The selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as the running mate to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is alleged to represent a win for the ordinary, the average, the homespun, the modest, the mainstream, and, above all, the normal.

This messaging is surely not supported by the radical far-left record accumulated by Walz, which includes his enthusiastic support for near-unrestricted abortion and his endorsement of his state becoming a so-called “trans refuge.” A case for the candidate’s purported ordinariness is also not helped by his legitimately goofy, dorky, hyped-up persona, which manages to suggest both the fire-and-brimstone mania of Howard Dean and the polo shirt-wearing awkwardness of 2000-era Al Gore—neither of whom exactly call to mind Ward Cleaver. 

The chasm between Walz’s alleged normalcy and the actual normalcy of his positions and persona will be settled in the fullness of time, but for now, there remains one rather perplexing question: Why do the Democrats feel the need to present the Harris-Walz ticket in terms of normalcy at all?

After all, a mere four years ago during the Covid-19 pandemic, Democratic politicians and talking heads were among those most adamant in insisting on the indefinite tabling of nearly every feature of normal life. What could be more abnormal than refusing to exit one’s front door for fear of coming down with a runny nose and sore throat? What could be stranger than wearing masks in nearly every public setting and, among the faithful few, even some private settings, including inside one’s own automobile? Indeed, what could be weirder than being compelled to use a vaccination card used to gain admittance to a concert or show?

Yet let us not forget the far left’s success in twisting our sense of who was, and who was not, normal during the worst days of the pandemic. Compliance with these outlandish measures was presented as a kind of test of normalcy: Even though those who refused to wear masks or resisted mandatory vaccination were plainly on the “normal” side of the argument—to the extent that such measures represented a shocking deviation from normal life—because they were not in the majority, and because they had no voice in the mainstream media, they could be characterized as social pariahs. 

Emblematic of this thinking was President Joe Biden’s disgraceful address in September 2021 in which he not only announced mandatory vaccination efforts but attempted to portray the group he referred to as “the unvaccinated” as outcasts from polite society. “The unvaccinated overcrowd our hospitals, are overrunning the emergency rooms and intensive care units,” the president said, to his everlasting shame. 

In the lexicon of the Democrats, yesterday’s “the unvaccinated” is today’s “weird” or “creepy.” Their use of such bullying language is intended to make their political adversaries appear estranged from the mainstream. 

Here we come to the heart of the matter: For the far left, “normal” has nothing to do with what’s morally, ethically, or spiritually right, but merely with what’s widely accepted at any given moment. For example, cohabitation—or, as I still prefer to call it, “shacking up”—has become so ubiquitous as to cease to cause a scandal even in upstanding families. Thus, the prevalence of cohabitation works to confer a patina of ho-hum ordinariness on the practice, but such prevalence says nothing about its morality or lack thereof. 

Such is the case with countless other social evils: abortion, the involvement of male athletes in women’s sports, the casual use of marijuana entirely independent of the pretense of its supposed medicinal benefits. The omnipresence of these things may have rendered them “normal” among wide swaths of the public, but they remain wicked, pernicious, or otherwise evil all the same. Even so, this sort of “normalization” can have a numbing effect on the morals of a culture: 

The Harris-Walz campaign is counting on swing voters and independents exhibiting a glum, tired-out indifference when it comes to their social agenda, or (even worse) simply giving in to that agenda as a consequence of years of subtle peer pressure: If your seemingly respectable next-door neighbor is vaping, can it really be so bad? Or, in a pandemic context, if everybody in the outdoor garden store is wearing a mask, can it really be so weird?

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Of course, it is—but not in the eyes of our cultural commissars. Ironically, those of us who call out such objectively bizarre behavior may cease to be considered “normal” in the eyes of that purported paragon of regular guy-ness, Tim Walz. 

Yet we ought to shrug off Democrats’ branding of us as weird, and simply laugh off their self-branding as models of normalcy, because their categories are silent about actual matters of right or wrong, and speak only to one’s conformity to society’s conventions. This sort of groupthink should be resisted with the same forcefulness with which our mothers once schooled us with that famous maxim: If your friend jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?

Or, to put it another way, if being called “normal” means making common cause with the radical policies of Harris-Walz, thanks, but no thanks.