Normal Is Not Our Friend

One final post on what I learned from three weeks in Washington

Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash

On Memorial Day, I wrote about the historic failures of Washington conventional wisdom, and how the pull of outdated thinking is preventing the political class from appreciating the scope of the dangers we face.

That was after I had been in DC for two weeks.

Now that I’ve been back in Philadelphia for a few days after three weeks with my Villanova University Washington program, I’ve had time to reflect on just how different things look from 120 miles north of the Beltway.

Last week, I wrote about the tendency to minimize the risks of a second Trump presidency by viewing the election as a traditional horserace. With a bit more reflection, I realize how this is really a symptom of a broader problem—how difficult it is to upend the ordinary.

It was jarring just how ordinary Washington felt.

The Villanova program is about challenging my students to appreciate the interplay of politics and policymaking by meeting and questioning high-level policymakers across the city. As they do, they discover that official Washington is a pretty small place that thrives on countless transactions built on relationships. And as a place built on relationships, it is also a place built on routines.

In other words, to the extent that Washington works at all, it works because it is stable and ordinary.

In this regard, it is really pretty much like everywhere else. All of us depend on some degree of stability to navigate the world. We have our routines and our patterns.

And usually this isn’t a problem. Normal is fine in normal times.

But when a threat is looming, normal can keep people from being proactive. This is especially true when the threat is so large as to be unimaginable.