavellian insight. In the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie writes that “[t]he Republican Party under Trump has fallen so far out of the political and cultural mainstream that the central aim of its most ambitious representatives and apparatchiks is to use the power of the state to bend that mainstream to their will.” In conversation with Ezra Klein, Zack Beauchamp of Vox observed how “many of the…criticisms of liberalism that [MAGA Republicans] are leveraging strike people not just as weird but also in a deep sense as opposed to the values” of American citizens. MAGA “weirdness” isn’t satisfied to be different or out of step. It indecorously demands compliance from an unwilling public.
There is much to say about negotiating between personal conviction and broader social institutions, especially when it comes to religion. Berlin says that this problem “remains unsolved, but we have learnt to live with it.” Some have fared better than others with this tension. Perhaps the last century’s most prominent case study is the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy, whose Catholicism faced suspicion and even bigotry. Kennedy was not always successful in navigating the unresolved issue of “political morality,” especially early in his campaign. As Rodger Van Allen documents in his history of this magazine, The Commonweal and American Catholicism, Commonweal editors “took exception to Kennedy’s remark that ‘Whatever one’s religion in his private life might be, for the officeholder nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution.’” More pointedly, the “idea that there was a cleavage between one’s religion and one’s public life was the antithesis of what [the editors] and their magazine stood for.” Personal principle and political decorum are often at odds, but the solution is never to pretend that they can or should be completely separated.
Kennedy would later reframe his approach to this dilemma. In a speech in Texas, he declared that he “believe[d] in an America where the separation of Church and state is absolute…an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jewish.” “An act against one church,” he continued, must be “treated as an act against all.” No longer demanding an unbridgeable “cleavage between one’s religion and one’s public life,” Kennedy asked Americans to pursue their private faith in earnest while allowing others to do the same, embracing another bedrock institution of our “political morality”: religious liberty. Kennedy’s solution to his personal weirdness—his Catholicism—was to remind Americans of their shared right to be unconventional. In the end, Van Allen observes, “The total number of Protestants who voted for [Kennedy] outweighed the number of Catholics and Jews combined. His triumph was then a triumph of American tolerance.”
This framing of toleration as one way to negotiate between private conviction and public norms can also be traced back to Machiavelli. Building on his understanding of Machiavelli’s “unsolved” conflict of values, Berlin explores how toleration “is historically the product of the realisation of the irreconcilability of equally dogmatic faiths, and the practical improbability of complete victory of one over the other.” Both people and princes “gradually [come] to see merits in diversity, and so [become] sceptical about definitive solutions in human affairs.” Indeed, this tolerance of diversity—especially a tolerance of differing religious views—is perhaps the most entrenched of American institutions, having arrived on the Mayflower. No wonder the very politician celebrated for his attacks on weirdness has also reminded us to “mind your own damn business.”
Politicians do not need to abandon all their personal religious convictions as soon as they enter public life. Conservative Catholics like J. D. Vance don’t need to give up their misgivings about the destruction of frozen embryos, nor do liberal Catholics need to abandon their critiques of the heartless grind of the free market, simply because these views often face an unreceptive public. Because we all live in a rhetorical world, however, politicians must constantly adapt their actions and positions to those of their peers. Cicero may have called this decorum. Today, perhaps, we could call it democracy.
A politician’s refusal to negotiate with his living, breathing “circumstances”—that is, with his fellow citizens—is not only indecorous. It is anti-democratic. This insight, it turns out, also belongs to Machiavelli. He may have believed that institutions like religious practice and constitutional norms are resistant to change, but he did not believe they are immune to change. In the face of stable, popular habits, “it is necessary to resort to extraordinary methods, such as the use of force and an appeal to arms” if one wants to establish new mores. Machiavelli finds it unsurprising that Roman religious traditions were set down shortly after the city’s violent founding. Most recently, our institutions around work, commuting, and school were radically altered during a pandemic. Institutions can change, but it often takes an emergency.
Machiavelli’s recipe for violent institutional change illuminates the particular dangers of MAGA weirdness. It also sets into high relief the difference between weird and weird. Yes, we find it distasteful when J. D. Vance bizarrely fantasizes about George Soros–funded jets full of Black Ohioans shipped out to California for abortions. We bristle at his critique of “childless cat ladies,” which implies a judgment against adoptive parents and even celibate clergy and religious. These ideas are electorally disastrous and socially toxic, to be sure. But a person holding repugnant positions isn’t inherently a threat to the very institutions of American life.
More worrying than Vance’s indecorous contempt for Americans who haven’t followed his own life path is Donald Trump’s embrace of political violence. He proclaimed that he would be “a dictator” on “day one” and would unleash the military against his domestic enemies. This scheme comes straight out of The Prince. There, Machiavelli explains how “in conquering a state, its conqueror should weigh all the injurious things he must do and commit them all at once.” The only alternative to decorous accommodation of the people is to crush their institutions with raw power. Having given up on decorum, our aspiring dictator hopes to test this very method. No matter how many times the press vainly anticipates that Trump will “find a new tone” or “become presidential” or otherwise adapt to the occasion, he refuses to—is unable to—shed his weird and un-American appetite for tyranny.
