THE NEW NORMAL AND THE PROSPECTS FOR A POST-POLITICAL FUTURE.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine

"WHEN WILL THINGS be normal again?"

In politics, this is a powerful wish and a commonly heard refrain. It's the desire that propelled Donald Trump into the White House with a Make America Great Again cap perched atop his head. His campaign tapped into a longing for an imagined 20th century standard, when the United States was militarily, technologically, and commercially dominant abroad and relatively homogeneous at home.

Now Joe Biden is rallying voters against Trump using the same technique. Biden's "no malarkey" campaign bus is powered by the fumes of goodwill he generated in his role as Barack Obama's vice president. He is selling the pre-Trump normal, and plenty of Democratic primary voters seem to be buying.

One weird side effect of this strategy is that Biden is running a markedly conservative campaign in the literal sense of the word: He wants to go back, to conserve what we had under Obama. The contrast is stark with the socialists and progressives otherwise dominating the Democratic held. What if, the Biden campaign seductively asks, we could simply pretend the 45th presidency never happened?

The idea of a "return to normalcy" has worked before. Warren G. Harding ran for president under that banner exactly a century ago. He won despite being described by H.L. Mencken as a man "with the face of a moving-picture actor... and the intelligence of a respectable agricultural implement dealer" (and later, less generously, as "a downright moron").

"America's present need," Harding declared, "is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration; not agitation but adjustment; not surgery but serenity; not the dramatic but the dispassionate; not experiment but equipoise; not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality."

Students of history will recall that his term ended not in equipoise but in a wave of scandal and an untimely death. I will leave you to draw your own conclusions about possible parallels for the centennial of those events.

Millennial and young Gen Xers actually use normal as a term of approbation. When I meet someone new, I'm offering a high compliment indeed if I say, "He seems really normal." Perhaps as a result of my casual abuse of the word, even I--in a moment of frustration over the difficulty of staying on top of an erratic news cycle--have grumbled: "When will things be normal again?"

But I didn't mean it. Because when it comes to politics, normal is...