The key to America's future? Just be normal

If you spend any time online, it’s impossible to ignore how bizarre political chatter has become.

Whether it’s pro-Houthi infographics shared by suburban Starbucks-toting influencers or young men exposing their nether regions to the sun (and perhaps inviting melanoma), the discourse feels like it’s descended to Dante’s ninth circle of hell.

We need to spurn old labels and form fresh alliances to build a new center.

We need some good old-fashioned normality but a new normality that moves beyond the dead consensus that led too-online young men to take the “red pill” and left struggling Americans hooked on pain pills.

My friend Edmund Smirk recently coined the term “Freak Right” to describe the increasingly weird, dark corners of the internet whose dwellers believe that Taylor Swift is a “psyop,” fantasize about waging war for an American Caesar, and fly into a rage about women going fishing.

Their delusional tirades ignore a central fact about Americans across the political spectrum: They're weirded out by radicalism, whether it comes from the left or the right. Taylor Swift enjoys some of the highest approval ratings out of any American public figure, and 61% of pro-life Americans support free and widely available birth control.

The election results bear this out. Freak Right candidates like Kari Lake, Blake Masters, and J.R. Majewski have all suffered huge losses in swing races. In response to this trend, Smirk encourages conservatives to move toward what he calls “Swiftian Normality,” which would surely be a welcome development.

Smirk also mentions the extreme left, whose development, or may I say, degeneration, rightfully upsets conservatives. Disproportionately overeducated, underemployed, and secular, the Freak Left tilts at windmills in search of what to deconstruct, defund, or dismantle next.

In general, the Freak Left gives more succor to violent criminals than to thought criminals, glorifies self-immolation over faraway conflicts while spitting on rural Americans, and tries to normalize “luxury beliefs” like polyamory, which tend to wreak havoc on the lower classes.

Because of the relative cultural power its adherents wield, Freak Left ideas have gained a startling amount of traction, as evidenced by the recent wave of anti-Semitism on major college campuses.

While the Freak Left and Freak Right fuel each other by embodying the worst stereotypes of either side, both are reactions to our broken center, which for too long has been defined by the dual individualisms of right and left. On the left, devotion to the self. On the right, worship of the unregulated free market.

The results have been disastrous, from NAFTA, bank deregulation, and China’s entry into the WTO, to the perpetuation of unconstitutional forever wars in the Middle East and widespread NIMBYism. All of these left millions of Americans behind, creating a receptive audience for extremists both right and left.

Attacking the Freak Right or Freak Left may be satisfying, but it is ultimately not enough. We need to spurn old labels and form fresh alliances to build a new center, one that can address our most urgent problems: a generation priced out of home ownership, a surge of migrants overwhelming our borders, and AI-driven social disruption, to name a few.

So, what would the new normal political agenda look like? The answer might best be called a post-liberalism of the center, driven by a deep understanding of obligation and community.

It would support restoring American manufacturing, investing in struggling communities, building national cohesion by rejecting the excesses of wokeness, taking back economic sovereignty from bodies like the WTO, supporting a revitalization of civil society, and curtailing unconstitutional interventions overseas. While embracing new ideas, it would also value time-honored traditions like free expression, pluralism, and bipartisanship.

On both right and left, there are signs of hope. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) has proven to be an effective voice for this program, working with Rust Belt Democrats to encourage made-in-America innovation. And Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), inspired by writers like Patrick Deneen, has taken an interest in tackling the root causes of anomie and loneliness in American life.

But beyond anything elected officials can accomplish, each one of us should follow conservative writer Yuval Levin’s advice in “The Fractured Republic.” We must commit ourselves “precisely to the formative social and cultural institutions that we have seen pulled apart from above and below in our age of fracture.”

Go to church, volunteer in your neighborhood, listen to Taylor Swift, watch football with your friends. And for Pete’s sake, log off and reject political freakery.

Peter Olive is a corporate lawyer and self-described "aggrieved middle American."