“When the dust settled, Donald Trump had bested Kamala Harris in the battle for normal. But Trump’s victory didn’t come down to a simple case of the right defending “traditional values” from progressives. There was some of that, to be sure, not least Trump’s opposition to transgender athletes participating in women’s sports and his vow to protect “merry Christmas from supposed leftist plans to “ban” the holiday greeting.
More often, though, it was Democrats who came across as the party of respectable normativity, the ones upholding a set of taboos and ways of talking and living. Meanwhile, Republicans, the ostensible party of order, reveled in shattering those taboos. This approach reached its zenith (or nadir) with a Madison Square Garden Trump rally late in the campaign at which edgy podcasters flung racial insults and pooh-poohed the gravity of the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol. A majority of voters didn’t seem to mind.
As one young voter told The New York Times: “I was so impressed by JD Vance, the way he carried himself and how normal he appeared. I think I became radicalized on the men and women’s sports issue. The ad that said, ‘Kamala represents they/them—Trump represents you,’ that was so compelling. While Trump is deranged, he represented normalcy somehow to me.”
In one of my posts over the summer I said that the campaign that won the election would be the one that won the battle to appear the more normal. That’s why Biden won in ’20, and it’s why I thought Harris/Walz would win this time. I’m still gobsmacked that Trump appears to have won the normalcy battle. But it’s now clear to me, at least, that he did it not by being himself normal, but by being outrageous in his revolt against the norms as defined by Liberal elites.
Ahmari's article traces the evolution of the concept normal, which culminates in Foucault's trenchant critique of normalcy and power. I thought these paragraphs were particularly good–
[Foucault's] critique had a lot going for it. Normal wasn’t, in fact, a neutral or objective category. It was warped by the interests and ideological beliefs of the scientific and managerial authorities who mobilized it. “Relations of power,” as Foucault observed in 1976, “are not in a position of exteriority with other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter.” Put another way: Power is always doing its thing, however invisibly, within the ways we come to know each other—or graph our characteristics.
But in a twist that Foucault himself couldn’t have anticipated, the anti-normative discourses inspired by his philosophy became … normal, and took on a disciplinary function just as earlier versions had. For an influential cohort of college-educated Americans, it became quasi-mandatory to declare their pronouns, to acknowledge the indigenous lands upon which they stood, and so on. It was the polite, conventional, and, well, normal thing to do.
These discourses—the normal of anti-normativity—peaked in the febrile years 2020 and 2021. Beginning in 2022, some of these institutions feared that anti-normative norms were alienating, ahem, normal people. The then-ruling Democrats, too, dialed back some elements of the new normal, with Kamala Harris notably declining to foreground her gender and racial background in her campaign.
But it was too little, too late. Weird J. D. Vance gets the last laugh.
I think David Brooks is right when he says–
But the fact is that every human society throughout history has been hierarchical. (If anything, that’s been especially true for those societies, such as Soviet Russia and Maoist China, that professed to be free of class hierarchy.) What determines a society’s health is not the existence of an elite, but the effectiveness of the elite, and whether the relationship between the elites and everybody else is mutually respectful.
The problem of course is that both American elite and non-elite culture is vulgar and materialistic. It's not as if the one has anything to learn or to teach the other about what true human flourishing means. And this is the problem with Brooks's recommendations for fixing the meritocracy that he condemns: It retains all the basic utilitarian values presuppositions that prop up the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. Brooks is just rearranging the furniture on a sinking ship.
Everybody knows that something is terribly wrong. It's that almost everybody is trying to come up with a solution working within the values framework that created the crisis in the first place. Any kind of real solution must come from outside that framework, at least that's the argument I'm trying to make on this blog.
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