Sunstein, Cass R. This Is Not Normal: The Politics of Everyday Expectations. Yale University Press, 2021.
Environments with big evils lead us to overlook small evils. The idea of what is normal changes over time. (In olden days a glimpse of stocking was something shocking.) Sometimes we ought to expand the idea of what is normal; sometimes we ought to contract it. Democracy is forever a battleground for our conceptions of normality. In This is Not Normal: The Politics of Ordinary Life, Cass Sunstein focuses on the psychology of normality to explain challenges faced by democracies, which he maintains are the best form of government, not just the least bad. He analyzes this history of political liberalism and its struggle to be born in the Articles of Confederation and the Federalist Papers.
He explores the historical example of changes in public perception in Nazi Germany. Germans who were not persecuted tended to look back on the Nazi period as the best years of their lives. They thought the holocaust was fake news. Their antisemitism grew in increments. Sunstein does not omit the obvious connections between these changes and the changes in American right-wing thinking under Trump, but he does not dwell on them exclusively. His interests are broader and more psychological and philosophical than political polemics. He is most interested in what he calls “opprobrium contraction” in which people are led to accept evils they would not have accepted a few years before. The abominable leads us to accept the merely bad.
Sunstein’s approach resembles virtue ethics more than it does deontology or utilitarianism in that it does not suggest a one-size-fits-all fix, but rather recommends techniques that we must be careful how we use, including social reform movements and revolutionary action, both of which can be either beneficial or disastrous to civilized society. He also discusses what we now might call cancel culture, which he calls “lapidation,” a term he coined as a gentler form of stoning. He also offers a scary analysis of the popularity of Ayn Rand, who he says is best considered as a cult leader, and it is hard not see the similarities between her bullying, vindictive personality, and the vindictive bullying of Donald Trump. Sunstein has written a thoughtful book that is perhaps shorter than it should be. 4.5 stars. ( )