CHAPTER TWO   

Who Are the Normals?

Call them the Normals.

Normals are the people who make America America, the ones who feed it and fuel it and drive it around, and who get up every day to take care of their families. They are the suckers who show up for jury duty without a sure-fire plan for getting kicked off the panel. They pay their taxes but get bitter about the deadbeats they see ahead of them in line at the Safeway buying cases of Dr Pepper with EBT cards. Yet, nonetheless, every year they faithfully and timely write their checks to Uncle Sam.

They are the ones who sign on the dotted line and end up in Third World hellholes with M4s shooting it out with the local religious fanatic/pederasts in wars they didn’t ask for and that their leaders often have no plan for winning.

What do the Normals do for America? They merely offer their sweat, their money, and their blood. Most of the time, they do so without complaint. Yet, their alleged betters, that bipartisan meritocracy without merit that is America’s Elite, still hates them.

Not merely has disdain for them.

Not only disrespects them.

Hates them.

That is the crux of the problem, and the genesis of this chaotic moment in history. America’s Elite has morphed from a caretaker caste granted access to the levers of power to run things while everyone else goes about their lives into a self-serving guild that despises the very people whose interests it should be serving.

In the past, the Elite at least paid lip service to the centrality of the Common Man in the American political scheme of things. The Democrat Party was, at one time, proudly the Party of the Working Man. But today, it is proudly the Party of the Silicon Valley Zillionaire, the Brooklyn Hipster, the Bitter Middle-Aged Divorcee Who Teaches English in a Unionized Public School, the Hollywood Pervert, the Vox contributor, and the LGBTQKLHU&%! Activist Whose Pronouns Are “Xip” and “Xork.”

The sliver of the Normals that the Elite approve of is the underclass—reliable votes and obedient serfs of the Elite. The Elite happily keeps them in line with bread and circuses. When it mentions them at all, it is to use them as a bludgeon—the underclass is, of course, the fault of the Normals. But so is everything.

The Republicans fetishized the Normals, too, in the sense that they at one time represented Main Street merchants, the yeoman farmers, and the upper middle class who were the backbone of the nation. The town Buick dealer, the local lawyer, the manager at Bethlehem Steel—these were the classic bourgeois Normals of the Republican base. But the Republicans also lost sight of their own constituents. Instead of Normals, the Republican Party began catering exclusively to the big-money donor types and to the puny know-it-alls of Conservative, Inc., that tiresome network of DC/NY-centered think tanks and publications that pushed a bunch of utopian ideas generated by a bunch of people who had done nothing in their life except go to college and write unread position papers while completing a fellowship at the Liberty Forum Coalition for Freedom.

This alienation between the parties and their core Normal constituencies increased as the bipartisan Elite not only cut the Normals out of their calculations and positioning but grew to hold the Normals in contempt. For the Democrats, Normals represented a hateful legacy of bigotry and reaction. For the Republicans, the Normals’ parochial concerns interfered with business as usual. Both parties were happy to have Normals’ votes and their tax dollars, but neither had any intention of actually letting the Normals have any kind of influence on what the Elite did with the power entrusted to it.

So it came to pass that by the 2016 campaign, both major parties were heading toward Election Day utterly oblivious to the fact that the Normals were seething. And the consequences of that oversight changed American history.

Today, at long last, the Normals are making themselves heard again, loudly and vigorously. It’s not the first time. The Normals have gone by several names over the years, but at their core they have always been the same. They are nationalist and patriotic, with a hint of populism, and periodically infused with anger at an Elite that has totally failed to do its job. The Silent Majority of the Nixon years faded into the background well before Gerald Ford was sworn in. It arose again in the Tax Revolt of the late 1970s and in the election of Ronald Reagan. We saw it briefly stir itself on behalf of Ross Perot in 1992, but it was not until the Tea Party movement of the first term of Barack Obama that the Normals roared back to the forefront of American politics. That movement waned, but it did not go into hibernation. The Tea Party failed to change the Elite—or, rather, the Elite failed to change itself in response to the Tea Party—and the Normals rose again in 2016 in the most improbable election in the history of the United States.

The natural resting state of the Normals is a kind of rational apathy. They do not want to be focused on politics. They want to focus on family and faith and earning a living. Normals view politics as a marginally necessary evil, and prefer to cede that dirty job to the Elite. The Elite likes the power and prestige, and the ability to take a cut of the spoils, which come from overseeing the operations of our society’s institutions. It is an arrangement that works—when the Elite does its job and minds its place.

But when necessary—when the Elite has failed to satisfy its part of the unspoken bargain—the Normals will revoke their political and cultural power of attorney, step back into the arena, and make their displeasure known.

That’s what happened on November 8, 2016.

The Normals have risen again, but having made their point they are not withdrawing back into their private lives the way they did in the past. This rising is different. This time they can’t go back to sleep again. The 24/7 news cycle and the presence of social media, along with the changed nature of the Elite, make that impossible. There is no down time; there is no longer any empty political space where nothing much happens and things just sort of flow along like a lazy river. Every day is a crisis, mostly because politicians and the media believe they benefit from crises. To sleep is to die, and the Normals know it. Like Michael Corleone in the abysmal Godfather Part III (1990), just when they think they’re out, they get pulled back in.

So the Normals keep fighting. And now their complaints are being funneled through the bully pulpit that is the Oval Office—often via its occupant’s Twitter account.

If you want to understand how you got President Donald Trump, you have to look at the people who chose President Donald Trump over sixteen other Republicans of various levels of establishment respectability, and over The Most Qualified Woman in the World.

The Normals elected President Donald Trump—or, arguably, they rejected everyone else. It is a distinction without a difference. They chose him, willingly. Here was a man with manifest personal failings, many ridiculously overblown—as we have seen, everything Trump is or does is, and must be, The Worst Thing Ever. Here was a man of uncentered ideology—a Republican sometimes, and Democrat others, and an Independent occasionally. Here was the least likely of presidents, a concept so ridiculous before it happened that it was famously a punchline in an episode of The Simpsons.

Yet, that’s who the Normals picked. And that’s the most graphic evidence of their displeasure with the current state of their country. Sometimes, it seems, you do have to burn down a village to save it, and sometimes you have to elect a Donald Trump president.

What would ever possess the Normals to do that?

To understand their motivations, you have to understand who the Normals are and what they have gone through in the last half-century of American history. You have to understand how empowering the Common Man went from being the solution to the problem. The focus on securing the freedom and prosperity of the Normals went from being the rationale for the United States to being an obstacle to the glory the Elite believes America can only achieve if it is fundamentally changed into a cosmopolitan, soft-socialist nanny state run by a transnational ruling class. Those short-sighted Normals, determined to assert their own interests and preferences, are a real problem for an Elite fixated on its own interests.

The Normals gave their everything to their country, and over time found their country with an increasingly detached and alien Elite at the helm, charting a course that ended up with Normal America crashing into the rocks. This is not a purely American phenomenon either, though its manifestation in the United States is different than elsewhere. You can see it in the “Little Englanders” who defied their betters to demand Brexit, and in the frustrated Frenchmen and Germans who look to outsider parties to make their voice heard over the blare of the Elite consensus.

Who is a Normal anyway? It is someone who does not choose to identify with the Elite.

It is important to understand that not all Normals are identical, nor are all members of the Elite. These are generalizations, and like all general rules there are exceptions. The exceptions do not disprove the basic point.

Normal Americans generally leave the day-to-day management of America’s institutions to those with the expertise and the affinity to run them. These are the Elite, though membership in the Elite is broader than simply those people with actual power and includes those who choose to affiliate themselves with the beliefs and norms of the Elite. You can be Elite if you are a GS-14 making trade policy in the Department of Commerce. But you can also be Elite by being a marketing consultant married to that bureaucrat because you subscribe to the same worldview, which often (but not always) includes liberal politics.

Elitists tend to value credentials, particularly academic ones. They also tend to trust institutions, and why wouldn’t they? They are the class responsible for running them, and they tend to value the prerogatives of institutions over the personal interests of individuals. That’s how you get the FBI essentially using manufactured evidence to pry a FISA warrant out of a judge, and then, when exposed, the Elite closes ranks to cry out that our federal law enforcement institutions are under attack. What about the guy who got spied on in violation of the law? Meh. It’s the Elite institution that matters, not some uppity rando insisting on his constitutional rights.

The Elite tends not only to revere and respect institutions and those with the expertise to manage them, but expects others to revere and respect them, too. Reverence and respect are, after all, part of the consideration for being Elite.

A Normal is simply someone who does not identify with the Elite and its core values. The Normals generally know who is one of them, largely because if someone chooses to identify with the Elite he will rarely let you forget it. While the Normals probably won’t use the term “Normal,” they will certainly use a term that evokes something similar.

“Middle class.”

“Working class.”

“Red stater.”

“Regular Joe.”

“American.”

That last is one of the key discriminators—Normals tend to eagerly and proudly identify themselves as “Americans.” It’s central to their identity, and they are deeply patriotic. They aren’t blind to the flaws of their country, but they love it—deeply and without the kind of mealymouthed reservations their Elite betters always seem to have to offer as a disclaimer before reluctantly displaying any kind of patriotic sentiment.

A Normal is never a “citizen of the world,” and Normals do not shift uncomfortably in their seats, as the Elitists tend to, when someone correctly observes that the United States of America is the greatest country on Earth. Their patriotism comes asterisk-free.

Normal status is not completely geographically dependent, though that can be a pretty good indicator. According to the New York Times, Washington, DC, one of America’s premier pustules of Elitism, voted 90.9 percent for Hillary Clinton.¹ In contrast, in West Virginia, where you don’t utter the word elite in the presence of children or respectable ladies, the Times reported that the voters went 67.9 percent for the thrice-married New York billionaire.²

The big coastal cities of Boston, New York, Seattle, and Los Angeles all fly the blue flag. You get to the outskirts of those urban centers and, in general, things change. Where the buildings are typically under three stories, you find Normals. Find the high-rises, and you find the Elite.

Nor is Normal status conferred by race or ethnicity. The media likes to talk about the unruly masses as “white,” but that term is losing its meaning. Race seems to be a subject young people never tire of yapping about even as the point of origin of their distant relatives prior to coming to North America becomes less and less of an issue in selecting their mates. To the extent a lot of Normals are “white” reflects the fact that a lot of America outside the cities is still “white.” But Normals come in every color and creed.

The Elite are certainly confused about the Normals—who they are and what they want. Much of that comes from a lack of familiarity. That’s not to say that a portion of the Elite is not made up of lapsed Normals—as with atheists, the angriest ones are often the ex-believers. But as Charles Murray documented in his book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012), the world of the Elite and the world the rest of America dwells in are becoming more and more segregated. Many in the Elite have never done a brake job, carried a rifle, or gotten smacked in the face in a bar fight. Nor have many outside the Elite seen a Michael Moore movie, drank kombucha on purpose, or worn a felt vagina-pun on their head to protest the election of an alleged sexual abuser over the enabler of an admitted sexual abuser whom they supported.

A Normal is fairly likely to have gone to church in the last month. A Harvard grad living in Georgetown is unlikely to have gone into a church in the last four weeks unless someone died—and even then it would probably be a church the family hired for the occasion with a rent-a-pastor who carefully curates the homily to avoid any awkwardly specific references to the Savior that the decedent didn’t actually believe in.

Those different experiences lead to very different worldviews and to an Elite that does not understand the Normals it presumes to lead—and that hates what it believes it understands about them.

The Elite’s media is supposed to help gather that information to inform its fellow Elitists, including those with actual decision-making power, but it has itself become packed with Elitists who lack any life experience outside college and grad school. Most mainstream media members do not know any Normals, or they have long since moved on from those with whom they grew up. They share the bigotry and prejudices of their class. Except for a few intrepid reporters like Salena Zito of the New York Post, none of the people in the media charged with going and finding out what was happening bothered to. When they did, it was more like a Margaret Mead anthropological expedition where, instead of trekking off to Samoa, some Washington Post reporter with a French poetry bachelor’s from Princeton and a J-school diploma from Columbia who cut his teeth writing for Daily Kos would fly into Tupelo for an afternoon to marvel at the locals, then call back to his editor with a story pitch along the lines of:

After church on Sunday—they totally believe in Jesus, if you can believe that!—the congregation gets together under a tent for a potluck and talks politics. It’s not really very sophisticated—they blame undocumented workers for problems, which is totally racist. In fact, while they never actually come out and say it, they are all super racist. Cutting regulations? Racist. Being afraid of terrorists? Racist. Not wanting men pretending to be women whipping it out in the restroom next to their teen daughters? Transphobic, and probably racist, too. Somehow. Because, I’ve learned, that the farther you get from the coasts, the more racist America becomes. Oh, and do not, whatever you do, go canoeing out in red America because you know what they’ll do to you. Haven’t you seen that red state documentary, Deliverance?

This is pretty much what our Elite thinks. It’s probably too kind.

Yet these Normals are the people who put Donald Trump in the White House, beating the full court press of the press and the rest of the ruling class. You might think they would get some credit for pulling off that feat, but if you listen to the loudest voices in our culture, the Normals are the worst people in the world.

Muslim extremist butchers? Bad, in theory, but you know who the real Taliban is? Catholics who prefer not to chip in for abortions.

Drug gangs who terrorize the ghettos? Well, the Normals are the ones who elected Ronald Reagan and his CIA, who—before the CIA became brave heroes speaking truth to power on or about January 20, 2017—invented crack and forced the local youths to sell it.

Freeloaders who free-ride on the welfare system? Victims of the Normals’ selfishness. The real problem, for some reason, is people who support themselves and their own families.

The modern Elite needs and wants an enemy, and the Normals make for a great villain. The Normals don’t fit in the grand scheme of things their betters envision. Normals just want to live their lives and raise their families in peace. Unforgivably, they seem to want hope and change without fundamentally transforming America.

They are branded racist, sexist, homophobic, and all the other countless -ists and -phobics that their alleged betters have invented.

Many believe in God, which today is the greatest of heresies. They don’t believe in science, especially such “science” as a frigid winter proving global warming exists or that someone can transform his/her sex by merely feeling like it.

The Normals are square, bourgeois, and totally uncool. Having contempt for them flatters the Elite hater, allowing the hater to revel in his or her own edginess. Or xir’s edginess—we would not want to risk misgendering a hater.

Even worse, the Normals refuse to acknowledge the manifest superiority of their betters. The fact that the Normals do not sufficiently respect or revere the Elite, or honor its myriad weird taboos and shibboleths, is infuriating. The barbarians! They even refuse to confess and do penance for the privilege inherited from their great-great-great-great-great-granddad who came from outside of Düsseldorf!

The Normals were, for a long time, reluctant to fight back. Lucky for the Elite—that’s the best kind of enemy, one too busy supporting his family to jump into the ring and start punching. But then, you can only push people so far. Like a little drunk in a bar who keeps poking, poking, poking at the big guy who just wants to finish his pint of unironic Pabst, eventually the pest is going to get a fist in his face.

The Elite poked and prodded and pestered. Eventually, the Normals were going to find their Donald Trump, whether his name was “Donald Trump” or something else. And can you really blame them?

Many are angry. They want change. And they are not about to back down.

Call them the Militant Normals.