Governor Tim Walz catapulted to the vice-presidential nomination of the Democratic Party by mobilizing the power of a single word: “weird.” Referring to Donald Trump’s agenda for a second term, Walz asked the Democratic National Convention, “Is it weird?” He offered an unequivocal answer to a thunderous roar from the crowd: “Absolutely, absolutely!” The power of Walz’s invocation of MAGA weirdness is found in the enduring appeal of its opposite: normalcy. Walz’s vice-presidential bid to corner the market on normal Americana is part of a broader anti-MAGA normalcy strategy for Democrats. Observers of the DNC noted a variety of normalcy narratives, including a pronounced patriotism, an emphasis on family values, and the theme of neighborliness, all laying claim to the cultural authority of normalcy, long held by Republicans.

While this effusion of normalcy has been welcomed by many liberals, it presents a dilemma that should temper our enthusiasm for Walz’s quip. The promulgation of normalcy is incongruous with the Democrat’s most paramount aim: the defense of democracy. The democratization of American politics has advanced through emancipatory social movements that found it necessary to challenge the contours of normal politics. At its best, the Democratic Party has functioned as a coalitional force harnessing the energy of movement politics to defamiliarize normalcy and open policy windows for democratic reform. However effective as an electoral strategy, the Democrats’ repositioning as the party of normalcy undercuts this history and participates in an antidemocratic ethos.

“Normal” became common in the English language only in the mid-19th century, initially used in the context of medical science. Physicians of that era developed the concept of a “normal curve,” or the statistical “norm,” to catalogue the biological features of the average human being. The “normal” or average human was also the ideal, healthy human. This development was integral to eugenics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which deployed the science of “normal” health to proffer racialized notions of the ideal citizen and a healthy body politic. As it migrated from professional to popular discourse in the 20th century, “normal” shed some of its original resonance in racialized science, becoming a powerful political framing. Like its usage in eugenics, “normal” was a way of conveying what is natural (the norm) and what is desirable (normalcy). As homeostasis was the ideal state of the normal human body, so stability and tranquility were the ideal state of the American body politic.

Warren Harding’s successful 1920 presidential campaign, waged on the heels of World War I, exemplified the power of this political usage. Harding ran on “the return to normalcy,” anticipating the contemporary rhetorical strategy of the Democratic Party. “America’s present need is not heroics but healing, not nostrums but normalcy,” Harding said. “Let us stop to consider,” Harding continued, “that tranquility at home is more precious than peace aboard.”

In practice, tranquility at home meant the quelling of dissenting movements amid the first Red Scare, which saw the then nascent FBI quash anti-war activism, harass the newly emergent ACLU, censor dissenting political publications, and repress a labor movement that included unionists, socialists, and anarchists. “Normalcy” had the benefit of suggesting a cool, calm, and rational politics, but it served as a comforting façade for precisely the antidemocratic, authoritarian impulses that worry so many about a second Trump term today.

For most of the history of political thought, democracy has been considered a radical aberration, the least desirable form of governance, unlikely to usher in normal political order. The founders of the American state and the principal authors of The Federalist Papers, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, shared this view as critics of democracy. Madison and Hamilton echoed canonical thinkers in Western political thought, like Plato and Aristotle, who understood democracy as inherently prone to disorder. Madison and Hamilton didn’t have the word “normal” at their disposal in the 1780s, but their rationale for the US Constitution reflected the desire for normalcy as Harding fashioned it in 1920. Hamilton, in Federalist No. 49, writes of “the danger of disturbing the public tranquility by interesting too strongly the public passions,” and concludes his defense of the Constitution, in Federalist No. 85, with an appeal to national tranquility. And Madison, in Federalist No. 10, devises a scheme of governance to preserve normal order in politics by insulating elite rule from democratic pressures.

America’s tradition of democratizing movements is a series of rebukes to the Federalists’ plea for tranquility and to Harding’s call to normalcy, as models of a democratic public sphere. For nearly a century beginning with the New Deal, the Democratic Party was an engine of progressive change, building political constituencies that overlapped with movement constituencies, and giving voice to a robust understanding of liberal democracy, one that at least implicitly legitimized the disruptive power of movements and the centrality of protest to the development of American democracy. Obama’s invocation of the Stonewall riots in his Second Inaugural Address, LBJ’s “We Shall Overcome” speech at the zenith of the civil rights movement, and FDR’s address to the Teamsters Union are all examples of the Democratic Party’s deference to movements once considered beyond the pale of American normal.

Few recall today that the title of the first draft of Martin Luther King. Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech” was “Normalcy, Never Again.” More than a historical anecdote, King understood that normal times were quiet, comfortable, predictable. He discerned in the desire for normalcy a retreat from the practices of democratic citizenship that the civil rights movement sought to cultivate: direct action, public consciousness, self-examination. King understood the risks of meeting the threats posed to democracy not with arguments for a more democratic future, but with the consoling lure of a return to less politicized, normal times.