Democrats are currently in the midst of whether to shut down the government as a response to President Donald Trump’s lawlessness — see this recent Ezra Klein column for an overview of the arguments for and against. What struck me, reading Klein’s assessment, is how centrally the internal Democratic debate revolves around the question of “normalcy.”

Not whether the second Trump presidency is normal: At this point, only the most blinkered deny that Trump is attempting to transform the United States into an authoritarian country. Rather, the debate is over the extent to which the rules of “normal” politics work in these abnormal times.

By “normal” politics, I mean a basic vision of the postwar American democratic system and the role of parties within it. Normal politics begins with an assumption of the rule of law, in the sense that good-faith readings of the Constitution and statute define the rules of the political game. Because those rules say that power is allocated in free and fair elections, normal politics includes a belief that competition for public opinion is paramount — which means that parties must tailor their agendas to the policy views of the public.

Under these conditions, rule of law and responsivity to public preference, normal politics means that legislative actions have two goals: 1) to enact new statutes that accomplish desired policy ends and 2) to enhance the party’s popularity and thus improve its standing among persuadable voters ahead of elections.

At present, the first premise of “normal” politics — the rule of law — is clearly broken. Trump is currently operating with total disregard to statutory and constitutional rules, enabled by Republican majorities in Congress and the Supreme Court. On this, everyone on the broader left agrees.

The question is how to respond. Would Democrats be best served by strategies from the normal politics era, or does Trump’s authoritarianism demand they write a new playbook?

This divide is obvious in the shutdown debate. Under normal politics, a shutdown makes no sense: Previous shutdown fights, like the GOP’s disastrous 2013 bid to defund Obamacare, show that Congress doesn’t have the leverage to coerce presidents into unilaterally abandoning policy priorities. Yet Trump’s agenda is so qualitatively different from a fight over health care policy — it’s not a mere partisan dispute, but an attack on the system itself — that it may no longer make sense to think of a shutdown as a policy fight at all. Rather, it is best seen as an act of sabotage and resistance against a would-be authoritarian trying to consolidate power.

Once you understand this divide, it becomes the obvious subtext of every single Democratic policy debate about responding to Trump. Team Normal thinks Democrats should attack Trump on the “kitchen........

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