Normal Is Over.

2025 and the collapse of the stories that kept us compliant.

The Stories We Tell

In a country as vast and varied as ours, there are certain narratives that we tell ourselves about the way we work as a society. Stability was a throughline that we believed would always hold us steady. We built our civic language around words like respect for the office, institutional, foundational, decorum, and settled law. We spoke easily of the peaceful transition of power, checks and balances, and due process.

For more than two centuries, these ideas formed the bedrock of the American experiment. It was not naïve to believe in them. They had earned our trust through repetition and endurance. We assumed they were fundamental truths. Anchors that would keep the nation intact, powerful, and respected even through periods of conflict and change.

We believed systems would self-correct. We believed leaders would respect the norms of leadership even when the law allowed them not to. We believed bad actors would be constrained before they could do irreparable harm.

We should have known better.

This year did not break those beliefs. It revealed how hollow we had already allowed them to become.

We, The Witnesses

The stories future generations will tell about this period will read as a series of cautions and contradictions.

Democratically elected officials working to dismantle democratic elections.
Laws written to protect the vulnerable used instead to disenfranchise them.
Open criminality among those charged with enforcing the law.
An economy that grows impressively on paper while ordinary Americans watch their purchasing power evaporate.
Institutions once synonymous with American excellence stripped for parts, sold for petty gain, or hollowed out to serve personal ambition.

Day-to-day systems continue to function, but they no longer feel reliable, certain, or fit to purpose. The machinery hums, yet confidence drains away. We watch as each violation is labeled unprecedented, even as the word itself loses meaning through repetition.

What once relied on a gentleman’s agreement has been displaced by a new logic: if something has not been explicitly forbidden, it is treated as permissible. Norms are no longer guardrails. They are suggestions, easily brushed aside and rarely defended.

We are told this is simply how power is supposed to work. That this is realism. That expecting better was always childish.

But what many people are experiencing right now is not political disappointment. It is something deeper.

The Cost of Knowing Better

There is a concept most often used to describe the experience of soldiers, first responders, and medical professionals: moral injury. It refers to the harm that occurs when a person is forced to participate in, witness, or remain powerless in the face of actions that violate their deepest sense of right and wrong.

Moral injury is not burnout. It is not fatigue. It is the pain of knowing what should be done, and watching it not be done, repeatedly, by those entrusted with responsibility.

Increasingly, that is a civic condition.

Millions of Americans are paying attention. They understand the stakes. They recognize the violations for what they are. And they are told, implicitly or explicitly, to accept them as normal, inevitable, or strategic. Over time, that dissonance erodes trust. Not just in institutions, but in the idea that participation matters at all.

This is why disengagement feels tempting. Why cynicism feels protective. Why rage and numbness coexist so easily. These are not signs of apathy. They are symptoms of prolonged ethical strain.

And yet, even now, many still cling to the hope that things will simply “go back” to how they were.

They will not.

The End of the Old Story

Normal is over.

Not because everything has collapsed, but because the stories that made compliance feel responsible no longer persuade. The gap between what we are told and what we observe has grown too wide. The language of tradition cannot survive endless exception. The appeal to norms cannot withstand their consistent violation.

This moment is undeniably chaotic. It is destructive. It is frightening in ways both obvious and subtle.

But it is also clarifying.

When old structures fall apart, they leave behind something scarce: open ground. Space where assumptions loosen. Where inherited expectations lose their hold. Where new frameworks become possible. Not because they are guaranteed to succeed, but because the old ones have forfeited their claim.

There is an opportunity here. A threshold.

If normal is truly over, then the task ahead is not restoration. It is orientation.

Next week, we will begin to talk about what comes after, and what it asks of us.