See How Easy That Was?

The rules are made up and winning is all that matters.

Chris duMond/Getty Images)

In high school, I had a teammate on the soccer team named Norm. Norm was great. He was very normal, very happy-go-lucky, nothing really got to Norm that much. I think about Norm a lot because his name is pretty close to a term that comes up often in discussions about politics, which is “norms.”

“Norms” in politics are, essentially, all the little unwritten rules that cover how things “should” and “always have” worked but aren’t actually codified into law, or if they are they’re not like, really codified. Or if they are really codified, then they’re not in the actual Constitution. Or if they are — you get the picture. The picture, which the Republican Party has seemingly understood for years, is that norms aren’t real. Nor are the laws. What you are able to do in the American political system, and any political system really, is only constrained by the simple question: Can you get away with it?

For the past several years, that’s been the main difference between the GOP and the Democrats. The Republicans have gotten away with a lot: They have a nominee with multiple felony convictions, a Supreme Court corrupted by private interests and unafraid to rule by fiat over the carefully designed laws (norms) they’re supposed to uphold. They have suppressed votes and tried to sway election officials and outright lied over and over and over again to suit their aims. The Democrats, meanwhile, have largely played by the rules, and lost, seeing bill after bill and effort after effort nipped in the bud or watered down by an opposition party unconcerned with the optics of anything they can get away with.

Now, thankfully, the Democrats are dipping their toes in the water. Biden is out! Kamala is in! This has never happened before. Before it did happen, ordinarily smart politicians like AOC were fretting that tossing the sitting President from the ticket and just sticking the VP up there would cause a norm-pocalypse, with legal challenges and donor chaos and much more insidious inside-baseball politicking. And would you look at that: It’s been fine! It all seems fine. Kamala Harris is the presumptive nominee and so far she is basically crushing it, largely thanks to the most widespread feeling of public relief I can remember since Biden’s first victory over Trump in 2020.

There is a tension here, I think, in that some form of norms and unwritten rules and constraints on the raw application of force are good for a society. But what those are, essentially, are flimsy metal guardrails on a highway or traffic cones on a blocked street. They are not impervious brick walls. They are there to help keep the social contract within acceptable limits if someone starts to drift off the road. But if and when the road gets truly fucked — if, say, we have an aspiring fascist running against a man who does not know what he had for breakfast on any given day — I would like to have leaders who realize that it’s fine to just drive on the shoulder. Blow the guardrail. Knock over the cones. Could this backfire? Sure. But if the other option is the most monumental shift in power toward the far right in decades, I’m fine with a little off-roading. Throw the norms out the window. Do what it takes to win.

My worry now is that Democrats will have made their One Big Move for the election cycle. Already you can see the party’s love of norms trying to creep back in. Josh Shapiro is one of the leading candidates for Kamala’s VP, which is a gift to the still-noxious Zionist movement in the country and spit in the face to student protesters and opponents of Israel’s ongoing genocide, most of whom are desperate for any reason to hope for a change in administration policy now that Biden is no longer in charge. It would also be the most boringly Democratic thing to do, and, I fear, a bellwether that if Harris gets into office, the party that has brought us to the brink of ruin will revert to form and go on acting as if the staid norms of a bygone era will protect our way of life without aggressive effort from those in positions of power. The norms aren’t real, but power is. We can only hope that the Democrats are finally starting to wield the latter.