Every four years, the cyclical rituals of American democracy impose the ordeal of an “election year” not only upon its own populace, but on the entire globe. At such times, stances on a range of geopolitical issues hang in the balance—positions which, in turn, promise to set the general tenor of international diplomacy and public discourse for years to come.

The 2024 presidential contest is especially significant for the pro-life movement because, for all of the recent disappointments from former president Donald Trump, the Democrats have embraced the most radical policy positions on abortion as core components of their institutional identity; should they prevail, they would be able to claim a mandate (assuming they would even countenance the use of such a term) and would enact a destructive agenda on the American nation, and then on the wider world by way of their foreign policy apparatus.

But, strangely enough, the Democrats—who have become, in a short span of time, a truly extreme party—have taken a rather odd tack regarding their political rivals. From this cadre of ideological avant-garde activists, for whom no social or economic position is too left-wing, we hear accusations that their Republicans opponents—especially the vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance—are, of all things, “weird.”

In some ways, this angle of attack makes an important concession; no longer are the proponents of the traditional family smeared as insincere actors who harbor an unspoken hidden agenda. Although there is still a strong strain of “theocratic panic” in the Democratic campaign—surrounding the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, for example—the characterization of family values as “weird” is a telling admission: for decades, the very notion that there were norms of any kind was something to be contested, derided, and rejected, according to self-styled progressives. The time-honored templates of tradition were, so we were told, the manacles of repression that needed to be shattered. Anything that looked like an enduring structure concealed a dark, repressive side—and all conventions and institutions, in their inherited forms, needed to be swept away so that the accumulated errors of history could be set aside in the name of progress. Norms—so we were told—were merely arbitrary social constructs that needed either to be purged of their patriarchal vestiges or set aside entirely. Hand in hand with this campaign to de-stabilize time-honored traditions in every realm of culture and discourse, we witnessed the rise of a militant enthusiasm for everything odd, marginal, or eccentric. Following sustained drives, first for tolerance, and then for diversity in all of its forms, “weirdness” (indeed, queerness) emerged as something to be celebrated. Taken together, a climate of opinion emerged that was vaguely but universally negative about the settled and established archetypes and values of the past and positive about peculiarity, nonconformity, and idiosyncrasy.

That the most prominent left-wing party in the Western world is denigrating weirdness should not simply be taken as evidence of hypocrisy. Rather, it is a signal that a threshold has been crossed, and new norms are being established—norms whose defense will be zealous, cruel, and uncompromising.

JD Vance has, by almost any reckoning, led an incredible life: from its humble beginnings, this 40-year-old’s story already includes credentials earned from elite institutions, dazzling achievement in competitive industries, military service, a meteoric rise in the political sphere, and a beautiful family to boot. Indeed, so compelling is his story that the bestselling memoir in which it is told, Hillbilly Elegy, was turned into a motion picture. In many ways, Vance’s life is exceptional—but one of the things which it demonstrates so exceptionally is the American Dream. To characterize this young, successful, pro-life, pro-family father of three as “weird” is to bring into view the next horizon what used to be called the culture wars. We live in a world where the following things are becoming commonplace: the elderly, disabled, and distressed are encouraged to end their lives via state-funded suicide programs; two adults can pay to facilitate the surrogate pregnancy of a human person to whom neither has any direct biological connection and become the “parents” of this child; the inevitable insecurities, uncertainties, and anxieties of adolescence are super-charged by social contagions and amplified with misinformation so that mere children and teenagers will be convinced or coerced into accepting treatments that, at best, will arrest the normal processes of maturation; and prenatal infanticide, at any stage of an unborn child’s gestation, is defended under the banner of human rights. All of these things are presented to us as unobjectionable and normal; and stable, fruitful heterosexual families are increasingly coded not simply as privileged, antiquated or unfashionable, but as “weird,” phenomena to which polite society no longer gives approbation. In other words, now that old norms have been eroded, a new, inverted set of norms will be forcefully established and ruthlessly enforced. The travesties we witnessed this summer during the opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics, and a Democratic National Convention, which featured a mobile “clinic” providing free abortions and vasectomies, to say nothing of activists in “Morning After Pill” costumes and a giant, inflatable replica of an intrauterine device—these high-profile, public events give a hint of the shape of things to come.

  Some conservatives have opined that, in our present content, there can be no act more rebellious, against-the-grain, or counter-cultural than starting a family; and this is certainly true. But rather than being buoyed by a rising tide of oppositional energy (of the kind that supported the counter- culture of the 1960s), the norms of the traditional family will face the kind of headwinds that would be more familiar to the dissidents of totalitarian states. Nevertheless, being more Vaclav Havel than Bob Dylan, the families who endure this opposition will receive not only the natural rewards which this state of life provides but, in doing so, they will enable future generations to thrive long after the depraved and de-stabilizing cultural forces which are now in ascendence have disappeared, and the nightmare of their would-be “norms” have been relegated to a particularly dark chapter of the history books. Such a future is a long way off, but hope that it will come should give us all the courage to persevere in the present. Go forth and be “weird.”