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The downpour in public opinion is explained by many factors, including the social hangover from the pandemic and economic jitters, even in the face of a strong labor market. But there is a powerful case that at the heart of our restlessness is a widespread sense that politics is no longer normal.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: “normal” is a problematic concept. Legal segregation was seen by many whites as “normal” for a long time. It had to be demolished. The word was deployed for decades to marginalize and mock LGBTQ people, as Andrew Sullivan pointed out in the tongue-in-cheek title of his classic book on homosexuality published in the mid-1990s, “Practically Normal.”
However, in a democratic republic, “normal” politics involves a series of compromises that most citizens, I bet, rightly accept. A modest catalog of our departures from these vocations shows how strange things have become.
The obvious example: normal means accepting the result of a legitimate election that your side lost and offering no sanction for a violent mob attack on the US Capitol to overturn the result.
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Yet a recent CBS News/YouGov poll found that 69 percent of Republicans and those who lean don’t think President Biden is a legitimate president, and 75 percent say the idea that Donald Trump he won in 2020 is a reason to vote for him. .
Normal also means not threatening to shut down the US and global economies by using the debt ceiling to extract unpopular political concessions. Of course, raising the debt ceiling has often involved political skirmishes. But it wasn’t until a decade ago that Republicans (note: only when a Democrat is in the White House) were willing to push the country to the brink to force spending cuts. It is not, by the way, about deficits. If so, the GOP would also put the big tax cuts they passed under Trump on the table.
Normal means that a party does not use its power in the courts and state legislatures to make elections almost meaningless by rigging district lines so that its opponents cannot hope to win power unless they secure landslides improbable
Again, this is a matter of degree. Gerrymanders have been used by both parties and date back to the most famous drawn in the early 1800s in Massachusetts and named after Governor Elbridge Gerry. He sliced and diced Essex County to give his Jefferson Democrat-Republicans an advantage over the Federals.
But gerrymanders have become more brazen and, thanks to technology and sophisticated data analysis, more effective. Courts, especially in Republican states (state courts threw out Democratic gerrymanders in New York and Maryland last year), have been complicit in ratifying scandalous maps.
To show how partisan this is, consider that last month, a newly elected Republican majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court overturned a decision by the same court (with a significantly different membership) from just a year before the maps drawn by the GOP were mismatched. discriminatory and anti-competitive. Parties cannot be held accountable if voters are almost powerless to remove them from power. (See: Viktor Orban.) This is not normal for a democracy.
Nor are the ideological struggles surrounding public schools and public libraries that involve, among other things, the removal of books from libraries and the gutting of curricula. It is true that we have had such battles before. In the 1960s, the radical right persecuted books that were considered “socialist and propagandistic,” said Matthew Dallek, author of the recently published “Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right.” But Dallek, a historian at George Washington University, noted that Birch-backed efforts “failed” largely because schools and libraries “were not really seen as ideological. They were seen as examples of good government.”
“The biggest difference between then and now is that these efforts are much more widespread, they’re in the middle of the Republican Party,” he told me. “What was once widely seen as a fringe has become a major force in many parts of the country.”
The break from normalcy has been a long time in the making. Dallek believes that the end of the Cold War had a destabilizing effect on politics, weakening the ability of Republican establishment figures to contain their fringes. And the hyperinflation of the 1970s, rising inequality since the 1980s, the Great Recession after 2008, and the dislocations of the pandemic contributed to a sense of economic turbulence that weakened shared bonds.
It also marked the end of the long consensus of the New Deal era, said Nicole Hemmer, a historian at Vanderbilt University.
“The disintegration of normalcy has coincided, not coincidentally, with the disintegration of norms,” said Hemmer, author of “Partisans: The conservative revolutionaries who remade American politics in the 1990s.” “Rules are based on consensus, and when that consensus breaks down, there is a break in a common set of beliefs, a common set of commitments, and the railings disappear.
“Normal has been oppressive to a lot of people, so it’s not like consensus for consensus’s sake is an ideal,” he told me. “But I think the idea of a shared set of values and a shared commitment to a political project is essential to democracy.”
Yes, and what we don’t need is for chaos to become our new normal.
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