The Fault in Our Norms

The destruction of America’s political norms.” “Don’t normalize that.” “This is not normal!” “Why can’t you just be normal?” The last two decades have seen a rising attention to normalcy in American public life. Google Trends shows a steady upward slope—a quadrupling, in fact—in online interest in “normal” between 2004 and 2024. But anecdotally, I’d say this acceleration has felt more intense since around 2015. Not coincidentally, that was the year former president Donald Trump first came to dominate national politics, and it’s also the year the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges, which shifted public discourse on sexuality and gender away from gay marriage and toward new frontiers, especially on gender identity.