The 2024 election was mainly about inflation and immigration. But it was also a contest over normal: what it is, who gets to define it, and how rapidly its parameters should shift. Partly, this involved the usual tendency of each political tribe to associate itself with icons of American normality—having kids, owning guns, coaching football, cooking down-home recipes—while characterizing the other as weird or awkward or unwholesome.
When the dust settled, Donald Trump had bested Kamala Harris in the battle for normal. But Trump’s victory didn’t come down to a simple case of the right defending “traditional values” from progressives. There was some of that, to be sure, not least Trump’s opposition to transgender athletes participating in women’s sports and his vow to protect “merry Christmas” from supposed leftist plans to “ban” the holiday greeting.
More often, though, it was Democrats who came across as the party of respectable normativity, the ones upholding a set of taboos and ways of talking and living. Meanwhile, Republicans, the ostensible party of order, reveled in shattering those taboos. This approach reached its zenith (or nadir) with a Madison Square Garden Trump rally late in the campaign at which edgy podcasters flung racial insults and pooh-poohed the gravity of the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol. A majority of voters didn’t seem to mind.
As one young voter told The New York Times: “I was so impressed by JD Vance, the way he carried himself and how normal he appeared. I think I became radicalized on the men and women’s sports issue. The ad that said, ‘Kamala represents they/them—Trump represents you,’ that was so compelling. While Trump is deranged, he represented normalcy somehow to me.”
The new Republican majority, then, is signaling a fatigue with the institutionally dominant version of normal and an openness to a new and as-yet-uncharted normative settlement, particularly around issues of gender, family, and identity.
“The right … has taken a boisterously anti-normative stance.”
Whatever their substantive outcome, these dynamics attest to the enduring potency of normal in our common life. For decades, progressives not only pushed the normative envelope, but questioned normality itself. Normal, according to this line of thinking, is an imposition of the powerful, used to discipline people at the margins: the poor, the mentally ill, racial and sexual minorities, and people with disabilities, among others. More recently, as progressives took over many elite institutions, they found themselves enshrining their version of normal—one that happened to be premised on suspicion of normality. The right, meanwhile, has taken a boisterously anti-normative stance in relation to this new normal.
But through it all, normal remains ubiquitous and ineradicable. It’s a remarkable fate for a relatively novel label, contested by natural and social scientists almost as soon as they came up with it; one whose history is stained by relation to eugenics and some of modern medicine’s less-than-benevolent moments; but which remains an aspiration for most people.
The French bequeathed the modern usage of normal to the world. As the historians Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens have shown, French anatomists as early as 1818 had begun using the “normal state” to describe and compare animal organs. But their usage lacked the binary quality—normal as opposed to pathological or abnormal—that we associate with the concept.
We owe that version to a French physician named François-Joseph-Victor Broussais, who in the 1820s referred to the “normal state” to describe a healthy organ, while characterizing any deviation as pathological. In Broussais’s telling, normal and pathological aren’t fundamentally different qualities. Rather, the pathological is merely a quantitative departure from the normal, whether in excess or deficiency.
It’s nonsense, if you think about it. As the philosopher and physician Georges Canguilhem pointed out a century later, both digestion and infection can cause an increase in white blood cells. The Broussais account couldn’t make out the difference between the two. Yet this was a sunny age of progress, and by positing an ontological identity between the normal and the pathological, Broussais and his followers were expressing “the rationalist optimism that evil has no reality,” as Canguilhem argued—which lent itself to the hope that science could replace moral judgment with quantifiable measures of normalcy.
That is why the 19th-century philosopher (and Broussais’s fellow Frenchman) Auguste Comte eagerly extended the doctor’s account of normalcy far beyond the clinic—to all of society. For Comte, the father of technocracy, normality supplied a neat way to guide “the collective organism,” allowing the administrator to promote reform and progress within scientifically defined limits.
Around the same time, specialists in an emerging field, social statistics, were busy enumerating everything about people: from bodily measurements to suicide rates to the likelihood of illness during the course of a worker’s life. Soon the human world would be buried in what the philosopher Ian Hacking called “an avalanche of numbers.”
“The concept proved extremely useful in a nascent industrial era.”
As the numbers piled up, another key French figure, the statistician Adolphe Quetelet, found that he could graph them on Gaussian bell curves, with the peak, the area of highest frequency, representing what he identified as “the average man” (he didn’t count women). The concept proved extremely useful in a nascent industrial era that preferred standardization for widgets as much for the men who made them.
Normality and Quetelet’s bell curves converged in the mind of Francis Galton, the late-Victorian scientist and half-cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton made important contributions that are still with us today, such as the use of fingerprinting in solving crime. He was also obsessed with hierarchy, which led him to the pseudoscience of eugenics (a term he coined).
Ranking people on bell curves on all manner of characteristics, Galton resolved that social policy must encourage the continuation of “the more suitable races,” over and against “the less suitable.” The idea, as the scholar Robert Chapman has written, “would in time be used to justify some of the worst atrocities ever committed,” including the Nazis’ systematic program for exterminating people with disabilities, known as Aktion T4, as well as involuntary sterilization programs carried out by US states. The “abnormal” had no right to live, let alone breed.
It wasn’t just the Galtonian eugenicists. Psychiatry, too, often used coercive means to discipline “abnormal” people, who happened to comprise almost the entire population. “Normal development” became the obsession of mothers and pediatricians. Children with what we now call autism spectrum disorders were punished cruelly to “correct” their divergence from the neurological norm.
The notion that abnormality was everywhere made no sense even from a bell-curve perspective, but it goosed the market for therapies that helped the masses approach normality—or at least, to cope with its demand. Then came the backlash.
Having pioneered normal, French intellectuals also led the way in opposition to it. It was the philosopher Michel Foucault who put forward some of the most brilliant critiques of normal and normalization in the second half of the 20th century, revealing how institutions like schools, prisons, and clinics used these categories to generate expert knowledge regarding marginalized populations, with the aim of valorizing their own power.
To this day, 40 years after his death from complications related to HIV, Foucault continues to top rankings of the most-cited scholars in the humanities. His ideas long ago left the academy and came to pervade elite institutions. When h.r. workshops teach employees to be wary of “normativity,” or when museums festoon their walls with curatorial notes interrogating the institutions’ own role in upholding racist and colonial norms, they are restaging the Foucauldian critique of normal, albeit in bowdlerized form.
This critique had a lot going for it. Normal wasn’t, in fact, a neutral or objective category. It was warped by the interests and ideological beliefs of the scientific and managerial authorities who mobilized it. “Relations of power,” as Foucault observed in 1976, “are not in a position of exteriority with other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter.” Put another way: Power is always doing its thing, however invisibly, within the ways we come to know each other—or graph our characteristics.
But in a twist that Foucault himself couldn’t have anticipated, the anti-normative discourses inspired by his philosophy became … normal, and took on a disciplinary function just as earlier versions had. For an influential cohort of college-educated Americans, it became quasi-mandatory to declare their pronouns, to acknowledge the indigenous lands upon which they stood, and so on. It was the polite, conventional, and, well, normal thing to do.
These discourses—the normal of anti-normativity—peaked in the febrile years 2020 and 2021. Beginning in 2022, some of these institutions feared that anti-normative norms were alienating, ahem, normal people. The then-ruling Democrats, too, dialed back some elements of the new normal, with Kamala Harris notably declining to foreground her gender and racial background in her campaign.
“Americans registered their discontent with the precepts of anti-normative normality.”
But it was too late. Many Americans registered their discontent with the precepts of anti-normative normality—on social media and in the polling booth. The taboo-breaking, tongue-wiggling social forces won out, and will perhaps get to define yet a newer normal, which, in turn, is likely to engender its own backlash.
Normal—the aspiration to it, the revolt against it, and the contradictions within it—is at the heart of what it means to be human. Yes, the modern use of it came about in the 19th century, and brought in train all sorts of silly hopes about statistics replacing old-fashioned morality and statecraft. And some of those statistical concepts were put to horrific use. But normal has a second and older valence—having to do with rectitude, with fulfilling what it means to be a social animal—that we simply can’t do without. Even if we disagree ferociously about its contents.
A century hence, I suspect, “He’s a normal guy” will remain one of the best things you can say about an American; and “he’s kind of weird” among the worst.