Sean Speer is out with a thoughtful piece on what he hopes will be the future of politics, perhaps of both left and right “normie-ism.”

There is much I like in his argument, particularly its rejection of politics as theatre and its emphasis on moderation, conviviality, practical competence, and commitment to ordinary life. I also think the idea that being ’normal’ is a forgotten virtue. In an age of expression and display, and putting the narrow, empty self and all her petty projects above common concern, there’s something desperately needed in the essentially respectful, and moderate approach to living life in a way that mediates between extremes.

After years of populist politics from the right, and the coming wave of it on the left in figures like Mamdani, Burnham and others, I also think that the public will be ready for this. It will probably resemble the ‘abundance liberalism’ that prioritizes building, competence and growth of Ezra Klein and co., and have a left and right wing variation. In this sense, I think he’s sensing the start of a trend that’s likely to find a lot of resonance in the voting public in the short to medium term, but not after we’re through with the full effects of the left wing reaction to the right’s current momentum. Then, I think it will be clear that this assumes a ‘normalcy’, worldview and institutional support structure that is no longer there.

But there’s also what’s descriptively “normal” today. Much of contemporary normality is anything but healthy or ’normal’ in the sense in which it is used to describe something normatively desirable: lives increasingly mediated by screens, weak community bonds, declining faith, the celebration of sexual libertinism and all its damaging effects on family, relationships and children, and a mainstream culture whose news, entertainment, and cultural media celebrate transgression, profanity, and constant self-performance.

I don’t think it’s normal to spend much of one’s waking hours looking a screen, rather than having relationships with people. It’s not normal to know more about national political controversies than your neighbours. Very odd to view pornography at a rate and extent and even young age that people do today, to delay marriage and have few or no children, to move repeatedly in search of marginal economic gains or rely on digital platforms for all your entertainment, or for what looks set to be even ‘friendship,’ sex and identity. It is downright abnormal to have little connection to religious life and via institutions, a virtual tabula rasa of understanding and connection to history and ways of life passed on by ancestors or extended family. It’s warped to see so many people manipulate and mutilate their bodies with tattoos, botox, plastic surgery, pursue a subjective and delusional identity through bodily amputation and enhancement, and to treat the body as raw material for the subjective will to modify as it pleases. And to have all these things celebrated as the fruits of choice, autonomy and freedom.

These are oddly normal in the statistical sense. It’s how many people live their lives, as normies, so to speak. Taken together with the results that they’re leading to, such as declining fertility, loneliness, addiction, family breakdown, the hollowing out of relationship networks, and a desert spiritual landscape, they look like sign of utter decadence and social exhaustion. This is the ‘ordinary lifestyle’ produced by an unchecked liberal approach to life in every domain.

There is a good kind of inheritance found in what is practiced by ‘normal’ mainstream. I would say it is the product of centuries of development in our ideas, institutions, and ways of life. It can’t be continuously assumed, as though it’s a naturally occurring phenomenon. Far from it, in fact. It is the remnant of a wilted flower: a more attractive and administratively capable version of a political philosophy that has largely exhausted itself.

But that’s what I hear in Sean’s argument, which effectively puts forward, unchanged, the liberal vision of life without modification, as though none of the trenchant critiques of it from left and right have any merit.

It is also interesting in that it is very much ‘liberal’, but it describes the mainstream of conservatism, especially in Canada, and is put forward by a leading conservative. Whatever one thinks of the ideas, it helps explain why Canadian conservatism has so rarely been more than a qualification of liberal dominance. It largely consists of liberal premises adopted several years later and administered somewhat more cautiously.

Some postliberal arguments are undoubtedly too root-and-branch in their critique. But a major contention is quite persuasive – that the liberal order inherited a set of prepolitical institutions, habits, and beliefs that it depended upon but did not create. A normative structure of family and social life, religious formation, communal bonds, inherited moral norms, and a broadly shared understanding of human flourishing all supplied the social and intellectual capital that made liberal institutions workable.

Over time, liberalism has helped erode many of those foundations. It’s not been ‘cultural marxism,’ but excessive liberal types of freedom that’s largely responsible.

I don’t think this largely liberal view can now charge forward anew under the banner of normalcy, because its citizenry increasingly lacks the human, moral, and intellectual capital upon which the positive aspects of that normalcy once relied. I think we see that in ample social pathologies of the present day.

That is why a serious effort to cultivate a new elite and rebuild culture from the bottom up is so important. It is also why conservatives should be more forthright about the intelligent—but limited and non-overbearing—use of state power to support the institutions and conditions on which a healthy society depends.

What I see in Speer’s vision, by contrast, is a rejection both of the need for this work and of the approaches required to undertake it. Normie-ism appears to assume that healthy ordinary life can be recovered without intentionally rebuilding the philosophical worldview and institutional foundations that could sustain some version of it.

I, however am bullish on the future, as something very different from this normie-ism is emerging among a small but growing, and often highly educated part of the population – a pursuit of higher ideals, thicker communities, religious faith, family life, and rootedness. It is, in some respects, an aspirational counter-elite. None of this will be a simple ‘recovery’ of some idealized past – it’s properly speaking, going to be a fulfilment of the ideals of human flourishing that have only ever been partially realized, and can always be developed further. It will have influence through the bottom up, in culture, but also top down via the people with such views shaping institutions from within.

Many of the best features of Speer’s normie-ism are present in this vision too, but it is grounded in a more substantive account of what makes a life good, and a willingness to pursue to it through culture and politics alike. I am much more hopeful for this vision, rather than the politics of the normie-ism of a bygone age.