{"id":4319,"date":"2018-08-17T11:49:41","date_gmt":"2018-08-17T11:49:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/08\/17\/norm-talk\/"},"modified":"2018-08-17T11:49:41","modified_gmt":"2018-08-17T11:49:41","slug":"norm-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/08\/17\/norm-talk\/","title":{"rendered":"Norm Talk"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a lot of talk, and a slew of new books, about (democratic) norms these days and how President Trump is flouting them.  Your humble correspondent has speed-read two or three of them. This crisis-of-democracy genre wouldn't exist at all if the populist revolt hadn't put paid to Hillary's (mainly merely personal) ambitions. <\/span><\/p>\n

But what are norms in this context?  This from an article<\/a> in Dissent<\/em>:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The crisis-of-democracy authors are disciples of \u201cnorms,\u201d the unwritten rules that keep political opponents from each other\u2019s throat and enable a polity to plod along. <\/span><\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/span><\/p>\n

One problem with identifying the protection of political norms with the defense of democracy is that such norms are intrinsically conservative (in a small-c sense) because they achieve stability by maintaining unspoken habits\u2014which institutions you defer to, which policies you do not question, and so on. As Corey Robin pointed out<\/a>when Levitsky and Ziblatt\u2019s book appeared, democracy has essentially been a norm-breaking political force wherever it has been strong. It has broken norms about who can speak in public, who can hold power, and which issues are even considered political, and it has pressed these points from the household and neighborhood to Congress and the White House.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even when norms do not lean to the right\u2014for instance, the norm of honoring previous Supreme Court decisions is part of the reason the right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade<\/em> has not been overturned\u2014they are a depoliticized way of talking about political conflict. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And we certainly can't have that, can we? The article is a hard Left critique of the establishment liberal crisis-of-democracy authors.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a lot of talk, and a slew of new books, about (democratic) norms these days and how President Trump is flouting them.  Your humble correspondent has speed-read two or three of them. This crisis-of-democracy genre wouldn't exist at all if the populist revolt hadn't put paid to Hillary's (mainly merely personal) ambitions. But … Continue reading “Norm Talk”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440,123,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-normativity","category-political-morality","category-social-and-political-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4319\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}