There Will Be No Return to Normalcy
Recently, I had a light debate with a friend regarding whether or not things were worse during the 2000s/ early 2010s or if they are worse now, during the early-mid 2020s – or, phrased differently, whether the a cultural turning point that has been labelled ‘the Great Awokening’ (circa 2013/14) made things worse… or not.
My possibly controversial contention is that things were actually worse then than they are now.
When my friend pushed me as to why I thought this was, I was forced to conclude that a decade ago, the suffocating atmosphere of a towering, sugary and all-consuming liberal nihlism appeared far more potent and unchallenged if compared to today, even if it was slightly less virulent. This was because a breakdown or possible diversion away from liberal norms was essentially inconceivable two decades ago.
Yes, you could find the odd movie lacking today’s ham-fisted liberal lectures in 2007 and most PS2/PS3 video games had few-to-no awkwardly-inserted transsexual protagonists but that didn’t mean that seemingly all-pervasive nature of liberalism was less present. 15-20 years ago, they were just more subtle – but even then, rarely by all that much. You might be surprised to discover how seemingly contemporary and ‘woke’ some pre-2000 media products look (‘90s girl power, ‘80s black grievance movies), and even more surprised to see that attacks on heteronormativity, white privilege and the nuclear family were standard fare in avant gard media and mainstream academia as far back at the 1960s.
Instead of viewing the famous ‘Great Awokening’ of 2013-14 as a sudden, violent eruption (even if we admittedly did witness a genuinely pronounced acceleration of wokism), we might instead view this prior decade of ours as a final act, as a coming-to-a-head of sociocultural trajectories long since at work or perhaps as a flowering of seeds that were planted long ago. The present hour is the tip of the iceberg, supported by a far grander body beneath the ocean waves, stretching back into the 1960s, 1920s, or even the 18th century, depending on your viewpoint. For this reason, slightly less venomous instantiations of Liberalism found in the near-past are simultaneously more self-assured, steely and even cocky; they simply took for granted the idea that their own cultural logics will continue unabated for decades or centuries. Indeed, the End of History had already arrived and was just beginning to make itself at home forever.
Still, whenever my mind drifts back to those immediate pre ‘Great Awokeining’ days before 2013, I am always somehow reminded of this image:
This image is from 2014. As well as being exactly one decade ago, it’s one of the two years (along with 2013) considered a threshold period separating our current reality from the immediately prior, ‘pre-Woke’ one (even if ultimately I still think both resides on a singular trajectory, differing only in degree).
I like this evocative and nostalgic photo because it truly sums up everything I remember about the first decade-and-a-half of the 21st century:
- Celebrity Worship.
- Shallowness and superficiality.
- A glitzy liberal aristocratic class with dazzling smiles.
- A pervasive sense that we were probably still living in the best of times.
In many ways, things have not changed very much since then but in other ways they have changed quite a bit. This image has obviously been burned into my retina for a decade now but it is quite difficult to imagine such a photo becoming viral today. We are more cynical, distracted, worried, pensive and grizzled to be dazzled by the glittery awe of the liberal culture industry. A growing darkness has partially replaced or made redundant the jubilant excesses of celebrity glitz, glamour and idolation. The Culture Industry has been, if not dethroned, somewhat demoted in its cultural hegemony. At the very least, the elite liberal class has been forced to become awkwardly self-conscious in ways that that they had previously escaped. And in my opinion, theirs is not a world we’ll return to any time soon.
Of course, some of those featured above have themselves been caught up in scandals along quasi-’woke’ lines. I say only ‘quasi’ because, unlike much of woke hysteria, both Ellen DeGeneres and Kevin Spacey ALLEGEDLY committed genuinely grievous acts of criminal and exploitative behaviour. And in both cases (employee abuse and sexual assault) their behaviour was archetypally indicative of everything the liberal left should be against, based as they are are extreme violations of power asymmetries.
Such actions are tantamount to high treason in the church of wokeism, and thus power abuses such as these are somewhat akin to men of the cloth committing the most evil act of child abuse; in both cases, the most exalted figureheads of a moral system are found to commit its most grave violations, casting public doubt on those very moral systems.
Many celebrities have thus been cycled out of the rotation of secular saints for comparable sins and have vanished from the collective unconscious. Indeed, it would be quite the achievement today to find a photograph of so many A-listers from the early 2010s be in one place and find that none of them had been MeToo’ed or accused of some other egregious act. An important unintended side-effect of this new reality, however, is that the celebrity worship we endured and still endure has somewhat been dampened; this is most evident from the failures of the Harris campaign to capitalize on her endorsements. And it is one of many signs that that time will not return.
No Return to Normalcy
Speaking to an America ravaged by political extremism, WW1 and the Spanish flu, William Harding won the 1920 presidential election with a then recording-breaking share of the popular vote. A large part of this victory was his famous ‘return to normalcy’ speech:
America’s present need 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…. Let’s get out of the fevered delirium of war, with the hallucination that all the money in the world is to be made in the madness of war and the wildness of its aftermath. Let us stop to consider that tranquility at home is more precious than peace abroad, and that both our good fortune and our eminence are dependent on the normal forward stride of all the American people.
Seems quite prescient, no? This call for a calming of tempers and a return to prior norms could be almost word-for-word replicated today, if we had candidates articulate enough to speak them. But today, that horse has long bolted. Contemporary America has been purposefully fractured down a million fault lines: racial, sexual, gender, economic, generational and on and on.
Yet I think that many political leaders and middle-to-high-ranking liberal elites (journalists, activists, academics) have it lodged somewhere in the back of their minds that this prior mode of being is still awaiting us, that it was merely frozen in ice around the time of first Trump campaign, slowly thawing. Outside of Instagram and TikTok, there is far less terror and uncertainty regarding Trump’s 2nd term with respect to the 1st. Trump himself might be the chosen one to bring America back to the centre, back to pre-polarisation, back to its heyday. Indeed, I think many powerful people in America are hoping that this is the case.
But this is not the case. For better or for worse, that time has ended.
So what about now? What’s interesting about 2024 was that is you still see attempts at cultural conditioning deriving from a prior monocultural framework. You see this in all sorts of places. Yet, consistently, these attempts fail to land and end up looking like an uncovered fossil. Since we’re now almost in 2025 let’s look back at some case examples from this year [If you like, you can skip these and directly read the next section].
3 Case Examples from Popular Media:
Exhibit A: The Boys Season 4 (2024)
The Boys (2019-2024) is an enjoyable and enormously popular series produced by Amazon Prime based on a series of graphic novels by Garth Ennis. The first season included a mix of standard ‘woke’ but also decidedly ‘anti-woke’ tropes in a classic ‘bait and switch’ format: successive seasons increasingly threw off the post-postmodern attempt to ‘make fun of both sides’ and simply become relatively orthodox hyperliberal sermons from the electric pulpit.
The Boys S4 is perhaps the least subtle example of this, with the exception that it sometimes pokes fun of condescending liberalism and its white savour complexes. One particularly funny segment involves Black superhero A-train forced to partake in a patronizing feel-good Hollywood movie with Will Ferrell.
But the aspect I want to highlight is its near-apocalyptic treatment of a rising white populist movement that’s so thinly-veiled it could be a Giovanni Strazza sculpture.
The entire affair is a reference to Trumpism and those in its orbit such as Tucker Carlson or Alex Jones. As an audience, we share in the terror at this blossoming demagoguery ready to mutilate America as we know it. Indeed, this is a big difference compared with leftist media of the 1960s-1990s. Today, the good guys are usually those who act from institutional power, whereas the bad guys are those who challenge it. Another funny thing to note is how the Jews are shoe-horned into the plot in quite clumsy ways. When in reality, Alex Jones types, conspiracy-loving survivalists and Boomer paleocons as depicted are typically pro-Israel and view anti-Semitism as an affair for dreadlocked students and uppity brown people. One has to wonder when American TV will bite its tongue and begin to depict left-wing anti-Zionists as villains, maniacs and potential terror threats. I think that this will be soon.
One could imagine that during the 2016 or even 2020 election cycles these often ham-fisted attempts at propagandisation would have had greater impact and may have even become a more pronounced cultural phenomenon. Imagine: The writers and actors may have had more slots on late-night talk shows to divulge how scary the political situation is and how important the show is and so forth.
Yet it seems as if we’ve all passed a certain cultural threshold by which, rather than taking off, these bruteforce attempts at cultural commentary peter off only a few feet into the air before hitting the ground again, not with a bang but with a whimper. There just isn’t a huge appetite for this kind of melodramatic liberal doom-saying. Perhaps this is because genuinely frightening prospects for doom continue to crop up: possible war with Iran, China, North Korea, Russia (or all 4) and the prospect that nuclear weapons may be used in these conflicts remain very real.
Exhibit B: Lindsey Graham’s Chickenhawk Comments
For the past 85 years, the accusation of being ‘Hitler’ has brought death to many an enemy of the American-Israeli global empire. Lindsey Graham, running on greed and instinct, has tried to summon this ancient spirit to the detriment of Iran. When asked why America should adopt a more aggressive stance he answered:
“I think we have nothing to lose. How did it work out when we got rid of Hitler? Better. He’s Hitler. ”
In a bygone era, the ‘Hitler’ charge would be the prelude to a storm of sanctions, bombs and missiles directed at your land. But this seems increasingly not to be the case. At least, it is not an automatic death sentence, even if we may see war with Iran in the near future.
Still, an increasingly non-white world shall go hand-in-hand with the death of the psychological legacy of WW2 and the set of pre-programmed, scripted responses that occur in people whenever they hear the H-word. The many millions of immigrants allowed to flood into the West in the last 10 years will not be so swayed by it. And the younger generations of whites seem to just as unswayed. We have to hand it to the system, a singular event in world history was used with remarkable skill to dictate policy in an enormous amount of areas with which it had nothing to do. But as we approach the 100th anniversary of 1945, we see the increasing inability to use the ‘Hitler branding’ to justify war, terror and death.
Exhibit C: Obama and Eminem
The recent performance by Eminem at the DNC really jettisoned me back to the ‘00s. It seemed like a swansong of that era’s cultural legacy as it exists in the present. The white rapper’s speech was part of a long-standing, cyclical routine that routinely finds mainstream singers and rappers vocally supporting Democratic political candidates, even if many more rappers support Donald Trump in 2024 than in 2016.
Eminem thankfully did not rap (I half-expected him to when I opened the video) nor did he give that characteristic grunt he sometimes does that sounds something like a goose being sexually abused (“mAWM’s spaghetti!). Somebody who did rap, though, was Barrack Obama.
At a certain point in time, the internet would have gone crazy for this. People who were largely apolitical would have found it amusing and the media would have replayed endless clips of it. But it did not land. And as we now see, along with Beyonce and Taylor Swift, it had no impact upon the election outcome.
The Obama-Eminem show could have almost been a ‘remembering the 00s’ event performed by well-meaning staff members or a local theatre group at a retirement home in the year 2060; that kind of a show put on for the elderly that nostalgically throws together past cultural figures without logical coherence, except for the temporal passage they happened to share. Think of those caring home performances today that put an impersonator of Nixon or Kennedy together with Sinatra and Monroe for example; they are figures who can symbolise a particular decade.
Indeed, for better or worse, Eminem and Obama are two figures who symbolised the ‘00s. A few online comments referenced how ‘historic’ the performance was but I could only imagine the comparatively greater cultural weight that would have been attached to this performance if it’d happened 12 years ago instead. There would have at least been a week of viral memes. But like so many things today, this pop cultural event disappeared into the ether as quickly as it arrived.
Again, we will probably not see a return to the ‘high celebrity culture’ period in which relatively low-stakes politics (by current standards) play out as hyperreal affairs, merging electoral politics with low-brow entertainment, indiscernable from a Superbowl ceremony. Indeed, Trump’s victory in the wake of Harris’ string of high-profile celebrity endorsements showcases this point (even if he himself leans upon low-brow entertainers when the opportunity presents itself).
4. What About the Future?
In the collective unconscious of both elites and regular people (but more so for the former) there’s the tangible idea that the polarisation and heightened tension typifying the present hour will recede like the tide, revealing once more a peaceful shore with which they can again build their houses upon sand. To repeat: alas, this is not the case.
This is not to state that things will only worsen. True: Israel, American, NATO or even Russia may lead us into another war, the devastation of which would make the shallow and glib artificiality of early 21st century liberalism be looked back to in fondness. But this chance does not make it any more possible to rewind the clock.
The recent election presented us with 2 potential returns to normalcy. One from the Left and the other from the Right; the latter ultimately won. Both seemed to implicitly capitalize upon the sentiment in the hearts of the electorate that there’d be some kind of ‘business as usual’ in the near-future. The hope, progression, inclusion of the Democrat party versus the vitality, efficiency and ruggedness of the Republican party. Both parties relied upon their accumulated stock of tropes and traditions trailing behind them like coat tails to inspire voters and both promised a continuation of the American experience, a return to “not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment;”
But both pictures were flawed. The domestic and geopolitical events of the past decade dictate that we are now inhabiting a vastly different space. Viewed in retrospect, the 2013 Great Awokening now appears as the last cry or final pulsation of a societal trajectory that had reached the apex of its own logic. Contra the conservatives, it wasn’t some aberration but a final form. Liberal society reaching its ultimate conclusion.
If the past decade was not an aberration but also not the end of history, then the next decade will not be a return to prior times nor a continuation of the same. Rather, the instability, uncertainty and flux that is so characteristic of this decade will give way to yet another new form, even if it undoubtedly contains traces of the present that it emerges out of. This slightly verbose language is all to say that while politicians promise stability those with their ear to the winds see an unstable future. Indeed, even the original return to normalcy did not occur: after that speech, America faced the 1929 crash and World War 2. We should prepare for something similar.
Yet the death of the American Empire may herald a real return to normal: a reality grounded upon tradition, family, spirituality, art and biology, merged with new advancements in engineering and medical technology. The death of what exists can give birth to something better.
As the great German poet Holderlin said: “ But where the danger is, also grows the saving power”.
Epilogue: Going Forward
I often try to suggest some practical advice at the end of these articles. In this case, it will take the form of psychological and rhetorical advice. Internally, we should purge ourselves of the idea that we will return to implicit optimism of the upbeat Regan ‘80s or Utopian liberal ‘90s. Those particular safety blankets must be cast off. The future is now open and this is something daunting, yes, but ultimately hopeful.
We should also learn from the past but think very, very long and hard about how to steer the cultural ship into brighter and better seas. To do so, we must become better informed about our the past and better informed at the rapid changes of the present, which will soon become the future. This is a duty for us all and I look forward to seeing the difference branches that this may take from the collective human capital that we represent.
Externally, we must emphasise in our rhetoric, especially to the politically undecided, that the route back to the near past has been destroyed in a landslide and there’s no turning back. Any conscious or unconscious attempt to reimplement the political norms of the pre-2013 (Great Awokening), pre-2007 (Great Recession) or pre-2001 (9/11) world are sadly doomed to fail. Again, this doesn’t mean that we are totally severed from the past and cannot learn from it; merely that the good times – a ’new normal’ – must be conquered in the future rather than in re-litigated the past. Doing so requires forming a radical new path intellectually before it can be realised concretely. Normalcy is what we make it.
For this, we need to put our heads together.
