No New Normal
15th March 2022
This presidency was supposed to be so normal. Watching Joe Biden’s inauguration, Washington Post columnist Max Boot “could not help but recall Warren G. Harding’s 1920 campaign slogan: ‘Return to normalcy.’” As Biden introduced his cabinet to the world, Steve Benen of MSNBC was “struck by how normal the choices are.” By April, Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post was relieved to find that “there are days when the new administration is so radically normal that it’s actually kind of boring.” With Bad Orange Man gone for good, everything was fine and good and most of all, normal, normal, normal.
And of course, one year in, it’s going great. Record inflation? Normal. Medical intervention via federal bureaucracy? Extremely normal. Nationally endorsed sexual predation in prisons and schools? The normalest. Cheerleading a new world war to change a nuclear power’s regime is normal; so are supply chain crises. It is also very, very normal for food and fuel to be prohibitively expensive. So that’s reassuring.