Normal Is Making a Comeback

Hey,

Years ago, when Boris Yeltsen was still president of Russia, he was asked by a reporter if he could summarize the state of the Russian economy in “one word.”

Yeltsen thought for a moment, and then said, “Good.”

People chuckled. The reporter asked a follow-up: “Perhaps Mr. President you could expand on that? Could you use two words?”

Yeltsen pondered for a long moment and then said, “Not good.”

I love that story—which I first heard from Leon Aron—for a bunch of reasons. But I’ll spare you most of them and just say that it’s funny and captures in a darkly ironic way how there’s a positive, optimistic case for everything.

Let’s start with a little optimism. I get a lot of grief from people who think I’m too negative. I mean, just because I spend my days like Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard in a Saigon hotel room, yelling affirmations at Werner Herzog quotes playing on an endless loop, people think I’m a downer. “Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.” (Preach!) “Do you not then hear this horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence?” (I’m not the only one!)

As the hilarious doctor said to the patient after informing him he’d be fine, I’m just kidding.

No, really, I’m just kidding.

I’m actually feeling really good. I mean, not physically (maintaining this physique comes at a heavy price), but in my private life—friends, family, work—things are going quite well. But I come from an ancient religious tradition that thinks talking about such things invites a divine version of Han Solo’s “Don’t get cocky” remonstration. 

But I do think things are getting better for the country and our politics. Or at least it looks that way to me right now.

Of course, I’m saying this from a conservative perspective. If you’re an unreconstructed, partisan left-winger, I get why you’d think things are going downhill like an armless surgeon trying to remove an appendix.

(Hey, I don’t just mix metaphors in this “news”letter, I mutilate them like a hungry bear eating a marzipan replica of Versailles.)

The failure of the Build Back Better bill was a good thing. As Kevin Williamson writes, it’s proof the system actually worked.

As Kevin, Charlie Cooke, and I have been shouting like a Spanish-wine-besotted Steve Hayes looking at his fantasy football standing, Joe Manchin wasn’t “one” man thwarting the will of the majority, in the Senate or in the country. He was just the 51st senator opposed to Build Back Better.

In fact, that understates it. He was probably speaking for another half dozen senators who didn’t want to vote for Build Back Better either. We know the identity of only one of them—Kyrsten Sinema—the rest didn’t feel like they could say it publicly. But if you think that, say, Maggie Hassan is crying into her New Hampshire maple syrup over this, you’re swallowing too many Democratic talking points.

I’m not going to wade too much further into Build Back Better punditry (if you want that, see my latest column). I’m not even going to write about the German effort to make memes of classical composers in the form of uncooked pancakes, widely known as the Bild Bach Batter movement—except to say that this is just the most glaring sign that the period of progressive overreach is over for the foreseeable future.

I don’t mean that Bernie Sanders and his crowd have given up. I mean that this was their last shot at “transformative” legislation for a while. Don’t get me wrong, liberals will have legislative victories again, but when they do, they’ll be better victories. Let’s say Biden and Manchin end up working something out. I might disagree with the end result, but it will be better than the legislation that just died.

Manchin was willing to support all sorts of stuff conservatives can rightly object to. But he wanted it to be paid for without dumb gimmicks. What the Democrats were trying to do was get a whole bunch of programs started on the bet that they could fund them later with tax hikes or more borrowing. Manchin objected to that. He wanted to fully fund universal pre-K for 10 years without gimmicks. There are good arguments for and against doing that, but from a liberal perspective—and a conservative one—it’s better than what Biden wanted.

The normals strike back.

But let’s move on. For the last few years I’ve felt like Jack McGee, the reporter who tried to convince the world that the Hulk was real in the ‘70s TV show. I’ve been saying that the deformed monster in our politics is populism and it manifests itself in both parties. The party bases, broadly defined, are determined to smash our institutions and norms like a gamma irradiated behemoth on a Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Until 2015 or so, I mostly focused on the left. But now I split my time between both manifestations of the same beast. The response from some folks on the right has been unpleasant. To borrow a line from Dr. Banner, they’ve been saying, “Don’t make us angry, you won’t like us when we’re angry.” And they were right!

More on that in a minute. The important point is that most voters aren’t with the people who claim to speak for the masses. A new study by the Democratic Governors Association underlines this point. It found that a significant number of Virginians voted for both Biden and Republican Glenn Youngkin. These voters rejected Trumpism, but they didn’t like Bidenism. A significant slice of them were black and Latino.

Indeed, the significant, though hardly massive, migration of Latinos out of the reliable Democratic coalition threatens to overturn the progressive playbook for years to come. Democrats bought into the idea that partisanship was essentially a biological imperative of some kind. If you were non-white, that meant you were a reliable Democrat forever. But putting aside the ugliness of such essentialism, the relevant point is that it wasn’t true. Black voters are now to the right of the progressive elites who claim to represent black interests. As I’ve written repeatedly, Hispanics are repulsed by the lingua franca of wokeness. Who you calling “Latinx”!?

This doesn’t mean they’re all Burkean conservatives or anything. It just means that black and Latino voters are increasingly becoming normal voters. Sure, most are Democrats, but they’re normal Democrats.

The best and most encouraging proof of this trend can be found in crime and education. For a couple years, progressive elites got high on their own supply of college term papers and thought that normal people spend a lot of time thinking about intersectionality and all that junk. They convinced themselves that normal people would just go along with insane notions like defunding the police. But in just the last few months, it’s become clear that fever has broken, as reality has smacked a bunch of politicians in the face with the semi-frozen flounder of normalcy.

Normal people don’t like to see homeless people dropping a deuce on the street (frankly, they don’t like seeing anybody doing that, homeless or not). They really don’t like wanton and unopposed shoplifting. And man, they’re just implacably opposed to murder. And it turns out they want cops to do something about that stuff. No, they don’t want cops to be racist or homicidal—but they never did.

It’s really amazing. Progressives mock laissez-faire policies not just in economics, but in free speech, free association and, in some situations, religion. But on crime? They’re libertarians. That’s unfair to libertarians, of course, because the overwhelming majority of libertarians understand that fighting crime is one of the few legitimate functions of government. Obviously, reasonable people can disagree on what should be criminalized or how laws should be enforced. But if you sound like you’re against criminalizing theft, robbery, or homicide, the normals are going to abandon you. That’s a little unfair to the defund the police crowd, which, last I checked, is still actually against murder. They’re just not particularly concerned with the government having the power to do much about it.

Across the country, the normal are making themselves heard on the issue of crime, and woke politicians are either getting defenestrated or backtracking like they left their wallets in the parking lot.

Likewise, normal people are fairly pragmatic about education. They want their kids to be taught stuff that doesn’t offend them and that doesn’t emphasize boutique ideological grievances. Contrary to the mantra from defenders of critical race theory, most parents—white, black, Hispanic, whatever—have no problem with teaching their kids about slavery and racism. But that was already happening (basically anybody who has school-aged kids today knows this because they were taught about such things when they were in school). Either critical race theory is something new and pathbreaking or it’s not. Proponents want it both ways. When they’re on the offense it’s a vital and gloriously radical new pedagogical approach, but when they’re on the defense it’s just “teaching history.” It can’t be both and parents know this. And they don’t like being told they’re idiots or “domestic terrorists” when they object.

More importantly, while normal parents will undoubtedly have varying views on what kids should learn in school, one thing that most of them can agree on is that their kids should learn it in school. As a GOP analyst quoted by the Post’s write-up of that new study said, “If they opened up the schools in the fall of 2020, Terry McAuliffe wins.”

And speaking of Terry McAuliffe, while some normal parents want to be very involved in what their schools teach, many others don’t. But none of them like hearing people like Terry McAuliffe tell them they have no right to involve themselves if they want to.

In the short term, this trend is good for Republicans, but that isn’t why I’m encouraged. To paraphrase Clark Griswold, I’m whistling “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” out of my nethers because this trend is good for America.

Republicans, like Glenn Youngkin, are benefitting from the ascendancy of normalcy right now because the Republicans are the out party. But that doesn’t mean the GOP is becoming the normalcy party, unfortunately. The GOP will take back the House and maybe the Senate, and when they do, a fresh wave of idiots will leap into politics like the caddies into the Bushwood pool.

Stuck on stupid.

The Republican visage of the Janus-faced Hulk is investing in stupid as if it were Bitcoin. Like Boris Yeltsen’s “not good” follow-up, let’s talk about that. I’m enjoying the political beclowning of wokeness on the left, but the right’s embrace of jackassery is legitimately bumming me out, because it’s driven by people trying to claim the conservative label.

Consider AmericaFest. For several days now, I’ve been subjected to clips from Charlie Kirk’s confab. If stupid were chocolate, he’d be Willy Wonka, albeit with a revival tent vibe.  Whether it’s his comparison of Kyle Rittenhouse to Jesus or his claim that their election “audit updates” come from a “biblical framework,” he’s peddling snake-oil-flavored everlasting gobstoppers of idiocy.

Before you get offended at me mocking people for declaring their Christian faith, consider that what I’m really mocking is their understanding of Christianity. Here’s Donald Trump Jr.:

““We’ve turned the other cheek and I understand sort of the biblical reference,  I understand the mentality, but it’s gotten us nothing, … It’s gotten us nothing while we’ve ceded ground in every major institution.”

My favorite part is the “sort of.” “Turn the other cheek” is “sort of” a biblical reference? What other kind of reference could it be other than some obscure instruction from a photographer to some butt model or what a tattooist says when he’s done with the left side?

More importantly, this is an inversion of Christianity of the sort that was common among social gospel progressives a century ago. Walter Rauschenbusch proclaimed whatever “God that answereth by low food prices, let him be God.” At least Rauschenbusch was interested in the plight of his flock. Donnie thinks a core tenet of Christianity needs to go if it doesn’t yield political power (for him). It should not fall to a guy named Goldberg to point this out, but from what I know about Christianity, this is pretty frick’n Roman.

But it’s not just the religion stuff. Sarah Palin, without a hint of irony, says she’ll get vaccinated “over my dead body.” (“Your terms are acceptable”—COVID.) Jesse Watters thought he was being super clever by using homicidal language—“killshot,” “ambush,” “dead,” etc.—in his exhortation to get college kids to harass Anthony Fauci. He wasn’t explicitly calling for violence, but he knew his stupid rhetoric would get the desired response. Overlooked is the fact that he wants people to stalk Fauci and he literally promised that Fox News will reward them with positive attention if they do. This wasn’t his position when left-wing activists followed Kyrsten Sinema into the bathroom. Madison Cawthorn, who makes Watters seems like Aristotle, told a group of mostly college students (at an event that makes its living feeding off of college students) that most of them should drop out of college. And, of course, Tucker Carlson doled out the usual boob-bait about the Capitol riot.

And so did Marjorie Taylor Greene, who makes a Chinatown tic-tac-toe chicken look like a model of intellectual rigor. That reminds me of Werner Herzog’s classic line about chickens, which works almost as well for her: “Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world.”

Anyway, I could go on. But the point is that if the GOP wants to be the party of normals, it can’t just take advantage of Democratic abnormalcy. It actually has to be, well, normal. So long as this chicken feed is part of the overall diet of GOP messaging, any political marriage between Republicans and the great mass of normal Americans will be short-lived.

The good news remains, however. The majority of Americans are better than their political representatives and, eventually, their hunger for sanity will prevail. In the short term, we will keep zig-zagging between parties overpromising the normal and underdelivering it. But so long as the system works, odds are the normal will inherit the future.

Have a wonderful Christmas, if that’s your thing.