There’s a syllable ringing through the Trump era like a greeting in Cheers: norm.
We have activists insisting that the way to fight whatever it is they want to fight is to not “normalize” it. We have pundits pronouncing on the “erosion of our democratic norms.” It’s all very redolent of the promise of Warren Harding’s 1920 campaign slogan for a “return to normalcy,” a malapropism and nonword for which he was roundly mocked (the proper word is “normality”).
These are all, anyway, not factual analyses, but “normative” judgments from people with a deep sense that things are not as they should be. I share the sense, but the norm talk is at best a useless and confused way to get at it.
A norm is quite simple to define. It’s something that generally or usually happens. It’s either a numerical tendency or a social custom that became customary by having the tendency to be observed. The two-term maximum on the presidency was a norm set by the example of George Washington stepping down in 1796. That “democratic norm” held for 144 years and 30 more presidencies. It was not “eroded” (erosion is a gradual process by definition) so much as exploded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who sought third and then fourth terms. Indeed, FDR took a shot at Harding in his 1944 State of the Union, avowing that a return to the “so-called ‘normalcy’” of the 1920s would mean “we have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.” As a progressive, he held a dim view of upholding what was once normal. Now, because of FDR’s norm-stomping overreach, the two-term max is enforced by the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution.
This is part of what makes the liberal cries of “don’t normalize this” such a strange verbal tic under the Trump presidency. Progressives and the liberal Left more generally are defined by an attitude that the normal, the status quo, the prevailing situation, and what have you ought to be regularly eroded. The moral force of norms and traditions are in some sense the enemy. Think of Obama’s campaign slogan, “Hope” and “Change”: they’re two words glorifying the notion of making the future unlike the present. “Normal” is a word about keeping the present like the past.
So, it is very strange to see the Left organize around rhetoric that grants that what is typically or traditionally done holds some authority on that basis alone. But the fight not to “normalize” Trump pits wish against reality. Trump is normal now. That fight is over. Whether you want to resist him or reelect him to three more terms, you’re better off arguing on some other grounds.
