The "New Normal"

Roger Kimball writes in part in American Greatness,

...Our part of Connecticut was badly damaged by Hurricane (or, for the weather pedants among you, “Superstorm”) Sandy in 2012. Like many families, we had to move out of our house for months and were subjected to seemingly endless meetings with various local and FEMA officials who eagerly seized the chance to tell us huddled masses what we could and couldn’t do with our property. Just as every public official and talking head now is an amateur epidemiologist, so back in 2012 they were all expert meteorologists.

I remember one meeting in particular when it was explained to us that storms like Hurricane Sandy were “the new normal.”

That wretched town official who was telling us serfs what we could and could not do with our homes did so on the hollow authority of knowing, or pretending to know, what the future would bring.

So it is now. At one of President Trump’s near-daily coronavirus press rallies last month, a media mouth began a question by noting the “new normal in which, you know, there’s [sic] smaller crowds in restaurants and bars and—” The president cut him off.

“Oh, that’s not going to be normal,” he said.

There’s not going to be a new normal where somebody has been having for 25 years 158 seats in a restaurant and now he’s got 30 or he’s got 60 because that wouldn’t work. That’s not normal. No, normal will be if he has the 158 or 68 seats, and that’s going to happen and it’s going to happen relatively quickly, we hope. . . . Our normal is if you have 100,000 people in an Alabama football game or 110,000 . . . we want 110,000 people. We want every seat occupied. Normal is not going to be where you have a game with 50,000 people.

The new normal? Incumbents are generally blamed for bad tidings, even if they happen because of factors beyond their control. So Democrats are eager to perpetuate the people’s misery long enough to assure they can destroy the people’s choice. The Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, for example, just announced that he is keeping the state shut down until June 4, two days after the already-delayed primary election.

...Will the old normal ever become the new normal, as the president suggested it would?

Read more here.