Shredding Norms is Cool!
Talking about what's happening is boring
One of the most annoying tics of the first Trump administration was the constant refrain that this is not normal. The intention was noble—pushing back on the normalizing biases of the media, which sought to sanewash Trump’s first reign by describing it in ordinary, even laudatory terms. (Remember when Van Jones described Trump as “becoming president of the United States in that moment”? This was the liberal CNN panelist!)
But the effect was terrible because it set up “normal” as the contrast to Trump—and that was exactly the contrast Trump wanted. If “normal” was working for you, then you saw the “this is not normal” mantra as a chant reassuring you that you weren’t dreaming. But if you didn’t like the pre-Trump “normal”—and there were many reasons, some reasonable and some less so, to dislike it—then you heard “this is not normal” as the kind of chastising that is always being meted out to rule-breakers. It was, that is, a confirmation of Trump’s pledge to be a different kind of president. Worse, it locked the not-normal chorus into an implicit pledge of “we’re going back”—a policy vision of status quo ante trumpum—and if there’s a lot of political value to be gotten out of appealing to a hazy memory of a golden age, there’s much less to be gained by appealing to the concrete memory of last month.
More to the point, it also helped the once-academic jargon term “norms” to escape containment. Norms aren’t really supposed to be celebrated; they’re meant to be observed. There’s lots of ways to break norms: when Theodore Roosevelt sat down to dinner with Booker T. Washington, that was a norm violation—and when no president for thirty years later dined with a Black companion, that was a norm. Norms can suck! Just celebrating norms because they are norms is the worst kind of unthinking reaction—and yet it’s a seductively easy way of generating copy in the Trump era. Describing something outré the president has done? There he goes again, breaking another norm.
At times, the effect isn’t to raise alarm but to make Trump seem like a badass. Here’s Politico’s Playbook this morning: “We are witnessing a revolutionary president tearing up legal, constitutional and now economic norms with every passing day — and to repeat, this is only week 3.” A “revolutionary” president tearing up “norms”? Wicked!
There were many voices who offered a better view.
was one of these; her essay arguing for values, not norms, as being the better standard to defend, is sadly once again valuable reading. Distinguishing between norms that matter because they help support democratic or good-government values and those that are just kind of vaguely lumped in with “appropriate presidential behavior” is important. I would only add that we should go one step further: let’s junk the norms talk altogether. If the values are what matter, state what value is being broken. It’s not just violating an “ethics norm” to refuse to promulgate ethical rules for a presidential administration—it’s leaving the doors open to looters and grifters.This matters because I think we instinctively recognize in other areas of life that norm-violators and rule-breakers are cool. You know who broke norms? Elvis. You know who played by the rules? Pat Boone.
Breaking the habit of describing norm violations is not just a matter of tidying copy. It’s an urgent imperative for actually describing reality. It would be genuinely more informative to simply state what is happening rather than putting norm-spin on the ball. (And, to Playbook’s credit, the subsequent paragraphs do this.) What is happening is this: the president of the United States has launched an unprovoked and irrational trade war on its closest trading partners (and, in the case of Canada, its closest security partner, period). This is not shredding norms. This is imposing immense economic damage on the economies of major countries and taking direct aim at American jobs and consumers.
I want to be clear: normally I hate the style of media criticism that asserts the media should write like THIS, not like THAT. I am indulging in it now because I think that many, many observers have failed to grasp that what is at stake is not some nice ol’ norms that grandpa Eisenhower left in the attic—we are literally looking at the possibility of a global depression if these trends continue. Screwing around with Treasury payments and tariff walls is not just outrageous—it is like mixing a nice bleach-and-Drano cocktail. You wouldn’t describe that as “breaking mixology norms”, unless you were doing a goof. And since the decision-makers for the federal government—a set that very possibly may not include the president—are pouring us all a glass, it’s time to stop goofing around.
hip, current references like Pat Boone, that's the promise of this substack
I get the point, but I still think it's "norms." Watching the conduct of Elon Musk and reading about the just-out-of-high-school groupies whom he deputized to grab the levers that control much of our economic system so he use his independent preferences to reallocate spending, what strikes me most is how child-like this behavior is. Much as Trump radiates the aura of that sixth-grade bully in the playground, these people seem like under-socialized boys at play who don't understand that we are nothing but under-insulated animals without the dense network of norms of conduct that have evolved as social institutions. I'm worried about a global depression too, but I'm more concerned about what may happen if the fabric of social conventions is broken and things simply don't work: things like banks, hospitals, supermarket supply chains, the grid. All of these and many more rest on a fabric of norms that has become far more dense in recent decades, as we have accelerated the transformation of the media in which we trade value from concrete to notional.
In Trump's first term, we relied on his appointees to be the grown-ups in the room, and it was not a metaphor. Musk's success in business has relied on professional executives who could buffer his impulses. But these two seem now to believe that they can go it alone, and as they hollow out the professional staff of one agency after another in the most powerful bureaucracy in the world, it's not clear who will be in a position to clean up the wreckage.