The funny thing about norms – is you rarely notice them until someone violates them.

[phantom power]

The funny thing about norms – especially someone else's – is you rarely notice them until someone violates them. Like the rule that racial and ethnic minorities ought to know their place. Like the rule that only white men get to be president. Or the rule that Christians get to dominate religious minorities. Or that America was founded for white Europeans.

What is crazy about the current presidential campaign and its coverage in the news, is how pundits and pollsters keep treating it as though accepted norms still apply. As if the usual tools for making predictions still work. As if Congress is still run by rational actors. As if Trump voters will vote their rational best interests instead of just burning the place to the ground like Dresden rather than let THEM have it.

This is a very Vonnegut moment. America has come unstuck in time. At one moment, it is 2016. At another, Orwell's 1984. The next, it is FDR's 1934. Or 1862, before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Everybody thinks they get to have America their way. And, by God, they feel entitled to it.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2016/02/entitled-to-their-own-country-by.html

[Igel]

1. Another thing about norms.

Those you don't like you want gone, and can only imagine that when those norms are swept away the norms that will replace them will be exactly to your liking and the new norms will work perfectly.

A lot of revolutions went off the rails because of this. The new norms were disastrous because things just didn't work out the way they had to--the model was wrong, or people just didn't fall into line like the sheep they suddenly needed to be. Or the new norms bit the revolutionaries on the butt, removing not just a bit of cheek but 2/3 of the hipbone.