We Have Never Been Normal

On the day that Donald Trump announced his Muslim ban, a week into his presidency in 2017, I was flying from San Francisco to Washington, DC as the news broke over the patchy WiFi. Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and other prominent Democrats were rallying protesters at airports around the country. Thousands had gathered at the White House. The fight for American democracy, it seemed, had begun.

I was scheduled to give a speech to a World Bank group the following morning. But I had recently published a widely read essay about the responsibilities that all of us in the ideas and policy advocacy business would have in the Trump era. The dangers of “normalizing” Trump were all the rage at that time and I had written about the risk that people like me would have strong incentives to simply go back to advocacy as usual, treating the new administration like any other Republican presidency, when it was sure to be anything but normal.

So I resolved that I would not give the speech as I had planned. The crisis demanded that all of us be in the streets, not trading abstractions about climate change and development finance in an airless meeting room above Connecticut Avenue. That morning, we blacked out the Breakthrough Institute website and posted a statement of opposition. I showed up for my speech but instead gave a short talk about the threat to democracy and informed the audience that I was leaving to join the protests at the White House and encouraged them to join me.

I walked out to a room full of blank stares and quizzical expressions. When I got to Lafayette Square a few blocks to the south, I found the usual smattering of protesters and banners, most having nothing to do with Trump or the Muslim ban.

It was Monday morning. Everyone had gone back to work.

Even after the shock of the first Trump election, when he had failed to win the popular vote and was still seen as alien even to much of his own party, we all, ultimately, went back to work. The non-MAGA wing of the Republican Party saw in Trump’s election an opportunity to cut taxes and social spending. For progressives, often more comfortable in opposition than in power, Trump’s victory validated priors about the Republican Party’s underlying white supremacy and the capture of the Democratic Party by neoliberalism. Despite my warnings to nuclear advocates, we too went back to work, advocating quiet climate policy and working, not without success, to advance policies to modernize the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and commercialize advanced reactors.

Even after January 6th, Biden and Democratic leaders in Congress made the conspicuous choice to go back to work, justifying a perfunctory and doomed Senate impeachment trial by conveniently concluding that “deliverism” was more important than halting federal politics as usual in order to fully attend to the deep rupture in America’s democratic traditions that the storming of the Capitol represented.

Suffice to say that eight years after I walked out of that speech, the effort to not normalize Trump has abjectly failed, simply reinforcing the suspicion among a substantial cohort of our fellow citizens that the nation is controlled by an insular and self dealing liberal establishment that is only interested in democratic governance insofar as it stays within prescribed lines that we determine. So badly has this effort backfired that as the election loomed, slightly more Americans told pollsters that we, not Donald Trump, were the greater threat to democracy.

The effort failed for multiple reasons. In part it failed because principled and non-partisan efforts to oppose Trump’s flaunting of democratic norms were never fully able to distinguish themselves from the normal overheated progressive resistance to any Republican presidency. The pussy hats and the Never Trumpers, “We Believe in Science” and the new cottage industry in fact-checking and disinformation research, social media outrage and high minded editorializing from mainstream media and centrist pundits all blurred together into an elite politics of affect and manners.

Trump’s undeniable talent for inflaming his opponents also led them to discredit themselves. From Greta Thunberg to defund the police, blue state COVID overreaction to “woke Bill Kristol,” Trump reliably inspired his opponents' worst political impulses. Democratic efforts to offer themselves up as the normie and responsible party and Trump and his MAGA followers as “weird” were constantly undone by the progressive Left’s own weirdness. The Trump campaign’s “Kamala is for They/Them, Trump is for you,” advertisement was unquestionably the single most memorable and effective ad of the election cycle, capturing not simply Harris’ unpopular position on transgender issues but the broader sense that Democrats were entirely out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people.

But perhaps more than anything, it happened because Trump’s coarseness, casual misogyny, meandering malapropisms, and fourth grade vocabulary has given liberal America a ready made excuse to dismiss grievances that were real. And by that I don’t mean economic disenfranchisement in the way that left of center folks often patronizingly imagine. Rising opposition to unchecked immigration wasn’t a misguided proxy for economic inequality that could be addressed through industrial policy or a child tax credit. Inflation and high interest rates were hugely salient experiences for most voters even if wages were also rising and Democratic policies on housing, energy, and climate seemed tone deaf to an electorate that was fed up with high prices.

To be clear, Trump has been wrong as often as he has been right. But that means that he has not infrequently been right. On immigration and China, Democrats have belatedly and grudgingly been forced to acknowledge this. I strongly supported the effort to bolster Ukraine after the Russian invasion and it is hard to know what would have happened in Ukraine under a Trump presidency. But with the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that absent a willingness by the US and Europe to directly enter the conflict, which even Ukraine’s staunchest US supporters, as best I can tell, are unwilling to advocate, the war is at this point unwinnable. And while Trump may not talk alot anymore about the COVID vaccine, Operation Warp Speed happened on his watch, not Biden’s.

Already, prominent Democrats are mobilizing from the same resistance playbook that served Democrats so poorly during the first Trump presidency. Harris, in a combative concession speech, sounded familiar themes around reproductive rights, gun control, and the rule of law. A day later, California Governor Gavin Newsom called a special session of the state legislature to prepare the resistance to the incoming administration. Some of those fights may, sooner or later, prove necessary. Trump has already attempted to overturn the result of one election and it is clear that his return to the White House could result in further assaults upon America’s democratic institutions. If and when those things happen, there will be a need for a measured and appropriate response.

But there is a risk in assuming that every bad thing will happen before it does. Trump has lots of cross pressures in his own coalition. The Elon agenda and the RFK agenda, to take one very prominent example, are not terribly well aligned. Maximalist procedural resistance from Democrats risks both saving Trump from his own excesses and giving him a ready made excuse when he fails to deliver on his promises.

What the scale of the Trump victory and the breadth of the electoral coalition he has built should establish is that the MAGA coalition of the white working class, christianist evangelicals, small business owners and middle managers, and, increasingly, non-white non-college educated voters is the new normal and we, the minority of college educated, liberal minded people in the United States, are the W.E.I.R.D. ones. Simply put, the fight to not normalize Trump, his agenda, and his coalition is over. It is no longer credible to treat Trump and the MAGA movement as a rogue, illegitimate, or anomalous phenomena.

To the contrary, normalizing Trump and his agenda is arguably the best thing that anti-Trump forces can do. Treating Trump as a normal politician, not an exceptional threat to democracy that must be driven out of public life, denies him the oxygen that has fueled his unique brand of grievance politics. The messianic qualities that Trump’s supporters attribute to him are in significant part a result of the extraordinary efforts that his political opponents have gone to keep him from power.

Doing so, of course, is easier said than done. Trump, hemmed in by the drudgery of normal politics, is likely to find ways to escalate. A sweeping round up of millions of illegal immigrants, for instance, or a trumped up federal case against Joe and Hunter Biden, will raise familiar alarms about Trump’s intentions. But less, in response to such provocations, is likely to be more effective than more.Trump will have a reasonable legal basis for rounding up illegal immigrants, even if doing so is unspeakably cruel and impractical. But doing so will also be extremely disruptive socially and economically in ways that are likely to produce significant backlash well beyond the usual blue, coastal, and affluent precincts.

Similarly, while any effort to prosecute the Bidens will not read substantially different to many voters than Democratic efforts to prosecute Trump, those efforts will also run into enormous legal and procedural roadblocks that are unlikely to result in a quick or decisive verdict and will likely generate sympathy for the Bidens that is presently lacking. In these and other cases, over the top rhetoric and maximalist resistance will not be an obstacle to Trumpism, it will feed it. A more measured response allows the weight of Trump’s tendencies toward exaggeration and overreach to work against him.

Meanwhile, there are a range of popularist policies that Democrats still remain on the right side of. Significant majorities of Americans continue to support limited abortion rights. They support things like the child tax credit and aren’t wild about giving huge tax cuts to the rich. They like Social Security, Medicare, and prescription drug benefits and support Obamacare, at least when they understand what it is. And they like clean energy and want to do something about climate change as long as it doesn’t raise their energy prices or their taxes. These are the sort of issues that Democrats and Republicans have wrangled over for decades and Democrats should absolutely contest them.

There will also likely be large swaths of the Trump agenda with which many of us should engage constructively. On things like permitting reform and nuclear energy, the Trump agenda is likely to push further on regulatory reforms that will be critical for the energy transition over the long term. Even on the Inflation Reduction Act, a constellation of interests and conflicting agendas within the Republican coalition make a wholesale repeal unlikely. There will be opportunities to mend, not end the IRA as well as ill-conceived EPA tailpipe and power plant regulations that were sure to backfire if left in place unchanged.

Over the next several weeks, my colleagues and I will have a lot more to say about some of those opportunities. Suffice for now to say that while a lot of progressive environmentalists appear determined to retreat to the safe spaces of blue states and Bluesky while pursuing scorched earth opposition to Republicans on federal climate and energy policy, pragmatic climate, clean energy, and abundance advocates will have the opportunity to once and for all declare independence from the climate and environmental movements, a shift that is long overdue.

For the last eight years, fear of normalizing Trump has very strongly discouraged mainstream civil society actors from engaging his agenda and coalition constructively, for fear that doing so was tantamount to appeasement and collaboration. But last week’s election should put an end to the notion that Trump or his followers can be driven from the public square. There is no path to reconstructing a vital center in American politics, or a nationally competitive Democratic Party, without engaging Trumpism and the national MAGA majority.