The Political Economy Of Normalization

Mainstream institutions keep rehabilitating enemies of democracy because enemies of democracy are now normal; they'll only stop when we abnormalize them again.

BYE! (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

By the time you read this, Ronna Romney McDaniel’s shambolic tenure as a paid NBC News contributor may already be over. 

What will remain is a foundational question for NBC News and other, similar organizations that have dual-if-unwritten mandates to reflect the American political spectrum and simultaneously serve as bulwarks upholding the country’s foundational values: Which of these missions is, in the final analysis, most important? 

If the past seven years have taught us anything it’s that these kinds of organizations—mainstream news outlets, think tanks, elite universities, civil-society organizations—aren’t well calibrated to make moral choices when their mandates come into tension. Abstract values will more often than not yield to other considerations: mass appeal, revenue, brand management, and, given the bent of the modern right, insurance against organized retaliation. 

I’m not sure if or how the rest of us can change this calculus. The durability of the dynamic may simply underscore two things: First, how important it is for the Trump opposition to embrace politics that convey MAGA’s incompatibility with democratic life; second, our collective obligation to defeat it so soundly that it shrivels on its own, before the corrosive effect it has on these mediating institutions destroys them.

DOWN ON ONE ROMNEY

One insight that’s helped prepare me for things like the Romney McDaniel hiring is understanding that the word “normal” has multiple meanings, and just about everyone in public life uses them interchangeably, even when they shouldn’t. 

When Trump does something like threaten judges and jurors, or insist on having dictatorial powers, it invites a glut of discourse about how abnormal it is. And in obvious and important ways it is: Major party leaders in the U.S. didn’t do this until now, so it’s definitionally alien to Americans (or at least to native-born Americans). It’s also abnormal in that the status quo ante consensus rejected that kind of behavior and we’d established strong norms against it. 

But one of the norms the Trump-era GOP smashed was the norm against aligning openly with violent extremists, such that they might one day take over a major party. Trump-like figures aren’t new in American politics—they’ve just typically operated outside the major-party duopoly. Relatedly, there have been members of the Republican party who lied like stink and wished to dominate their opponents—but until 2015 or so they’d typically been relegated to the fringes. The destruction of those boundaries is new. And insofar as the Republican Party is a membership organization boasting tens of millions of voters, billions of dollars, and powerful institutions, whatever it happens to stand for at any given moment becomes normal in much the same way that MLB’s designated-hitter rule or inter-league play or expansion teams or instant replay became normal by dint of their adoption. 

Ronna Romney McDaniel is a craven person of low character. She’s also, in the context of modern U.S. politics, almost painfully normal. 

That’s the kind of normal mainstream institutions have always strived for. What you, and I, and the broad resistance mean when we say normal has almost nothing to do with it.

The challenge then isn’t to convince them that this idea or that contributor isn’t “normal”—it’s to convince them that adhering to their old standards of normalcy is, in the current climate, a mistake. And not just a mistake that might cost them marginal viewers or readers or donors, but a mistake that will corrode their very missions and might even cause the legal and political foundations underlying them to crumble. 

Comcast might do well in a second Trump presidency. NBC News ratings might go up. But the two outcomes are unlikely in tandem, because unless NBC News starts lying for Trump, Comcast will have big problems.

LIFE OF THE UNIPARTY

Early in the Trump presidency I’ll admit to being surprised at how easily transgressive figures were able to bleed back into polite society. They experienced more friction than most outgoing political operatives, but many of them found open doors at the kinds of places that’d typically profess to abhor disgraced liars. 

Some of these second chances were worse than others. Many Trump officials have chosen or been forced to ensconce themselves in right-wing politics, which is where they belong. Others sought opportunities with mainstream but Republican-aligned interest groups (think the Big Oil or the Chamber of Commerce). The genuinely demoralizing phenomenon was watching Trump officials accept cleansing sinecures at politically or culturally liberal (small-l) institutions. Mick Mulvaney joining CBS News, and various Harvard-Kennedy school-type fellowships come to mind. Remember Sean Spicer on Dancing with the Stars?

We knew the bar was low. The Romney McDaniel hiring was really a test of whether there was any bar at all. It seems that there is, but if anything the bar’s moving in the wrong direction.

And it won’t be lifted unless mainstream institutions rethink how they vie for influence within our political ecosystem.

Alas, I don’t really expect them to. They’ve been doing things this way—where people with former job titles like “RNC Chair” go on to work in media or academia or professional services or The Ideas Industry—since long before I started writing about politics. It’s the cozy relationship between power and influence that good-government advocates decry when they refer to revolving-door corruption, because it incentivizes both passive forms of corruption (like capture) and the more venal kinds—quid pro quo, nepotism, etc. 

This is where the jargon-spewing MAGA creeps who rail against the “swamp” or “uniparty” have a point, even if they have no good-faith intention to replace the system with anything more ethical. It really is a seamy system.

But it’s a bedeviling problem, even to good-faith people who don’t simply intend to loot the place, because establishmentarianism can never be fully uncorrupted. When victorious leaders replace defeated ones, and new governments replace old ones, they don’t remake their polities anew. In democracies, they rely on institutional knowledge, the consultation of former officials, input from people with various kinds of expertise and interests, to insure against disruption and chaos. When elections approach, the actors and institutions that are part of this symbiosis ready themselves for whatever may come next.

Long before Trump, corporate behemoths thought it wise to scoop up talent from both incumbent White Houses and veterans of the out party, to insure access to whoever became president. But back then there was at least something in it for the public. Or at least there was supposed to be.

Ideological diversity at media companies and scholarly institutions served the crude purposes of access, balance, and market appeal. But it also had inherent value: Echo chambers yield bad journalism and bad scholarship and institutional weakness. In practice this meant news consumers would hear from people with familiar views on taxes, social insurance, abortion, trade, foreign policy, and so on, even if reporters grew too cozy with sources on both sides. The range of opinion was circumscribed to marginalize the fringes of the U.S. political spectrum, which is itself circumscribed relative to most western democracies. To the extent that this mainstreaming was biased against any faction at all, it was probably the far left. But the national political media was for decades a welcome home to voices that stretched roughly from Bill Moyers to the odious Pat Buchanan. 

Trump has changed that. 

SIN ‘SITY

Through his corruption and vindictiveness, Trump has made the revolving door system even more sordid, because institutions adjacent to power are no longer just looking for inroads—they suspect, with good reason, that if they don’t throw money and adulation at people who regurgitate his party line, he will look for ways to punish them.

As

Jay Rosen

has suggested, one service Romney McDaniel may actually have been able to provide was to offer executives, “guidance on how seriously they should take his threats to NBC.”

Under Trump, “viewpoint diversity” and “representing both halves of the partisan divide” have ceased to overlap. It was always lazy for news organizations to equate “hiring a Democrat and a Republican” with “viewpoint diversity” but there was at least some continuity between the two concepts. Today, news organizations can find good-faith actors to reflect liberal or progressive views quite easily. If they want faithful representation of conservative views they can hire anti-Trump apostates who’ve been expelled from the GOP. But if they want to represent Republicans they have to court liars. And in some cases, like Romney McDaniel’s, it means they have to court outright enemies of democracy.

Here you could at least say critics are pressuring these outlets to limit ideological diversity, because “elections don’t count or are fraudulent unless we win them” is an ideology of a sort—it’s just not compatible with a free press, free inquiry, or a free country. To the extent that the Republican Party experiences a boycott of election deniers as bias, it’s actually little different than complaining that the U.S. mainstream is biased against Nazis. Yes, very much so, and for good reason. 

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If you look around, you’ll see it’s not just Romney McDaniel. Harvard continues to lend its name to the increasingly Trumpy, methodologically compromised Harris poll, Jamie Dimon is complaining about how unfair we all are to Trump. Rudy Giuliani is the masked singer.

You can detect the gravitational pull Trump has on the establishment in everything from the Romney McDaniel scandal to the sweet reprieve he got from appellate judges in New York, who just saved his business from ruin by giving him an exemption from the law. Would any self-respecting judge offer Hunter Biden the same leniency? If the answer is no (and it should be no) these judges should ask why they let themselves be manipulated into engaging in the kind of corruption befitting a judge Trump appointed directly?

MSNBC has employed Alicia Menendez for a long time. I’d be shocked if, under current circumstances, either MSNBC or NBC News would hire Bob Menendez to provide expert guidance on the Democratic convention. But as a cost of doing business, their executives were prepared to house a right-wing enemy of democracy, even as democracy is the only reason their institutions exist. 

What might change their approach is a persuasive argument that catering to this unethical cohort will, over time, eat away at the value propositions that make them viable. 

Individual liberals can play a small but constructive part by reminding the leaders of these institutions who comprises the real audience for professional news. Democrats can do much more by working harder to expose and stigmatize the bad deeds Republicans have done on Trump’s behalf. Indeed their work on the January 6 committee may have ultimately doomed Romney McDaniel. But there was a progressive effort shortly after the 2020 election to pressure these kinds of institutions not to open their doors to MAGA wreckers. It was called the Trump Accountability Project. But the Biden transition rejected the concept outright and strangled it in its infancy. “In the spirit of the President-elect’s call to build a more united country, we have decided that the Trump Accountability Project will no longer be active,” its founders wrote. “Instead, we will shift our focus towards healing, rebuilding trust, and working collaboratively to create a stronger, more inclusive America that values democratic principles and the rule of law.” That was a mistake. 

NBC was not fated to hire Romney McDaniel, and she was not fated to get a job at a mainstream news outlet. Perhaps the turmoil NBC experienced will train other institutions going forward that people like her are too far over the line to rehabilitate. But the fact that she reportedly had multiple mainstream-media suitors tells this larger story. Asking mainstream institutions not to “normalize” Trump and MAGA and insurrection is telling them to blacklist a faction that’s now very normal indeed. The solution is to abnormalize it again.