2
Sentences
The phrase ‘new normal’ caught on in 2001 and has proved extraordinarily popular and adaptable since. As a catchphrase, it offers a nice rhetorical way of summing up a situation and rounding off observations. However, its conceptual implications are rather more considerable than its rhetorical advantages. The phrase encapsulates a new concept of normality itself. Its purchase as a catchphrase has served to normalize that new concept of normality. This and the following two chapters flesh out these points, first by considering the career of the catchphrase and then by examining its relation to the concept of normality.
When I set about writing this chapter, the phrase was powerfully associated with social conditions following the Covid-19 outbreak. In fact, it evinced a remarkable escalation of usage after the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a pandemic on 11 March 2020. A Google search with the keyword ‘new normal’ in mid-October 2020 came up with 90.5 million results (45.2 million in the news category and 13.3 million in the video category), itself an indication of the scale of its usage. A search with ‘new normal’ ‘Covid-19’ accounted for 88.1 million results (37.9 million news and 7.71 million videos). Similarly impressive numbers were obtained when joined with ‘coronavirus’ (49.7 million) and with ‘pandemic’ (47.4 million), at least some of which did not overlap with each other. The social conditions following the outbreak had evidently hardened as the immediate ground for the catchphrase, but not entirely. It has appeared with growing frequency for a couple of decades already, and even in the midst of the pandemic it was occasionally evoked for other contexts. But the Covid-19 social condition is the obvious juncture to begin from, before tracking its earlier career.
Making a beginning is a daunting task for this study. It makes sense to begin by noting some of the characteristic ways in which the catchphrase ‘new normal’ was used in the pandemic context. To do that meaningfully, some illustrative examples of usage are needed. But the areas of usage were extraordinarily various. The phrase appeared thus (often prominently, as titles, mottos, or leitmotifs) in governmental documents, academic publications, industry reports, information pamphlets, campaign posters, commercials, documentaries, movies, television series, songs, fictional texts, artworks, tweets, blogs, internet profiles, etc. The registers, modes, and contexts of usage were dauntingly numerous. Nevertheless, some effort at clarifying its connotations before tracking its career seems expedient, and news reports provide a reasonable if limited resource. As the Google search numbers show, news reports accounted for nearly half the results of usage. Such reports usually cover diverse areas of social life (politics, economy, culture, sports, crime, education, fashion, celebrity, etc.) at various levels (city, regional, national, international). Taken together, news reports are amongst the most widely read and most regularly produced texts. They usually maintain a direct address, are circumspect about both specialist vocabulary and colloquialisms, and eschew convoluted constructions while courting rhetorical appeals. Linguistic usage in news reports, I suspect, slips continuously into everyday conversations. For the purposes of these observations, news reports are texts that are likely to be found by a news aggregator like Google’s.
So, I searched for sentences using ‘new normal’ in the reports of two British national dailies, The Guardian and The Telegraph, for the period 25 July–25 September 2020. In this period the initial shock of the Covid-19 outbreak and immediate lockdowns were done with. The consequent changes in social arrangements still seemed strange but were nevertheless routine; a mixture of sulky trepidation and grudging acceptance prevailed. The outbreak continued with rises and falls in numbers. Reports in these British dailies were not very different from English-language reports from other countries: the USA, Canada, Australia, India, South Africa, etc. In a similar vein, ‘the new normal’ had found its way translated into other languages—for instance, into German (neue Normalität), Portuguese (novo normal), Spanish (nuevo normal) news, as far as I am aware. My collection of sentences, sieving out obviously like constructions, follows. The newspaper, date of appearance, and general theme are marked for each; the specific authorship and context are not. The emphasis here is on phrase usage in a general way rather than with individual quirks. The list is divided into four sections, three to do with the pandemic and the fourth to do with other issues. Some of the distinctive rhetorical features of sentences are also noted parenthetically. The sentences are numbered for easy reference, there are 54 altogether.
1. The Covid-19 ‘new normal’ as an unfamiliar prevailing situation
1.01: ‘In five-inch heels and a lace pencil skirt, Milan is taking baby steps into the new normal’ (The Guardian, 24 Sept.) [theme: fashion; metaphors: baby steps]
1.02: ‘Pubs have been adapting to the “new normal” over the past few months and will continue to do so, but pubs were struggling to break even before today and these latest restrictions may push some to breaking point’ (The Guardian, 22 Sept. 2020) [theme: pubs; metaphors: adapt/breaking point]
1.03: ‘Welby writes that the “new normal of living with Covid-19 will only be sustainable–or even endurable—if we challenge our addiction to centralisation and go back to an age-old principle: only do centrally what must be done centrally”’ (The Guardian, 15 Sept. 2020) [theme: religion; metaphors: sustainable–-endurable]
1.04: ‘Children in Scotland went back to school in August, so Vincent-Smith has had “a head start” on the new normal, adjusting to staggered school runs, adding masks, wipes and hand sanitiser to backpacks, and working out how the family can reacclimatise’ (The Guardian, 5 Sept. 2020) [theme: schools; metaphor: reacclimatise/head start]
1.05: ‘As much of the rest of the country starts to try and live a new normal, vulnerable groups like the senior citizens risk being left behind—as fears of the virus remain for them’ (The Guardian, 3 Sept. 2020) [theme: the elderly; metaphor: left behind]
1.06: ‘The new normal needs a new politics’ (The Guardian, 26 July 2020) [theme: politics; repetition: new]
1.07: ‘The new normal is beginning to be felt’ (The Guardian 25 July 2020) [theme: business; metaphor: feeling]
1.08: ‘The economy now needs to be free to adjust to the “new normal”, whatever that may be, and losing some jobs while creating others is a necessary part of that process’ (The Telegraph, 24 Sept. 2020) [theme: economy; metaphor: free to adjust; note hedge]
1.09: ‘It’s the new normal. Or the new abnormal’ (The Telegraph, 24 Sept. 2020) [theme: culture/films; antonym: abnormal]
1.10: ‘As we settle in for what might be a long haul through the autumn and winter, time devoted to picking high-quality stocks that can adapt to a challenging new normal will repay the investment’ (The Telegraph 31 Aug. 2020) [theme: economy; metaphor: adapt/challenging]
1.11: ‘Indeed, a number of new companies will make their money out of this so-called “new normal”’ (The Telegraph, 29 Aug. 2020) [theme: economy; hedge]
1.12: ‘The new normal may mean staff coming in for a couple of days a week—just don’t expect your own space’ [The Telegraph, 28 Aug. 2020) [theme: work; hedge]
1.13: ‘Lockdown meant a move away from uncomfortable underwires and itchy lace—but what now in the “new normal”’? (The Telegraph, 11 Aug. 2020) [theme: fashion; question]
1.14: ‘One face mask is not enough if you are easing into a new normal, it’s time to get one for every occasion’ (The Telegraph, 4 Aug. 2020) [theme: fashion; metaphor: easing into]
1.15: ‘A ban on backstroke, weightlifting “pods” and some extreme HIIT shelved. Lucy Dunn gets the low-down on the “new normal” for gyms’ (The Telegraph, 26 July 2020) [theme: fitness; metaphor: low-down]
2. The Covid-19 new normal as a settled situation
2.01: ‘The usually warm connection between artists and audience at the end of a show is lost in the chill of the new normal’ (The Guardian, 20 Sept. 2020) [theme: art; metaphor: chill]
2.02: ‘That’s not necessarily at all sustainable, it’s not where we want the new normal to be, but it does suggest more flexibility of how we run our key operations’ [The Guardian, 1 Sept. 2020) [theme: business; metaphor: place-where to be/ sustainable]
2.03: ‘For many in Papua New Guinea, Covid-19’s “Niupela Pasin”—new normal—is a return to the old ways’ (The Guardian, 20 Aug. 2020) [theme: economy; metaphor: place-return to]
2.04: ‘The first must-have look of the “new normal” doesn’t have a designer label, or a hefty price tag’ (The Guardian, 11 Aug. 2020) [theme: fashion; metaphor: look]
2.05: ‘People sleeping rough and living on the streets doesn’t have to be part of the new normal’ (The Guardian, 11 Aug. 2020) [theme: homelessness; metaphor: place: to be part]
2.06: ‘My summer romance with the new normal is consciously uncoupling—goodbye summer and goodbye freedom, it was nice while it lasted’ (The Telegraph, 21 Sept. 2020) [theme: new measures; metaphor: romance]
2.07: ‘Nevertheless, there are a glut of chic and clever jewellery launches to bring a little sparkle to the new normal’ (The Telegraph, 14 Sept. 2020) [theme: fashion; metaphor: sparkle]
2.08: ‘In a post-Covid world, you can rely on Singapore Airlines as it adjusts its award-winning services to accommodate the “new normal”’ (The Telegraph, 10 Sept. 2020) [theme; metaphor: accommodate]
2.09: ‘In Switzerland, the atmosphere was as normal as I have experienced since lockdown began—not new normal, but normal normal’ (The Telegraph, 8 Sept. 2020) [theme: travel; repetition and antonym]
2.10: ‘The “new normal” means my school run has never been so chilled’ (The Telegraph, 6 Sept. 2020) [theme: daily life; metaphor: chilled]
2.11: ‘Forms and bureaucracy dictate our new normal, leaving us more infantilised than ever before’ (The Telegraph, 29 Aug. 2020) [theme: measures; metaphor: infantilised]
2.12: ‘This “new normal” is really quite depressing, and I fear the queues, the masks, and the virtue-signalling (our youngest was told off by one disapproving lady for daring to touch a box of fudge in a gift shop) are going to last for years’ (The Telegraph, 28 Aug. 2020) [theme: daily life; categorical/note article ‘this’]
2.13: ‘Britain’s appetite for the new normal will leave us all with a stomach ache’ (The Telegraph, 15 Aug. 2020) [theme: food; metaphor: appetite]
2.14: ‘But, in general, the “new normal” was increasingly hard to distinguish from the old one’ (The Telegraph, 12 Aug. 2020) [theme: New Zealand measures; metaphor: distinguish]
2.15: ‘Face masks become new normal as figures show almost everyone wearing one outside the home’ [The Telegraph, 6 Aug. 2020) [theme: measures; categorical change]
2.16: ‘Fitness firms struggle to shape up for the new normal’ (The Telegraph, 2 Aug. 2020) [theme: business; metaphor: shape up]
2.17: ‘The carefree mixture of casual and formal is the new normal’ (The Telegraph, 1 Aug. 2020) [theme: fashion; categorical]
2.18: ‘Stringent rules have kept infection rates low in the Canary Islands where tourists have been returning to the new normal of holidays’ (The Telegraph, 27 July 2020) [theme: travel; metaphor: returning-place]
2.19: ‘In a turbulent world, giving workers the chance to plan ahead will make the hideous “new normal” more bearable’ (The Telegraph, 27 July 2020) [theme: work; metaphor: hideous/bearable]
2.20: ‘After such a long period of time working from home, many of us have developed new ways of working and fallen into new routines, and while lots of workers are looking forward to getting “back to normal”, many feel like the “new normal” will never be the same as it once was’ (The Telegraph, 27 July 2020) [theme: work; metaphor: back to]
3. The Covid-19 new normal as an imminent situation
3.01: ‘The sources of our economic growth and the kinds of jobs we create will adapt and evolve to the new normal’ (The Guardian, 24 Sept. 2020) [theme: economy; metaphors: evolve and adapt]
3.02:[About Revenge Porn Helpline cases] ‘But while the number of cases has dropped slightly since April, they remain higher than in any previous year, prompting campaigners to warn of a “new normal” post lockdown’ (The Guardian, 15 Sept. 2020) [theme: sex; metaphor: warn-danger]
3.03: ‘The door is open for more public investment in climate mitigation and adaptation, and there is a growing chorus demanding that the new normal be “green”’ (The Guardian, 15 Sept. 2020) [theme: climate change; metaphor: chorus-demanding]
3.04: ‘He expects the new normal to herald “a resurgence of the fan as a sort of face mask”, complete with old-age flirting techniques’ (The Guardian, 3 Sept. 2020) [theme: fashion; metaphor: herald]
3.05: ‘With optimism and proactivity at its core, our back-to-school programme of thoughtful, practical Guardian Masterclasses throws a golden autumnal light on what the “new normal” truly means: a chance to reach for something better than the ordinary’ (The Guardian, 31 August 2020) [theme: education; metaphor: golden autumnal light]
3.06: ‘Or maybe not: maybe as the new world becomes the new normal we’ll want to hurry forward, away from our first intuitions of change, shedding them behind us because nothing’s so stale as the news from last week’ (The Guardian, 1 Aug. 2020) [theme: books; metaphor: place-hurry forward/shedding/stale]
3.07: ‘And now, with measures easing, it is becoming clear how our pandemic-inflected sense of style may translate into life in the “new normal”’ (The Guardian, 26 July 2020) [theme: fashion; metaphor: translate]
3.08: ‘It is, of course, not that simple, and there are many variations which will involve a mix of control measures as well as vaccines, but at least there will (hopefully) be more options and opportunities on the road towards a “new normal” if we already start preparing the ground, and build constituencies and public confidence towards a new future’ (The Telegraph, 13 Sept. 2020) [theme: vaccines; metaphor: road/ground/build]
3.09: ‘Mitchell and his wife Flo escaped London for his mother-in-law’s home in Hampshire as they planned for their new normal’ (The Telegraph, 22 Sept. 2020) (theme: sports; metaphor: plan; note possessive ‘their’]
3.10: ‘It is time to move to what will become our new normal for as long as the coronavirus is with us’ (The Telegraph, 16 Sept. 2020) [theme: measures; personalization of coronavirus]
3.11: ‘As pandemic restrictions ease, three experts explain how we can best transition to the new normal’ (The Telegraph, 25 July 2020) [theme: mental health; metaphor: transition]
4. Other new normals
4.01: ‘Extreme weather is the new normal’ (The Guardian, 16 Aug. 2020) [theme: climate change; categorical]
4.02: ‘The new normal is abnormal in the extreme, a city where library books have been pulled from the shelves and a protest song banned in schools’ (The Guardian, 1 Aug.) [theme: Hong Kong security law; antonym: abnormal]
4.03: ‘In the UK, overweight is the new normal’ (The Guardian, 26 July 2020) [theme: health; categorical]
4.04: ‘Russian influence in the UK is “the new normal”’ (The Guardian, 20 July 2020) [theme: politics; categorical]
4.05: ‘Such preoccupations are absolutely typical of the new normal, in which a propagandistic diversity agenda is not only touted as basic fact but also as the basis on which we must all work, think and teach’ (The Telegraph, 27 Sept. 2020) [theme: politics/diversity training; synonym: typical/normal]
4.06: ‘It is now widely believed that depressed aggregate demand, accompanied by ultra-low inflation and near-zero interest rates, is the new normal’ (The Telegraph, 20 Sept. 2020) [theme: politics; categorical]
4.07: ‘Dutch-style roundabouts prioritising cyclists could become the new normal after more planning applications submitted’ (The Telegraph, 19 Aug. 2020) [theme: transport; categorical/tentative]
4.08: ‘Air conditioning could become “new normal” as Brits endure unseasonably hot nights’ (The Telegraph, 12 Aug. 2020) [theme: weather; categorical tentative]
With those sentences in view, some general inferences can be made. These concern the denotative usage of the catchphrase, and the substantive association of the catchphrase with the pandemic context.
Denotation
Repeated usage is the defining characteristic of a catchphrase like ‘new normal’, as it is for slogans, proverbs, aphorisms, dictums, etc. Frequent repetition has not made this catchphrase passé—it is not a cliché yet. Those Google search figures indicate that the density and frequency of its repetition in relation to the Covid-19 context over at least seven months were remarkable. In this respect, the sentences suggest three observations.
First, a particular consanguinity was perceived between the Covid-19 context and the expression ‘new normal’. So long as the former prevailed, the latter was associated with it. In fact, over the period covered in the examples, and indeed earlier and since, the ‘new normal’ became substitutable for the Covid-19 context. In many of the sentences, ‘new normal’ simply refers immediately to the Covid-19 context (starting with 1.01, 1.02, 1.04, 1.06, 1.14, and onwards). The ‘new normal’ had come to denote this context and was often used as if to name it.
Second, using the ‘new normal’ thus was convenient because it allowed for constant adaptation to different themes, seemingly giving a distinctive turn to the catchphrase and a distinctive angle on the theme. In other words, it immediately foregrounded the common denominator arising from the Covid-19 context across quite disparate areas. The sentences cover almost every area of news reporting: politics (1.06, 2.11, 2.14, 3.03), economy (1.10, 1.11, 3.01), and business/work (1.02, 1.07, 1.12, 2.02, 2.19, 2.20), fashion (1.01, 1.13, 2.04, 2.07, 2.17, 3.04, 3.07), education (1.04, 2.10, 3.05), culture and arts (2.01, 2.13, 3.02, 3.06), travel (2.08, 2.09, 2.18), sport and fitness (1.15, 2.16, 3.09, 3.11), etc. For every theme there was a precedent situation and an obtaining situation arising from the outbreak, and for every theme the phrase ‘new normal’ worked as shorthand to indicate that that was the connection. At the same time, the catchphrase also showed that this shift was not specific to any given theme but cut across others at the same time.
Third, denotative usage and its peculiar convenience did not mean that the catchphrase became exclusively attached to the Covid-19 context. The ‘new normal’ was already a burgeoning catchphrase before the outbreak of the pandemic (much of its earlier career is discussed further on in the chapter). It may be surmised that some remnant or accrual from past contexts was available, however unobtrusively, in its usage within the Covid-19 context (an argument which occupies the next chapter). Within the period covered by the sentences given in the previous section, the catchphrase continued to be used for other contexts (as in the sentences in section 4). In fact, a kind of hierarchy of usage developed. In itself, the catchphrase was predominantly and emphatically attached to the Covid-19 context. When featuring elsewhere, its usage appeared as a deliberate labelling, a new recruitment to the precincts of the catchphrase. Thus, the sentences in section 4 are mainly categorical statements, of the form such-and-such is or could be the new normal: ‘Extreme weather is the new normal (4.01); ‘overweight is the new normal’ (4.03); ‘Russian influence … is the new normal’ (4.04); ‘Air conditioning … could become the new normal’ (4.08). In brief, there was a core usage of the moment and a range of other usages around the core. This has, in fact, been a feature of the catchphrase’s career from 2001 onwards.
Substance
As already observed, those sentences suggest that in some way the catchphrase ‘new normal’ was just right for the situation faced after the Covid-19 outbreak. No doubt repetition played a part here. Repeated usage was probably set up by initial categorical statements, such as ‘Living with Covid-19 is the new normal’; ‘Living with the pandemic will become the new normal’. With incessant repetition the categorical could be dropped and the phrase became denotative for a while. This is much like naming or renaming. If Dick decided to start calling Jack ‘Slug’ and many others followed Dick’s cue, then poor Jack would be in some danger of becoming better known as ‘Slug’.
But there was more than mere repetition to the strong association of the catchphrase with the pandemic. It was a meaningful association. The experience of the pandemic context had a substantive bearing on the ordinary-language concept of normality. I mean ‘ordinary’ as opposed to ‘specialist’ concepts of normality, which are examined at some length in Chapter 4. The relevant ordinary-language dictionary definition of ‘normality’, appears under General Uses I.1.a in the Oxford English Dictionary (2020): ‘Constituting or conforming to a type or standard; regular, usual, typical; ordinary, conventional. (The usual sense.)’ With that in mind, the examples given offer some insight into how this definition was given a distinctive turn by the catchphrase.
First, my division of the sentences related to Covid-19 into three parts is already based on a conceptual consideration. That the ‘new normal’ can be conceived as, at the same time, describing a settled situation, an unfamiliar prevailing situation, and an imminent situation gives a curiously abstract construction to the ordinary concept of normality. Some of the sentences suggest an oxymoron or contradiction in the catchphrase, and I pick those up further on, but that is not quite my immediate point. It is not the defamiliarization or subversion of normality that these sentences principally suggest, but rather the normality of the ‘new normal’. The point seems to be that the concept of normality in the Covid-19 context is as standard, typical, usual, regular, conventional, etc. as it ordinarily is; it is just that realities are yet to conform or are only occasionally conforming with this concept. It is as if the concept of normal life has been somewhat dissociated from the reality of living, and moreover the concept is more real than the reality and it is up to reality to catch up with the concept. The concept seems to have overtaken the reality. This is an odd if unobtrusive turn given by the catchphrase. It contrasts with the dictionary definition, which suggests that the concept is a description of reality: what is normal is such because the realities of living (behaviours, activities, etc.) make it so. We may say that the ‘new normal’ suggests a dissociated sensibility towards normality rather than a contradiction or paradox. The concept of normality assumes precedence over the reality. This is obvious in the construction of sentences/clauses such as: ‘The new normal needs a new politics’ (1.06); ‘The new normal is beginning to be felt’ (1.07); ‘it’s not where we want the new normal to be’ (2.02); ‘to accommodate the new normal’ (2.08); ‘shape up for the new normal’ (2.16), and the like. The concept of such normality already obtains as normal, these suggest, but such that the all-comprehending realities of politics, feeling, fitting, being, living are somewhat off norm.
Second, the curious notion that the living reality is off norm from the current Covid-19 ‘new normal’ is conveyed in those sentences without grammatical infelicity or obvious incoherence. The sentences seem, so to speak, quite normal. They do not jar. It appears to me that the frequent use of metaphors serves to gloss over any possible awkwardness in syntax or meaning. Consider metaphors like these in relation to the ‘new normal’ of the Covid-19 context: [1] ‘taking baby steps’ (1.01), ‘infantilised’ (2.11); [2] ‘adapt’ (1.02, 1.10, 3.01), ‘evolve’ (3.01); [3] ‘sustainable’ (1.03, 2.02), ‘adjust’ (1.08), ‘reacclimatize’ (1.04); [4] being ‘left behind’ (1.08), ‘return’ (2.03, 2.18, 2.20), ‘road towards’ (3.08), ‘hurry forward’ (3.06), ‘herald’ (3.04); [5] ‘translate’ (3.07), ‘transition’ (3.11); [6] ‘easing into’ (1.14), ‘be part of’ (2.05), ‘accommodate’ (2.08), ‘shape up’ (2.16); [7] ‘chill’ (2.01, 2.10), ‘appetite’ (2.13), ‘hideous’ (2.19), ‘golden autumnal light’ (3.05). These quietly and with piecemeal effect associate the concept of the normality in ‘new normal’ to real experiences and processes. They are likely to evoke memories and images of, respectively: [1] childhood, [2] natural changes, [3] environments or habitats, [4] locations and directions of travel, [5] state changes, [6] shapes and spaces, [7] sensations. The awkwardness of the concept of new normality overtaking the reality of habituated or familiar normal life is rendered unexceptional—is normalized—by these metaphors. Put another way, the habituated and familiar normal life evoked by the metaphors serve to ground the concept of the new normal. As a figure of speech, metaphors often render the abstract tangible and hold ambivalences together. However, the catchphrase ‘new normal’ is not in itself obviously metaphorical. With specific associations, of course, it could be: if the ‘normal’ were visualized in the geometric and original sense of ‘perpendicular’, or in terms of a statistical graph, it may well operate as a metaphor in itself. By and large though, in everyday communications, apart from mathematicians and statisticians few take that turn. Despite its relatively recent advent into everyday vocabulary (in the course of the nineteenth century), ‘normal’ is now firmly established as almost a pre-conceptual abstraction (Chapter 4 dwells on this process). It is simply taken as making sense without referring straightforwardly to anything. But the phrase ‘new normal’ might, if one were to pause on it, disturb the way in which ‘normal’ simply makes sense. That is where the metaphors come in, to smooth away such disturbance. The catchphrase seems to invite metaphors and constitutes its relevance through metaphors.
Third, simply by being used so frequently, catchphrases attached to specific contexts do loose some of their glib transparency at times and seem opaque. That is to say, they are then not just used to say something, they draw attention to themselves and to how that something is being said. With time, most catchphrases, unless adapted to other contexts and of-the-moment issues, tend to be regarded as clichés. This quality of flickering opacity in catchphrases is apt to lead to wordplay in their usage, or tentative or conditional usage. And that kind of wordplay or tentativeness could imply a reconsideration of the issue to which the catchphrase refers. That is to say, the substantive bearing of the catchphrase on the context is brought to attention as a mutual modification. Pausing and paying attention to the catchphrase could mean reconsidering the issue it is applied to. This kind of tentative usage and wordplay on ‘new normal’ is variously found in the sentences. Tentativeness is indicated often by putting ‘new normal’ in quotation marks: around a third of the sentences do this (1.02, 1.08, 1.13, 1.15, 2.03, 2.04, 2.08, 2.10, 2.12, 2.14, 2.19, 2.20, 3.05, 3.07, 3.08, 4.04, 4.08); in sentence 1.11, ‘this so-called “new normal”’ is doubly tentative. Tentativeness in this form could be by way of partially disowning the catchphrase while taking recourse to it, as if it were a reported phrase. That may be one way in which awareness of the catchphrase being a catchphrase is registered (i.e. this is in quotation marks because it is a catchphrase). Tentativeness could also be a way of doubting the aptness of the phrase or the reality of the Covid-19 situation itself. Wordplay around the ‘new normal’ in these sentences seems to underline the inadequacy of the catchphrase, or perhaps the irony of using it at this juncture. The counterpoint or antonym is used in this vein: ‘It’s the new normal. Or the new abnormal’ (1.09—and yes, that is two sentences); ‘not new normal, but normal normal’ (2.09); ‘the “new normal” was increasingly hard to distinguish from the old one’ (2.14); ‘The new normal is abnormal in the extreme’ (4.02—not a Covid-19 instance). Despite these nuances, the main effect of such tentativeness or wordplay is to foreground the catchphraseness of the catchphrase, so to speak.
With these initial observations on the connotations of the catchphrase ‘new normal’ in media usage, I turn to its career from 2001 onwards, in the form of a contemporary historical narrative. In the remainder of this chapter, I focus on the period 2001–2019; in the next, I concentrate on 2020 alone, where the pandemic context is discussed in more detail.
9/11
The catchphrase ‘new normal’ has, I have noted already, an older provenance than the Covid-19 context. The Google n-gram of the phrase ‘the new normal’, tracking frequency of usage over time (by year) in a corpus of 8 million printed books from 1800 to the present is shown in Figure 2.1.
Fig. 2.1 Google n-gram of ‘the new normal’.
Published books are not the obvious medium of catchphrase circulation; nevertheless, this is an indicative graph. Neither ‘new’ nor ‘normal’ are recently introduced words, but the phrase combining them appears from only just before 2000 and really took off shortly afterwards. This kind of Google n-gram graph is relatively rare, and seems to be obtained mainly with catchphrases and slogans: similar results, for instance, can be elicited with ‘black is beautiful’ or ‘just do it’.
Prior to 2001, the phrase only had a limited purchase in financial accounting and business reportage. A Time magazine article of 1 August 1949 entitled, in tentative tones, ‘New Normal?’, reported on decreasing inflation and the health of stock values since World War 2, and noted General Electric’s performance as ‘possibly a bellwether of how good “normal” might be’. The title worked here at two levels. At one, it gestured towards the comprehensive social shift, across all areas, which resulted from the war. Tacitly, before the war life was normal; the war itself was presumably not normal; and the prevailing condition after it is possibly a ‘new normal?’. At a more restricted level, for its immediate readership, the article pointed to the statistical normals (means and deviations) which describe the economic condition … for stocks, for trading, for inflation, for interest rates, etc. That, in this instance, the phrase had a relatively specialist and a general import at the same time hints at its potential as a catchphrase. But, in fact, it did not become one over the next five decades. It remained confined to business and accounting circles in the interim, and that rarely too, and mostly fortuitously. In financial accounting and forecasting, normals often have to be adjusted, not merely in response to economic performance but in anticipation of extraneous factors which would predictably impinge upon performance. That could include regime changes: for instance, in taxation, regulation, institutional redefinition (such as, privatization of public-sector companies), and criminalization or decriminalization of trading practices. Under such circumstances, accountants would naturally prepare forecasts according to a ‘new normal’ as against the prevailing or prior normal. Such anticipated change in normal indicators would bear upon investor behaviours. The Google n-gram in Figure 2.1 shows some pick-up of the phrase from the mid-1990s. Those generally take in the fortuitous or well-defined use of the phrase in technical areas—mathematics and logic, data science, finance, computing, geology, meteorology, etc.
The phrase became a catchphrase after the terrorist attacks in the USA of 9 September 2001 (‘9/11’ as it came to be known), repeatedly and increasingly frequently used thereafter in media reports and programmes, speeches, policy reports, academic papers, and so on. Its first significant use is attributed to Dick Cheney, then vice president under President George W. Bush. In his remarks to the Republican Governors Association of 25 October, he had observed:
Homeland security is not a temporary measure just to meet one crisis. Many of the steps we have now been forced to take will become permanent in American life. They represent an understanding of the world as it is, and dangers we must guard against perhaps for decades to come. I think of it as the new normalcy.
What that meant was described thus:
To date, nearly 1,000 individuals have been arrested or detained here in our country during the course of this investigation. We’re cutting terrorists off from their sources of funding by freezing millions of dollars in assets. Congress has passed important new legislation giving us modern methods to pursue the war on terror, while safeguarding the rights of law-abiding citizens. Tomorrow at the White House, President Bush will sign it into law.
(Cheney 2001)
The phrase ‘new normalcy’ was numerously quoted in newspaper reports over the following months. Before long it became ‘new normal’ rather than ‘new normalcy’, and remained associated with Dick Cheney’s announcement while becoming a general appellation—or coming to denote—the post 9/11 social condition. But let’s pause on Cheney’s ‘new normalcy’ before carrying on with the ‘new normal’.
Cheney may have been well versed in the history of Republican election campaigns or, more likely, not—in any case, his choice of words came with an apposite echo from there. The first presidential elections after World War 1 in 1920 featured ‘back to normalcy’ as the campaign slogan of Republican candidate, and eventual victor, Warren G. Harding. A political slogan usually represents or is associated with the agenda of a government, institution, political party, movement, formation, or alignment, whereas a political catchphrase or catchword is more fluidly and repeatedly employed by various users in different and emerging contexts. ‘Back to normalcy’ became Harding’s 1920 Republican slogan, and ‘normalcy’ caught on in a larger way. As William Safire (1968) observed in his compendium of political slogans and catchphrases: ‘“Normalcy” was a catchword; “not nostrums but normalcy” a catchphrase; “back to normalcy” a slogan’—all originating from Harding and taking a life of their own. The awkwardness of the word ‘normalcy’ gave it a distinctive and therefore memorable ring: ‘Harding’s use of the word might have been a mistake; some say the word was written “normality” and fluffed, but if true the mistake was fortuitous: the word caught on to symbolize not only a campaign but an era’ (Safire 1968: 291). The era in question, thus symbolized, was robustly characterized by Karl Shriftgiesser (1948: 37) a decade or so after it ended: ‘return to normalcy, to use the gauche word of Warren Harding’s that became the destructive shibboleth by which the American public was led over the peak and down the hill into the valley of the Great Depression’. At the optimistic campaigning juncture in 1920, ‘back to normalcy’ was meant to counter the post-war weariness that gripped the American public—it suggested a restoration or return of some sort. In that sense, its echo in Cheney’s ‘new normalcy’ was ironic: after 9/11, for Cheney and more widely, it suggested quite the opposite of any restoration or return—it was an announcement of no-return. It exhorted the American public to ‘buckle down and get used to a new regime’. And yet, perhaps the irony is not as pointed as it might seem. In 1920, ‘back to normalcy’ was less straightforward than it sounded. It did not, in fact, suggest a return to or restoration of pre-war conditions, or to pre-Wilson Republicanism. In a detailed account of the 1920 campaign historian Wesley Bagby (1962: 158) says:
That Harding sensed this popular feeling was proved by his famous phrases: ‘What America needs is not heroics but healing, not surgery but serenity, not nostrums but normalcy’. The world needed, he said, to steady down ‘once more to regularity’. It was time for change.
In this reading there’s no return or restoration in going ‘back to normalcy’ then, but rather it answered to a desire for change from the condition of war. ‘Normalcy’ was used here in the loosely medical sense of being healthy, as a counterpoint of abnormal. It was associated with healing, serenity, good medicine (rather than nostrums), and regularity. And in that sense too, its echo in Cheney’s ‘new normalcy’ still rang as ironic: it went, after all, hand in hand with George W. Bush’s declaration of a war, a ‘war on terror’. That a ‘war on terror’ established a ‘new normalcy’ sounded like an indefinite deferral of healing, serenity, regularity—bidding goodbye to all that.
Cheney’s Hardingesque turn and its ironies petered out as ‘new normalcy’ was replaced by the more pat ‘new normal’, but the thrust of his announcement remained with this phrase. Why, we may ask, the ‘new normal’ rather than the more grammatically natural ‘new normality’? ‘Normality’ is the noun form of the adjective sense of ‘normal’, suggesting a condition; using ‘normal’ as noun gives the word a technical or specialist air—as if the term is defined as a thing or object in itself. But in the catchphrase it is obviously not that. Nevertheless, the technical or specialist turn is a nuance of the catchphrase, and perhaps the advantages of that nuance become apparent in the contexts of its usage. Alternatively, the ‘normal’ in ‘new normal’ possibly rings as a dangling adjective, inviting a noun to be added after it according to context. In terms of context, after Cheney’s ‘new normalcy’, through the period of the invasion of Iraq to Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008, the ‘new normal’ predominantly referred to the post-9/11 condition. That is, it was associated with the various adjustments in political and social life which resulted from the terrorist attacks—especially in the USA, and gradually across the Anglophone sphere and further. As such, the suggestiveness of the phrase, anchored to 9/11, seemed to spread from context to context, area to area.
Thus, quite soon after Cheney’s ‘new normalcy’, on 14 November 2001, the popular National Public Radio’s (NPR) science and health programme The Infinite Mind, created by Bill Lichtenstein and hosted by psychiatrist Fred Goodwin, broadcast an episode entitled The New Normal? This addressed mental health problems following the terrorist attack. Goodwin introduced the programme thus:
This show is about the new normal, but to address that question in the current context is quite complex. Generally, in mental health, we differentiate normal from illness by how long the symptoms continue after a stress or trauma. For example, the full range of depressive symptoms is normal in a grief reaction, but if they go on month after month, grief has slipped into clinical depression. But how can you distinguish normal from disorder when the precipitating stresses continue; when week after week, there’s another stressing event and we’re told by officials that such events are likely to continue? There’s a real challenge here for the mental health community to separate normal reactions to world events from the clinical symptoms of a disorder requiring intervention and treatment.
(NPR Programme Transcript: 2)
Thus, a conceptualization of the normal other than in statistical or accounting terms, in terms of health and illness, was recruited into the ‘new normal’. The argument was: where departure from normal behaviour is usually gauged in relation to a specific stressing event, for an ongoing and continuous appearance of stressing events a different approach is needed. Having constant cause for stress needs to be conceived of as the ‘new normal’. In a way, the distinction between health (normality) and illness is blurred in this new normal, wherein possible distemper due to ongoing stress is the normality. Importantly, for this ‘new normal’ the battleground is the mind. The normal mental-health situation is given as the mind being interfered with by local stresses, like a bereavement, and being restored where necessary by watchful psychiatrists. In the new normal, however, the mind is under constant attack from stressful ‘world events’, and the psychiatrists are fighting a continuous barrage of stresses by their interventions. The mind seems to become a general space where world events and psychiatrists battle to maintain a balance that is the ‘new normal’.
Taking a different direction, but more predictably from Cheney’s ‘new normalcy’, in August 2003 the NGO Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now called Human Rights First) published a report entitled Assessing the New Normal: Liberty and Security for the Post-September 11 United States. By this time the ‘war on terror’ had morphed into the invasion of Iraq, which began in March 2003. The various deceptions and mendacities which the George W. Bush administration in the USA and the Tony Blair government in the UK had pushed to justify the invasion were beginning to seem unjustifiable. There were suspicions of human rights abuses and atrocities being committed by military and private security companies commissioned by the government (the Abu Ghraib torture photographs would appear not long afterwards). The growing count of civilian casualties in Iraq grated, albeit less than the relatively small numbers of casualties among US military personnel. Though not directed specifically to the Iraq-invasion context, this report was evidently grounded in this troubled time. Its thrust is best conveyed briefly in its Executive Summary:
Assessing the New Normal, the third in a series of reports, documents the continuing erosion of basic human rights protections under U.S. law and policy since September 11. Today, two years after the attacks, it is no longer possible to view these changes as aberrant parts of an emergency response. Rather, the expansion of executive power and abandonment of established civil and criminal procedures have become part of a ‘new normal’ in American life. The new normal, defined in part by the loss of particular freedoms for some, is as troubling for its detachment from the rule of law as a whole. The U.S. government can no longer promise that individuals will be governed by known principles of conduct, applied equally in all cases, and administered by independent courts. As this report shows, in a growing number of cases, legal safeguards are now observed only insofar as they are consistent with the chosen ends of power.
(Lawyers Committee for Human Rights 2003: vii)
The areas where ‘rule of law’ had been compromised, according to the report, included uneven access to courts and extra-judicial proceedings where legal recourse should be guaranteed; infringement of privacy protections and unregulated covert operations by government agencies; weaponizing the civil immigration system and undermining established procedure; and, especially, extending infringements of ‘rule of law’ in the international domain. Much has been written about these developments since. The question that arises here is: what did the particular phrase ‘new normal’ convey here? The point the report emphasized was that a ‘detachment from the rule of law as a whole’ had settled in permanently and could no longer be regarded as pertaining to a temporary emergency—a state of exception. That seems to place adherence to the ‘rule of law’ as the ‘normal’ condition; and correspondingly, departure from ‘rule of law’ was pegged as the ‘new normal’. As with the psychiatric ‘new normal’ of the Infinite Mind episode noted earlier, the phrase makes sense as a departure from an erstwhile idea of what’s ‘normal’. The normality of ‘rule of law’ is a somewhat complicated matter. Let’s say, as a rule of thumb, that ‘rule of law’ is understood as the consistent and coherent application of some fundamental principles of liberal jurisprudence for all proceedings within a given state jurisdiction (taking the formal or thin description of ‘rule of law’ in Tamanaha 2004). The normal legal condition according to ‘rule of law’ may then be understood in two somewhat different ways: one, a condition where comprehensive application of those principles is maintained in practice (i.e. normal-in-practice); or two, a condition where there’s consensus on a conceptual system based on those principles to which practice should adhere (i.e. normal-in-concept). This distinction is not quite nit-picking. It is difficult to feel convinced that ‘rule of law’ has ever really been consistently normal-in-practice anywhere, including in the USA; it is easier to maintain that ‘rule of law’ as normal-in-concept has been consensually held in formally liberal states with variable effects on practice. In this sense, the normal is not quite an ideal and nor is it quite a reality; this is normal in the sense that some system of ‘rule of law’ is held as normative. This report made the argument that both consensus on the concept and adherence to the practice of ‘rule of law’ had been undermined—hence, ‘detachment from the rule of law as a whole’. In this sense, the ‘new normal’ was not so much a departure from or an alternative to but a negation of the ‘normal’.
By 2005, the ‘new normal’ seemed well grounded as a catchphrase referring to—almost denoting—the post-9/11 social condition. But from that core a broader set of connotations were extended to the phrase, as if its implications were being generalized and could be delinked from the post-9/11 social condition. This was only possible, of course, given that it was considered as linked in the first instance. In an interesting way, an encyclopaedia-like description of the phrase in a 2005 academic paper showed precisely how this linking and delinking works:
The new normal was a term that emerged in public discourse following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It came to signify both a broader public understanding of new risks, and specific organizational responses to that risk, such as risk-avoidance processes and procedures. The new normal, for example, was often used to describe heightened airline safety, including more rigorous inspections of passengers. It is applied to new antiterrorism laws by civil liberty advocates and to the artistic, literary, and musical tributes to the 9/11 victims. Observers have noted that new normal involves the public stockpiling of antibiotics and gas masks, heightened anxiety and stress-related illness, and acts of civility and selflessness that emerged following the 9/11 attacks. New normal, then, represents a broadly reconstituted order that incorporates new understandings and interpretations of a crisis into a revised status quo.
(Sellnow et al. 2005: 169)
That last sentence is an enactment of delinking: it’s a generalization which deliberately decontextualizes the phrase from its 9/11 moorings and attaches it to abstract concepts of ‘order’ and ‘crisis’. Quite naturally, the next paragraph then moves to a systems-theory description of these concepts, and effectively recruits the phrase away from the 9/11 context to more fluid application to organizations, groups, etc. But the 9/11 context was still firmly attached to it as a dominant core of its associations, around which other considerations of normality and norms could be visualized as a diaphanous penumbra, linked and yet liberated or at least delinkable. Indicatively, on the fourth anniversary of 9/11, CNN/ USA Today/GALLUP released an attitude survey that found that:
most Americans feel that neither the country nor their own lives have fully returned to normal since terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001. […] Americans appear a bit more pessimistic now than they were then about the likelihood that normalcy will ever be fully restored to the country or to their own lives.
(Saad 2005)
While that dominant sense remained attached, opportunistic employment of the catchphrase appeared in a range of relatively momentary or marginal debates in this period—not less important debates, but receiving less sustained attention then. Reports on climate change took recourse to it at times, as did those on health concerns (especially increased incidence of obesity), and on growing habituation to digital applications. An art exhibition entitled The New Normal, curated by Michael Connor, was put together in 2008 and then toured in various galleries in the USA, Canada, and Spain till 2010. Connor’s essay on the theme in the attendant book (Connor et al. 2008) began with Cheney’s speech and the post-9/11 context and then broadened the discussion, via chosen artworks, to everyday life. Connor (and putatively the artworks) paused, on the one hand, on life under continuous surveillance, and, on the other hand, voluntary and involuntary data-sharing by individuals using new digital technologies. The essay observed optimistically that ‘disclosure is a game with its own rules and aesthetic codes’ (15) and recommended the exhibition as an investigation of these rules and codes. So, the trace of the catchphrase from Dick Cheney’s 9/11 pronouncement remained, and yet, also seemed diluted by 2008.
Financial crisis 2007–2008
However, the catchphrase’s occasional appearance in business and accounting circles prior to 9/11, which had receded into the background for a while, made a decisive return. It reappeared in financial circles with reference to and yet drawing away from post-9/11 associations, and gradually congealed around the 2007–2008 financial crisis. Gradually, its denotative significance shifted from 9/11 to the financial crisis. By 2009–2010, the ‘new normal’ immediately signified the financial crisis and regimes of perpetual austerity rather than post-9/11 and war-on-terror regimes.
This shift took place most indicatively in the relentlessly motivated realms of financial speculation, and started well before the financial crisis of 2007–2008. It appeared, in fact, with the slump following the terrorist attacks and, more importantly, the bursting of the dot-com bubble between 2000 and 2002. After dizzying growth in the share values of new technology start-ups through the 1990s, they plummeted quickly within two years. Online companies either went out of business or had to find ways around having their valuations slashed savagely (accounts of the time include Perkins and Perkins 2001; Cellan-Jones 2001; and Malmsten et al. 2002). In the April 2003 issue of the finance magazine Fast Company, technology investor Roger McNamee announced the ‘New Normal’ following the dot-com crash (capitalized: it was the theme of that issue). This referred to an investment environment in which profits could be secured again from the sector, given its emerging and promising character. The thrust of this upbeat announcement depended on McNamee’s own successful portfolio as an investor on behalf of various companies, especially through Integral Capital Partners, which he had co-founded. In an interview in that Fast Company issue, he spoke of an ‘old normal’ in the 1980s and 1990s when the new dot-com companies provided an exciting and relatively unregulated field of adventurous investing with quick fortunes being made, which led to that precipitate crash. In the emerging New Normal from 2003, McNamee observed, the technology sector promised robust, regulated, and long-term growth, and offered propitious prospects for investors—as his own portfolio proved. ‘The ’90s were not normal,’ he announced. ‘The thing I am most certain of in this world is that the technology universe will not see that ’90s type of growth explosion again—not in our lifetime. This is the New Normal, and it’s about the rest of your life’ (McNamee and Labarre 2003). By 2004, he had elaborated his theme into a book, where he summarized the New Normal thus:
The book was a heady elaboration of these seemingly world-embracing tenets, a celebration of the successful investor’s clarity of vision, zeitgeist knowledge of the ‘facts of life’, individual heroism, bolstered by the author’s own proven record. The New Normal became a kind of motivational chant, appearing on almost every page of the book, often several times.
By 2008, financial gurus were feeling troubled again as a big crash unfolded. Some of the largest financial-sector corporations in North America and Western Europe teetered on the brink of bankruptcy in 2007 and 2008, calling for gigantic state-interventions or bailouts. Among the many factors which led to the crisis were the introduction of subprime mortgages and a consequent housing bubble, deregulation of and normalized corruption in transactions (such as price-fixing and predatory lending), complex packaging of risk in products for large-scale speculation, and a credit crunch. The government bailouts enabled most of those big corporations to survive relatively unscathed (barring a few notorious cases of liquidation, like Lehman Brothers and Ameriquest). They became de facto nationalized, though not de jure. Their executives retired in disgraceful luxury or continued their activities, while large numbers of middle- to lower-rung workers became unemployed. Some temporary and mild regulatory measures were introduced—often reintroduced having been rescinded earlier—to signify de facto nationalization. More importantly, the governments in question thrust the cost of the bailouts given from the public purse upon the citizens who had filled that public purse to begin with. This strategy was captured by the righteous-sounding catchword ‘austerity’ (of which more later, especially in Chapter 5), underpinned by the portentously measured imminence or reality of recession. Public spending on all sectors (health, education, culture, social care, housing, etc.) were brutally cut; for the great majority, savings stopped growing and pensions became permanently insecure; small- and medium-sized businesses and jobs disappeared while unemployment benefits shrank. Government executives drew public attention away from the financial sector by articulating the crisis in terms of a ‘sovereign debt crisis’, with collective responsibility laid on citizens as the collectively indebted. Catchphrase-laden exhortations from political leaders and government bureaucrats to ‘do more with less’ and demonstrate ‘resilience’ and ‘sustainability’ became de rigueur. On the campaign trail towards becoming UK prime minister in 2009, David Cameron announced an ‘age of austerity’, and spoke of the need to get out of ‘the debt crisis’ by ‘doing more for less’. The ‘new normal’ found its way into the political and bureaucratic repertoire of these catchphrases too, striking by turn downbeat and upbeat notes. Elected in 2009 as the financial crisis hit, in a 2010 interview US President Barack Obama was able to note an improvement in the economic outlook. But, he observed, an undesirable ‘new normal’ might be in the offing:
What is a danger is that we stay stuck in a new normal where unemployment rates stay high. People who have jobs see their incomes go up. Businesses make big profits. But they’ve learned to do more with less. And so they don’t hire. And as a consequence, we keep on seeing growth that is just too slow to bring back the eight million jobs that were lost. That is a danger. So that’s something that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about.
(Obama with Kroft 2010)
Around the same time though, like so many other leaders, his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, was enthusiastically propagating the ‘new normal’ gospel with all the rhetorical flair of a parrot:
I am here to talk today about what has been called the New Normal. For the next several years, preschool, K-12, and postsecondary educators are likely to face the challenge of doing more with less.
My message is that this challenge can, and should be, embraced as an opportunity to make dramatic improvements.
(Duncan 2010)
In political and bureaucratic circles, the catchphrase had found an ambiguous but steady anchoring to the financial crisis. However, in the world of speculation and investment, where the crisis seemed centred, the phrase managed to recover its motivational drive à la McNamee somewhat sooner, within 2009.
In March 2009, for instance, a McKinsey Quarterly strategy article entitled with the phrase gauged opportunities for investors to make hay—albeit comparatively moderate amounts of hay—in this crisis environment because ‘it is no less rich in possibilities for those who are prepared’ (Davis 2009). It argued that investors mainly have to factor in the changes that have resulted and calculate accordingly. In brief, the changes involve less leveraged businesses and greater government regulation, the latter a good thing in some respects (more transparent) and bad in others (more protectionist). That distribution of what’s good or bad marked the investor’s normative (normal) horizons; for others, of course, highly leveraged businesses with little regulation and access to unprotected monies had proved disastrous—that was the crisis. More or less in keeping with McNamee’s insights, the article pointed investors to the technology sector and to Asia, where the crisis was not felt as keenly then. The ‘new normal’ anchored to the crisis, the article promised, will persist even when the crisis is over. Investment managers who had waded into this ‘new normal’ and, again like McNamee, claimed to know what’s what and how to strike gold were also keen on the relentlessly motivational cadences of the catchphrase. Bond traders William H. Gross and Mohamed El-Erian of Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO) were the McNamees of the 2007–2008 financial-crisis ‘new normal’, and set about a publicity campaign to colonize the catchphrase. Their success in doing so among the financial cognoscenti was down to their own performance, especially through the PIMCO Total Return fund (see Forbes 2010), though that ‘new normal’ success was a bit frayed a few years down the line (Goldberg 2013). In any case, by turn, El-Erian and Gross produced a series of lectures, blogs, and interviews in the course of 2009, claiming to have ‘coined’ the phrase ‘new normal’. A chatty article on this ‘new normal’ by Gross (2009) made much the same assessment and recommendations as the McKinsey Quarterly article, with golfing and child–adult metaphors thrown in and a PIMCO stamp put on them. Delivering the Per Jacobsson Foundation lecture on that theme the following year, El-Erian said:
We coined the term ‘new normal’ at PIMCO in early 2009 in the context of cautioning against the prevailing (and dominant) market and policy view that post-crisis industrial economies would revert to their most recent means. Instead, our research suggested that economic (as opposed to financial) normalization would be much more complex and uncertain—thus the two-part analogy of an uneven journey and a new destination.
(El-Erian 2010: 12)
The claim that El-Erian and Gross ‘coined’ the catchphrase was bold, but it was made confidently and was repeated often by them and others. The journey–destination metaphor was well taken, and captured the speculative intent in deploying the catchphrase, not just at this juncture but also earlier. Just as Cheney’s 2001 ‘new normalcy’ had put anything like a 1920 Harding notion of ‘back to normalcy’ to rest, it now seemed evident that no journey can take an even path and reach a familiar destination. There would be no return from the post-9/11 security and legal regime and no return from austerity. In financial investment and speculation, it seemed, returns are not so much impossible as not to be contemplated—only new destinations could be reached, and, despite the challenges, they all offer investors opportunities. History has no lessons here.
While the ‘new normal’ of the 2007–2008 financial crisis was being registered in this vein, there were two sorts of specialist recourse to the catchphrase. On the one hand, some got down to fleshing out the practicalities of ‘doing more with less’ and being ‘resilient’ in various sectors of governance. A multitude of government and corporate reports, scholarly papers and books, journal special issues, etc. followed along those lines. On the other hand, and more interestingly, some picked up the upbeat tone of the investors against their grain, and started anticipating a wholesale social and cultural transformation for the good—a caring and humane capitalism, a thrifty but contented lifestyle for ham and eggers (happily austere). A paper by Amitai Etzioni (2011), simply entitled ‘The New Normal’, went through various measurements (data) of consumption, social relations, beliefs, and lifestyles during the recession in the USA to raise the prospect of general moral improvement:
The Great Recession has forced a much larger number of Americans to face the question of whether they can adapt to a more austere life and whether they can find other sources of contentment. Data show that this is possible but there seems no way to predict which course Americans will follow, unless these data are much more widely available and the social forces that promote consumerism are restrained.
(Etzioni 2011: 788)
For Martin Walker (2009), the force that could restrain the forces that promote consumerism was already at large, and it was precisely the one which investors contemplated with trepidation: Big Government. Or, in his words: ‘Thrift is becoming the new normal for the American consumer […]. But lavish spending is becoming the new normal for the federal government […]’ (66). He felt Big Government might engineer a transformation to get past what had been an unsustainable model of rapacious consumerism. Soon, however, the crisis was declared as done—by 2012, or 2014, or 2016, depending where one was. Having taken possession of the catchphrase, El-Erian wondered whether it wasn’t time to declare ‘the end of the new normal’ in 2016. However, to many it already seemed that not much had changed for financial investors and speculators. Somehow, this ‘new normal’ was no more than a bit of varnish on old furniture, merely accentuating the old patina (as Crouch 2011; Mirowski 2013; Dardot and Laval 2019 [2016], among others, observed discontentedly). In short: government remained small, regulation remained ineffective (the effects of the main instrument in the USA, the Dodd-Frank Act 2010, was uncertain), highly leveraged business practices rebooted quickly, and de facto nationalizations of banks soon became loss-making re-privatizations.
2012–2019
By 2012, the energies of the ‘new normal’ as a catchphrase anchored to the financial crisis were already seeping away in the USA and Europe, though they did so slowly. Its encouraging cadences in investment circles made it a useful brand name for various consultancy firms, and it persisted mainly as such in those circles. In 2011, Paul Hodges of International EChem and John Richardson of the Asia section of ICIS (Independent Commodity Intelligence Services) authored an e-book entitled with the catchphrase in the spirit of McNamee and Gross and El-Erian; and Hodges set up a consultancy operation entitled New Normal Consulting. By 2020, the UK Companies House had twenty incorporated companies listed bearing the name New Normal. However, if soon after 2012 the catchphrase had moved on from the financial crisis in business circles, it remained firmly with its fallout on the ground: austerity policies. These consisted in governmental regimes of doing ‘more with less’, cutting public expenditure, moving publicly financed services to private players and deregulating accordingly, cutting taxes, and downgrading employment security. Various studies thereafter observed that this had become a permanent regime of government, irrespective of the financial crisis. In the ‘new normal’, it seemed austerity had been ‘constitutionalized’ (McBride 2016), become grounded in citiscapes (Hinkley 2018), diluted human rights protections (Lusiani and Chapparo 2018), and exacerbated inequality (Wysong and Perrucci 2018)—to name some researches tagged to the catchphrase. In 2019, Isabel Ortiz and Matthew Cummins published Austerity: The New Normal based on 161 IMF country reports for 2018–2019. This observed that following a brief period of increased governmental spending during the financial crisis in 2008–2009, from 2010 onwards—and by their projections, continuing till at least 2024—reduced spending had become the norm across the world, with severe consequences:
Overall, austerity has become a ‘new normal’, with the majority of countries in the world contracting public expenditures in the period 2010-24. The incidence and depth of fiscal austerity varies across regions and income groups. In terms of regions, for 2020 onwards, the Middle East and North Africa has the highest proportion of countries contracting expenditure during the three shocks (15 out of 20, on average), which is also the region that undergoes the most severe cuts (3.2 per cent of GDP, on average) […]. For country income groups, 45 per cent of countries classified as low-income experience budget cuts during the three shocks, on average, which increases to 62 per cent of lower middle-income countries, 66 per cent of upper middle-income countries and 69 per cent of high-income countries. However, the deepest contractions occur in middle-income countries. This includes 2.1 and 2.5 per cent of GDP for lower and upper middle-income countries, respectively, on average during the three shocks, compared to 1.8 and 1.3 per cent of GDP for low- and high-income countries, respectively.
(Ortiz and Cummins 2019: 11)
Austerity had become one of the stable references for the catchphrase in circles which felt concerned about it. But austerity was itself a ‘catchword’ with a shifting purchase, on which more in Chapter 5.
Meanwhile, as a catchphrase, ‘new normal’ was cropping up for other contexts in all kinds of media, for issues from the trivial to the serious, of little or great public interest. An NBC American sitcom entitled The New Normal, aired in late 2012 and early 2013, for instance, had neither a whiff of the financial crisis and austerity about it, nor the scent of investment opportunities. Set in middle-class Los Angeles, it featured a gay couple employing a single mother as surrogate for their baby, and taking her and her daughter into their home. The ‘new normal’, in this instance, was in presenting same-sex relationships and single motherhood within the precincts of family life in a way that would be palatable for mainstream US television viewers. The series wore its attempts to court that audience on its sleeve, with a thick layering of fairly conservative family values delivered with light-hearted nods to conventional prejudices. Notably, it was possibly the first to employ the catchphrase in popular culture circuits with a gay political agenda, perhaps inspired by critical discussion of ‘normality’ of longer provenance than the catchphrase itself—especially, 1990s’ queer theory (of which more in Chapter 4). As it happened, if the idea was to bring about a ‘new normal’ of family life by performing it on screen, even this gentle effort was received with hostility by religious groups and broadcasters (Goldberg 2012; Pierce 2012). ‘New normal’ was then recruited by Evangelist ideologues to campaign against LGBTQ politics in various articles (and at book length with the catchphrase as title in Nolland et al. 2018). In this regard, cheery optimism and ominous censoriousness confronted each other across a chasm in the same words.
Another significant uptake of the phrase, carrying the shadow of the financial crisis and something of the spirit of investor optimism (with individualism shorn off), took place outside the USA and Europe—in the People’s Republic of China. It appeared here less as a catchphrase and more as a political slogan. A catchphrase is used to characterize a prevailing or emerging condition or phenomenon (or commercially, a product or service) and is adaptable to numerous contexts. A political slogan refers squarely to the objectives and strategies (the agenda) of a political alignment—a government, institution, party, association, movement, etc. Such slogans appear where the alignment and its objectives are represented to a relevant audience or seek public attention: such as, a government promoting certain policies and ideological principles, an institution presenting its purpose, a party making an election bid, or an activist group announcing its oppositional position. Shortly after becoming president in 2013, Xi Jinping started using the phrase (新常态 xin changtai). Notably, in May 2014 news reports quoted him as observing: ‘We must boost our confidence, adapt to the new normal condition based on the characteristics of China’s economic growth in the current phase and stay cool-minded’ (Reuters 2014). His speech at the opening of the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit on 9 November 2014 dwelt on the phrase at some length. In relation to the relatively slower growth rate of just over 7 per cent that year after a prolonged period of growth rates over or hovering at double digits till 2011, Xi observed that this was a ‘new normal’ which offered new development opportunities. In his words: ‘First, despite slower growth under the new normal, China’s economy is still growing at a considerable rate’; ‘Second, under the new normal, China’s economic growth is more stable and has more diverse drivers’; ‘Third, under the new normal, China’s economic structure has been improved and upgraded, providing more stable development prospects’; ‘Fourth, under the new normal, the Chinese government has vigorously streamlined administration and delegated powers, further unleashing market vitality’ (Xi 2014). In these points, in fact, the ‘new normal’ was not used by way of labelling an agenda or policy framework—so, not quite as a political slogan in the sense I have delineated. The first two points pegged the ‘new normal’ as describing an economic condition which China had not engineered but found itself in. The third and fourth points marked the government’s responses to that ‘new normal’—thus, a consequent process of engineering rather than measures that create a ‘new normal’. In Xi’s three-volume selection of speeches and writings The Governance of China, effectively a sanctioned account of his policy thinking, the ‘new normal’ appeared in the second volume (Xi 2017). This did not carry the APEC 2014 speech, but had a section entitled ‘The New Normal of Economic Development’, with speeches and writings from December 2014 to July 2017. One of these, ‘What Is the New Normal in China’s Economic Development?’, from a speech to the CPC Central Committee on 18 January 2016, interestingly put the phrase in ‘a historical and practical perspective’ (268) and detailed his view of the effect of the financial crisis of 2008 in Western economies on PR China (271–72).
Though Xi’s use of the ‘new normal’ was circumspect, it soon gathered a life of its own in PR China and internationally. It seemed to become a slogan denoting the Xi-government’s economic programme itself, rather than referring to a situation to which that programme responded. It is doubtful whether Xi intended the phrase to become a slogan for his own economic policies, but that occurred nevertheless. In fact, his position in PR China and his rhetorical facility meant that, on the one hand, almost every speech or text he produced offered numerous memorable and quotable phrases, and, on the other hand, bureaucrats and academics inside and outside China endowed such phrases with superlative significance. Xi’s ‘new normal’, with the catchphrase baggage it already had, became conveniently available as an overarching slogan for China’s economic policy particularly and Xi’s governmental regime generally. Within China, a concerted effort was made by economists and policy experts to make the slogan cohere with numerous initiatives, sector by sector, issue by issue, and phase by phase (e.g. Tong and Wan, eds. 2017; Cai, ed. 2020; Wan and Li 2020). Effectively, the slogan seemed to become a title for a coherent policy direction. Outside China, the phrase was given a wider purchase that made economic policy drives coterminous with modes of social control, so that it appeared to become a slogan for Xi’s general principles of government (the Noesselt, ed. 2017 special issue of the Journal of Chinese Political Science is a good example).
As the second decade of the twenty-first century wound down, the catchphrase kept expanding its range to a bewilderingly large number of issues. Woven through the financial crisis and austerity, a distinctive strand had to do with conditions of work, especially with regard to working time and workspace. The desirability of ‘flexible’, ‘agile’, ‘nimble’ working practices—especially in the ‘gig economy’ of temporary or short-term employment—emerged into business vocabulary in the 1980s. This referred to a shift from fixed hours (the traditional 9-to-5 job) and a fixed space (the office desk) towards more opportunistic use of time and space. The aspiration to free up time and space for work converged with the emergence of the ‘digital workplace’ in the 1990s. On the one hand, this became a brand name for commercial products integrating office facilities (maintaining records, replicating documents, communications, etc.) through internet portals. On the other hand, the ‘digital workplace’ emerged as a concept whereby paid work could be shifted from being done in material spaces to internet precincts. The latter was a possibility that interested companies and governments keeping tabs on—and encouraging—the gradual increase of persons working on computers, and often working seamlessly from both offices and homes. Influentially, the US government’s NCIA (National Communication and Information Administration) and Economics and Statistics Administration published a report, A Nation Online (2002), based on large-scale surveying, which tracked trends in this regard. This suggested that a gradual elimination of material workspaces in favour of digital workspaces could take place. Correspondingly, the division of work and leisure in the working day could then be reconsidered. This kind of ‘flexibility’ in work was already the subject of considerable upbeat research, especially under the Alfred P. Sloane Foundation’s programmes; in 2003, the Foundation turned this focus predominantly on the issue of space and launched the National Workplace Flexibility Initiative (see Christensen 2013). These drives began to anticipate an imminent ‘new normal’ with the onset of the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Sponsored by the Foundation, Georgetown University Law Centre’s (2009) report Public Policy Platform on Flexible Work Arrangements (FWA) appeared conveniently at this juncture, with a recommended national campaign backed by a policy and legal framework to ‘make FWAs the “new normal” in the American workplace’ (12 and passim). As the financial crisis and perpetual austerity settled, the opportunistic, individualist spirit which was celebrated as the ‘new normal’ for investors was transposed on the ‘new normal’ of the ‘high performing’, ‘innovative’ worker. This was elaborated in elegiac tones, for instance, by John Putzier (2004), in a book with the indicative title Weirdos in the Workplace: The New Normal … Thriving in the Age of the Individual (Ch. 4 extolled the virtues of flexible working and digital workspace). A great density of news articles, documentary films, corporate reports, academic papers, and commercials have tracked the imminence, and then the gathering pace and unmistakable appearance of this ‘new normal’ since. On the eve of the Covid-19 outbreak, this ‘new normal’ seemed to be of the present, at least for some sectors of white-collar workers (Taylor and Luckman, ed. 2018 offered case studies accordingly).
To an overwhelming degree, reports and studies of the ‘new normal’ of ‘flexible work’ in the ‘digital workplace’ have had a starry-eyed, gushing tenor. The following points have been stressed. Workers want it because it makes for sound ‘work–life balance’, makes caring and nurturing while working easier, cuts the costs of commutes, allows for greater self-determination in the distribution of leisure—and working time. Employers want it because it makes for happier and more productive workers (or, at the least, as productive as always) and increases speed and efficiency. Countless attitude surveys and ‘evidence-led research’ have been devoted to bolstering these arguments, attended by how-to-make-work-flexible guidebooks. Some concern has occasionally been expressed for the mental health of isolated homeworkers, but generally it would seem that all who are invested in the issue have been looking out for workers’ interests. Relatively less discussed (save in narrowly focused academic papers and some abstract generalizations in, for example, Lazzarato 2017 [2009] and Bloom 2017), have been the obvious downsides for workers. It was not for nothing that this ‘new normal’ really came together during the financial crisis of 2007–2008, amidst cutbacks. Flexible working decimated legal protections for workers and strictures about employers’ responsibility towards workers, which were carefully instituted through much of the twentieth century. In terms of time, flexible work meant the erasure of the relationship between working time and pay. That remained, especially in the public sector, an accounting process de jure, but completely dissociated from the de facto practices of work. It also erased erstwhile notions of right to leisure/holidays and overtime pay. It normalized casual and temporary working contracts or made the ‘gig economy’ mainstream. Pension and other benefits and protections of employment began accordingly to be pared down or to disappear. In terms of space, it has tended to give increasing access to employers into workers’ homes. That usually takes the form of invasive surveillance and diktats, sometimes in the name of looking out for the worker’s ‘health and safety’. The distinction between private/personal and public space has gradually been dissolved for workers beyond some formal platitudes. Ironically, the effects of these changes have perhaps been most keenly felt by workers whose work has not been—or cannot be—flexibilized: manual, menial, and shop-floor workers. Unmistakably, the principal benefit of flexible working in these terms have been for employers’ account books, to buck up the performance measures of managers and the returns-on-investment of shareholders. Savings have appeared in terms of estates costs, infrastructure costs, insurance costs, pension contributions—without eating into output and turnovers. At the same time, new investment opportunities in technology industries and services have opened up. Flexible working has made sense of ‘doing more with less’.
By way of drawing towards a conclusion for this chapter, the growing association of the catchphrase with climate change through this period is likely to be regarded as the most momentous in retrospect. With growing frequency from around 2010 onwards, the catchphrase was being used to headline reports on global warming/climate change in news media and scientific bulletins: such as, ‘The New Normal?: Average Global Temperatures Continue to Rise’ (Biello 2010); ‘Get used to “extreme” weather, it’s the new normal’ (Hedegaard 2012); ‘Extreme heatwaves are predicted as the new normal for British summers by 2040’ (Bawden 2013); ‘Climate: the new abnormal’ (Stover 2014); ‘Study sees a “new normal” for how climate change is affecting weather extremes’ (Mooney 2015). Headlines give a glimpse of but the tip of the iceberg in catchphrase usage in news media. ‘New normal’ featured with growing frequency in reference to specific weather events and general reportage on climate change research and policy. In being used thus, the prior familiarity of the catchphrase was called upon to emphasize the issue, and, at the same time, the significance of the issue imbued the catchphrase with a distinctive significance. In the main, however, such usage is a rhetorical ploy in newspeak. More interestingly, from 2015 onwards, the catchphrase was given a more rigorous and measured turn, in tune with the scientific advocacy that raised climate change as an urgent public and policy issue. In this direction, a paper in 2015 (Trenberth et al. 2015—the subject of the newspaper report just mentioned, Mooney 2015) objected to the tendency in reportage to infer a ‘new normality’ from singular extreme weather events. It proposed instead that specific weather events should, in the first instance, be examined as if they are not caused by human-induced climate change. Thereby the extent to which such events can be explained by cumulative factors can be determined, which would then give a robust and graded sense of the contribution of long-term climate change. The paper concluded:
The climate is changing: we have a new normal. The environment in which all weather events occur is not what it used to be. All storms, without exception, are different. Even if most of them look just like the ones we used to have, they are not the same. But we cannot sort out these questions of degree without a large ensemble of model simulations, particularly for events as rare as the Boulder floods, and the kinds of models that can be run in such a way are often incapable of simulating the event in question and thus lack physical credibility. We argue that under such conditions it is better for event attribution to focus not on the synoptic event, but rather on the influences of the changed large-scale thermodynamic environment on the extremes and temperatures and moisture associated with the event.
(Trenberth et al. 2015: 729)
A couple of years later, another paper (Lewis et al. 2017) took possession of the catchphrase itself, recruiting it away from its catchphrase-like fluidity and conferring it with a quantifiable rigour. The argument suggested that the catchphrase could be more than a rhetorical device and designate a method of measuring climate change. That would be by setting a reference point of extreme weather (a kind of current norm of extremity) and then statistically tracking changes before and after to establish the time taken for a ‘new normal’ to emerge:
The time of emergence of a new normal [ToENN] is defined here as having occurred when more than 50% of future anomalies exceed a reference event in magnitude or intensity. This definition can be applied broadly to a diversity of events. We begin by applying this general ToENN framework using the record-breaking global average 2015 temperatures as a reference event. When will years as hot as 2015 become the norm? We focus on annual- and seasonal-scale events, rather than short-duration, high-impact extremes such as heat waves, as such large-scale observed record-breaking events have been widely discussed in the public domain using a new normal framing. However, our proposed methodology is intended to be applied to investigating events across spatial and temporal scales.
(Lewis et al. 2017: 1141–42)
A couple of years later, another paper (Moore et al. 2019) offered a different take on the idea of the ‘new normal’ in relation to climate change. This focused on the relationship between the objectively measurable phenomenon and subjective perceptions thereof. Drawing upon a large corpus of Twitter posts (between 2014 and 2016) to gauge the latter, the paper concluded that evidence of climate change in objective terms did not have a corresponding impact on perceptions. Perceptions tend to normalize the obtaining situation quickly and in an ongoing way, or, in other words, do not register the change as long-term change. In a New Scientist report on the study, one of the authors, Frances Moore (2019) asked, ‘Is there a risk that these exceptional events [such as, record-breaking temperatures] just become part of the “new normal”?’, and answered, ‘But temperatures quickly became unremarkable: after just a couple of years of strange temperatures, people stopped tweeting about them. Our best estimate is that people base their idea of normal weather on what happened in just the past two to eight years.’ In relation to climate change, the catchphrase thus not only grounded itself in the rhetorical ploys of news reportage but also took a step into specialist purposes. That is to say, its purchase as a catchphrase inspired attempts to give it a measurable reference—attaching it to gauges for empirical process and perceptual processing—which, in turn, could give it added weight as a catchphrase. In a way, the phrase ‘new normal’ in relation to climate change has served as one of the fulcrums of science-based public advocacy.
In policy circles, the importance of science-based public advocacy apropos of climate change has intermittently been referred to a somewhat different turn on the ‘normal’, through the phrase ‘post-normal science’. Its resonance has mostly been limited to science and technology policy circles, wherein it appears as a policy-academic catchphrase. It was introduced and elaborated in an influential paper by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz (1993), which focused on areas where scientific knowledge is uncertain or contested and yet the social stakes in that knowledge are high. This means that, despite ambiguities in the knowledge, policy decisions based upon it cannot wait for more conclusive findings and full consensus. This situation puts a particular pressure upon scientists and policymakers who have to act upon the available scientific evidence and inferences. Both cannot wait for scientific knowledge to follow its normal, generally gradual, course towards garnering consensus, but have to act jointly to advocate for an appropriate path forward. They then engage in ‘post-normal science’, where ‘[t]he model for scientific argument is not a formalized deduction but an interactive dialogue’ (740) which would involve ‘public engagement and participation’ (751), in the spirit of bringing in ‘extended peer communities’ (753). All this is redolent with the good intentions of governing elites, or perhaps with their desire to indemnify themselves against liability or minimize responsibility. The relationship between the catchphrase-at-large ‘new normal’ and this policy–academic catchphrase ‘post-normal science’ is not immediately evident—an interesting issue to which I return in Chapter 4.
Towards 2020
In 2020, the core application of the catchphrase ‘new normal’ shifted again: this time, as observed at the beginning, in view of circumstances following the Covid-19 outbreak. These circumstances and their relation to the catchphrase call for a considered pause, to which the next chapter is devoted.
Notably, the career of the catchphrase outlined in this chapter involved no cancellation of an existing nuance with the appearance of a new one. The ‘new normal’ following the 9/11 terrorist attack remained the ‘new normal’ thereafter and is still a ‘new normal’ as this is written. But it was given an additional dimension with the ‘new normal’ for investing in the technology sector following the dot-com crash announced by McNamee. That was not overtaken by the ‘new normal’ set by the 2007–2008 financial crisis and consequent austerity policies: the complex of the catchphrase’s ambit extended further, and that too remains an aspect of the ‘new normal’ as this is written. Positive and negative normative takes from 9/11 and the financial crashes did not quite oppose, let alone negate, each other; rather, they appeared to be the flipsides of the same coin. The advent of the ‘new normal’ as a political slogan in PR China tagged an institutional agenda to the fluid circuits of the catchphrase, without eschewing or dislodging its catchphrase purchase. Every circumstantial recruitment of an issue to the ‘new normal’ added to the catchphrase without subtractions, from the truly global crisis (like climate change) to the relatively trivial (like eating habits or fashion tastes). The ‘new normal’ of gender and sexual relations, whether seen through liberal light or illiberal murk, was and is not a separate area from any of the above issues. The catchphrase makes it a piece within the whole. Flexible working as a ‘new normal’ too became but another and continuing surface in the prism of the catchphrase. The measured turn given to the phrase with reference to climate-change research sharpened its connotations without dispelling its catchphrase fluidity. In the process, the catchphrase refracts so many issues pertaining to the contemporary world or reorients and grounds so many of them by its suggestiveness that it acquires a constitutive power. That is to say, it seems to effect something that is greater than its many contexts of usage, as if the very persistence of the usage of the ‘new normal’ brings about an adjustment in the concept of normality itself and materializes a state of normality. This turn seemed all the more entrenched as the Covid-19 pandemic unsettled the world in 2020.