“Always With an Eye to the Great Return”: Normalcy, Democracy, and the anti-Vietnam War Movement

Maxwell Burkey

 Co-Presenters: Individual Presentation
College: College of Liberal Arts
Department: School of Social Sciences
 

Abstract:

Following the election of Donald Trump, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the January 6th Capitol insurrection—a period characterized by crisis and flagging democratic norms and institutions—American political elites summoned “normalcy” as the bulwark of liberal democracy. Against the pugnacious political ideologies of the right, the liberal’s invocation of normalcy strikes one as decidedly cool-headed, non-combative, non-partisan. Set against the fiery machinations of a figure like Trump, and the anti-democratic projects of right-wing populism and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, the appeal of normal times is the escape from political agitation itself: normalcy offers stasis, comfort, predictability, rationality. Amid a regime of normalcy, the key pillars of the political order enjoy consensus, go uncontested, perpetuate forward. Normal times are quiet times. But what are the ideological underpinnings of normal politics that this approach to defending democracy commits us to? Are there risks to meeting the threats posed to democracy not with arguments for a more democratic future, but with appeal to a past normalcy? And how have democratizing movements in American politics grappled with the lure of normal politics in contexts that demanded a politics of resistance, disobedience, and radical action?This paper distills the anti-democratic dimensions of appeals to normalcy and how they undercut resistance to right-wing populism, using the anti-Vietnam War movement and the activism Daniel Berrigan as a case study.