Normalcy Got Us Here. Now Get It Out.
As the Biden administration leaves office, it's time to let their most integral selling point leave with them.
The best part of the Kamala Harris campaign was short-lived. When she first took Joe Biden’s place as the nominee, the immediate line of attack was to directly refer to Republicans as “weird.” In the opening weeks of her campaign, a flurry of Democratic senators and governors all started pushing the idea that Republican policy was abjectly strange and that you, the public, should be put off by it. It was a single, all-encompassing—if still a bit tame—word that summed up the most bizarre the Trump campaign had to offer. In the moment, the best retort Trump could conjure up was, “No, you are.” With the additional benefit of just not being Joe Biden, Harris’ entry into the race was met with a near-instantaneous leap in the polls after what the BBC described as “a honeymoon of free press.” Between the deliberate effort to ostracize Republicans and the “we’re not going back” moniker that her campaign took on, those first few weeks of the Harris campaign provided some semblance of optimism for the future of the election cycle.
And yet, like clockwork, Democrats could not help but trip over their own feet. By the time the DNC rolled around, both “weird” and “we’re not going back” were basically nowhere to be found. In conjunction with Biden staffers, Harris’ inner circle made an intentional push to ditch the polarizing rhetoric. Harris’ acceptance speech at the DNC would set the tone for the rest of the campaign: a centrist push for unification and return to normalcy that was a derivative reprise of the Biden 2020 campaign. From then on, Harris’ polling would steadily fall as her campaign became progressively meek, uninspired, and retrogressive, culminating in her election loss.
The return to normalcy was an impossible sell. The issues of today are a direct result of what that normalcy perpetuates, and voters know it. It’s why Trump won the first time, and it’s why he won again. Normalcy as an idea for the future is, frankly, insulting, and it’s certainly more insulting than calling Trump or JD Vance weird. At least that’s honest. Democrats spent the whole election cycle lying about Biden’s health, tiptoeing around the subject of Gaza, and one of the few honest things they had going for them was rejected for the sake of bipartisanship. Republicans are weird. Framing weird as a direct insult implies there is an underlying stigma attached to the conservative belief system. It’s one thing to believe something and keep it to yourself, but openly binding yourself to that belief makes it yours. Separate from truth and reality is perception. It’s the latter of those that gets you elected.
This is less about fighting fire with fire than it is about simply leveling the playing field. By operating within the boundaries of their misguided sense of self-righteousness, Democrats have ceded ground to Republicans on almost every major issue. This criticism goes beyond electoral politics. More importantly, I’m talking about political conversations with family members, co-workers, friends, whoever. The conversations we have a say in. Normalcy legitimized harmful right-wing narratives (particularly on immigration and crime) by letting them remain unabated in the public consciousness until they became some of those people’s realities. Dispelling these narratives feels like rowing against the current, and facts only get you so far. At some point you’re going to have to rip down the facade of parity and tolerance. Restricting women’s bodily autonomy is shameful, mass deportation is vile, denying climate change is unfathomable, and believing in any of those things is fucking weird. Donald Trump’s numerous comments about Ivanka are weird. JD Vance’s beef with childless adults is weird. Normalcy means letting these people into the White House.
Looking back, Michelle Obama’s “They go low, we go high” remarks from the 2016 DNC reinforce these same appeasements. 8 years later, and it looks like Michelle is starting to get it. She was the only living First Lady to not attend Jimmy Carter’s funeral, and she’s not attending Trump’s inauguration either. Her attendance is expected for the sake of normalcy, but what’s the point? Among countless other examples, the President of the United States is now someone who incited an insurrection upon their previous election loss. Tradition is dead. It is nauseating to see Barack Obama chum it up with Trump at Carter’s funeral. Barely a week removed from comparing Trump to Hitler, Biden shakes Trump’s hand and laughs alongside him in the Oval Office. Normalcy got us here.
It doesn’t have to be confrontational; it might not even resonate, but there are people willing to be on the right side of things if it presents itself to them. While maybe less antagonistic, it’s like yelling fire in a crowded theater and then claiming free speech. You don’t get to spout bullshit and get off scot-free.
Your co-worker thinks maybe there are too many immigrants; no man, immigration is the backbone of this country. Mass deportation is abhorrent, and it’s not going to help anyone.
Your mom thinks trans women should stay out of girls’ sports; there are like 6 people in the whole country this situation even applies to. Quit worrying about genitalia.
Normalcy says we should accept these views in the name of opinion. Yet as Trump takes office, we are staring at a direct, tangible result (for the second time, mind you) of that frame of mind.
At the risk of appearing too cordial, I’ll end with this: there are also plenty of people unwilling to be on the right side of things no matter what. These are the fucking weirdos. Tell them as much. Use these freaks as the proper example for what believing in hate should look like. Enough with the capitulation to racist vitriol. The era of letting someone perpetuate vaccine skepticism, climate change denial, or revisionist history for the sake of civility is over. We’ve got some of the most unimaginable ghouls leading our nation now because Democrats refused to call a spade a spade. Trump was supposedly the biggest threat to democracy we’ve ever faced, and I’m sitting here watching Democratic leaders usher him into office with smiles and applause.
As Biden leaves the White House one last time, normalcy needs to leave with him. Democrats are more useless than ever, and as usual it’s up to ordinary people to pick up the slack. If there’s any iota of a sliver of hope here, it’s that Trump’s win was slim. He didn’t even break 50% in the popular vote. The battle for truth is winnable; we just have to be willing to participate.