3

‘New Normal’, 2020

Eve of the pandemic

By mid-2020 the catchphrase ‘new normal’ referred first and foremost to conditions following the Covid-19 outbreak. Though the contagion was quietly taking root already, in early January 2020 few would have known about it and fewer would have anticipated its global impact. Nevertheless, 2020 began with apprehensions and events for which the catchphrase was frequently used, following issues outlined in the previous chapter. The explosive spread of the pandemic, so that it quickly became the ‘new normal’ did not mean that the prior resonances of the phrase were erased and replaced. As in earlier phases of the catchphrase’s career, each nuance and resonance accrued with earlier ones, enriching its connotations and extending its reach. But there was something different about the emphatic way in which the ‘new normal’ became attached to the pandemic, with denotative effect. This meant that though the earlier resonances and nuances were very far from dispelled, they all seemed to become, so to speak, aligned with this forceful association. The ‘new normal’ of the Covid-19 condition became, to use a metaphor, like a magnetic pole of the catchphrase with regard to which its many usages now formed a pattern much like iron filings. The other usages appeared to be apropos of its reference to the pandemic hereafter, in various degrees turned towards or away from the latter. In the process, the catchphrase itself seemed to become opaque at times, drawing attention to its own catchphraseness and its limitations. This chapter outlines how this process unfolded.

In English, news headlines featuring the catchphrase appeared from the beginning of the year, well before the pandemic became the news. On 1 January, the English version of a feature by Serge Halimi in Le Monde diplomatique declared ‘From Santiago to Paris to Beirut, Protest is the New Normal’ (Halimi 2020). The French version was entitled ‘De Santiago à Paris, les peuples dans la rue’. In French, the equivalent ‘nouvelle normale’ had been relatively rarely used and could barely be considered a catchphrase, though the word normal(e) has both an older provenance and more frequent everyday usage. However, as the pandemic expanded, the use of ‘nouvelle normale’ increased in French reportage. Halimi’s article pointed to the extraordinary proliferation of a particular form of protest around the world: by crowding in public spaces. As the year opened, large-scale crowd protests were under way in Hong Kong, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Columbia, France, Italy, Poland, Algeria, and Liberia, to name a few countries. These variously challenged austerity measures, neoliberal policies, inequality and discrimination, corruption, and authoritarian governments. The protests, as Halimi observed, mostly sought something larger than redressal of specific grievances: they demanded regime change. Concurrently, as it happened, through December 2019 and January 2020, particularly intense bushfires raged in various regions of Australia, regarded as the latest disaster connected to climate change. On 2 January, an op-ed piece by Paul Krugman (2020) in The New York Times, headlined ‘Apocalypse Becomes the New Normal’, suggested that the Australian bushfires and other such catastrophes over the previous year were ‘all related to climate change’: ‘Apocalypse will become the new normal – and that’s happening right in front of our eyes’. The tense change between the headline and the in-text warning took advantage of the fluidity of the catchphrase; a new normality calls for attention by its evidence in the present as it shifts towards another, more disastrous, new normality. It seems both evident and imminent. In this connection, building upon a series of protest actions, the Extinction Rebellion group called for gatherings outside Australian Embassies in various countries from early January. The Fridays for Future movement also continued calling upon school students to take strike action in various countries from 3 January onwards. Amidst burgeoning expressions of anti-establishment dissent and discontent, the establishments in question often seemed fractured along ideological lines and increasingly defensive. The UK-based consultancy company Verisk Maplecroft, which offers global risk assessments which insurers take seriously, released its report Political Risk Outlook 2020 in mid-January. It observed:

The pent-up rage that has boiled over into street protests over the past year has caught most governments by surprise. Policymakers across the globe have mostly reacted with limited concessions and a clampdown by security forces, but without addressing the underlying causes. However, even if tackled immediately, most of the grievances are deeply entrenched and would take years to address. With this in mind, 2019 is unlikely to be a flash in the pan. The next 12 months are likely to yield more of the same, and companies and investors will have to learn to adapt and live with this ‘new normal’. (11)

The year seemed set for a tumultuous ‘new normal’.

Within two months 2020 turned out to be very much more tumultuous than anticipated, and the catchphrase became a sort of discursive site for mediating and negotiating paths through the tumult by echoing the recent past, and at times becoming opaque itself.

The shadow of 9/11

‘New normal’ had taken off as a catchphrase after 9/11 and President George W. Bush’s declaration of a ‘war on terror’ on 20 September 2001 (Bush 2001). On 11 September 2001 acts of extraordinary violence in the USA by a fanatical religious alignment were witnessed, which then became an expanding and continuing cycle of bloodletting, with proliferating extremist brutality and state aggression by turn. The impetus was, of course, all at the hands of human agencies, and indeed that has been the case for renewed usages of the catchphrase thereafter, whether due to the 2007–2008 financial crisis, austerity, identity politics, climate change, working from home, or crowd protests. In that respect, it might seem that the ‘new normal’ that appeared after the Covid-19 outbreak had a different push: it was an act of nature, a legal force majeuere. However, the various turns of the Covid-19 ‘new normal’ in 2020 often recalled—or variously chimed with—the 9/11 ‘new normal’ of 2001. Evidently, despite the differences, the consequent sense of shifting normality at multiple levels of social organization and everyday life appeared to be of similar scales. In both instances the causes of the ‘new normal’ were articulated so as to constitute the experience of the ‘new normal’ in analogous ways. For instance, both evoked, very quickly and naturally, metaphors of war. The experience was to be of prolonged warfare and emergency measures but without promising the closure of peace and restoration of established custom. The 9/11 and Covid-19 ‘new normals’ chimed particularly in being similarly fraught: an imperative and sudden departure from a given normality with no promise of return—towards a militarized order on constant war-footing, forcefully imposed rather than consensually directed. In this precipitate and anxiogenic tenor, the 9/11 ‘new normal’ seemed to be echoed in the Covid-19 ‘new normal’. The war metaphors were particularly emphatic in both because the force of states was invoked and unleashed. No state had, however, taken warlike stances for the 2007–2008 financial crisis. In that instance, the culpable financial sector had to be protected and citizens made to pay by the state. That financial-crisis ‘new normal’ moved from the impetus of normalized corruption in the financial sector straight to a post-war evocation of ‘austerity’ instead, with the warlike juncture skipped (see Chapter 5). However, the echo of the 9/11 ‘new normal’ in the Covid-19 ‘new normal’ seemed expedient and similarly warlike.

It might be argued that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were more meaningfully—were actually—acts of war compared to the appearance of a contagious virus. In fact, both were similarly within metaphorical territory insofar as social responses went. The moves following the 9/11 attacks were presented as being very much larger than reprisal for those specific attacks. They seemed to engage with a clash of ideologies, civilizations, ways of life, East and West/North and South. Though economic interests and political expediency motivated on-the-ground strategies, the conflicts were presented in abstract and polarized normative terms. These resonated both with a swathe of liberal thinking (influentially, for instance, Rawls 1999 and Huntington 1996), and with popular sentiment in formally democratic states (often crystallized in catchphrases and slogans). Bush’s phrase ‘war on terror’, for instance, came to designate legislative changes and political–economic strategies which cut across domestic and international domains, and took in every area of governmental, commercial, and civil activity and, indeed, the domain of convictions and emotions, the mind itself. ‘War on terror’ became as persistent and pervasive a catchphrase as ‘new normal’ thereafter. The ‘war’ in question was seemingly directed against the experience of ‘terror’ itself and anything that could cause that experience could be dubbed ‘terrorist’—except, of course, actions by the Bush administration and its allies. Effectively, this ‘war’ could draw in any other organization, state, set of attitudes, beliefs, habits, cultural practices, etc., according to the needs of those calling the ‘war’. It was, as I had noted at the time, really a metaphoric ‘war’ against abstractions which could materialize as actual conflict, or at least as tangible coercion, whenever needed. It was a speech-act courting acceptance of a ‘new normal’:

A war against an abstraction that seems to include different experiences and tangible effects and contexts is one that causes little demur. This is a war that can be easily condoned because of its very fuzziness, because it is not clear what such a war consists in – what its means are, what exactly the specific targets are, etc. In a sense such a war is glibly accepted largely because one cannot possibly be sure in what sense this is a war; a war against an abstraction has all the metaphoric power and yet all the sense of underlying security that a loose use of the word ‘war’ with regard to abstractions (such as ‘war against crime’, ‘war on unemployment’, ‘information war’, ‘gender war’, etc.) has instilled in a period of relative stability.

(Gupta 2002: 27)

In the event, as observed in the previous chapter, the ‘war on terror’ after 9/11 sucked in many dimensions of civil life: mental health, transport, surveillance, civil rights, art, and so on. All became accordingly facets of the 9/11 ‘new normal’, which is to say, the ‘new normal’ that was also the ‘war on terror’.

Inevitably, war metaphors greeted the Covid-19 outbreak and immediately resonated with the metaphoric 9/11 ‘war on terror’. In fact, war metaphors have been endemic to science and policy language concerning epidemics for long. With writings about epidemics in mind, Susan Sontag (1990) had observed that in capitalist societies:

War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view ‘realistically’; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, imprudent – war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive. But the wars against diseases are not just calls for more zeal, and more money to be spent on research. The metaphor implements the way particularly dreaded diseases are envisaged as an alien ‘other’, as enemies are in modern war; and the move from the demonization of the illness to the attribution of fault to the patient is an inevitable one, no matter if the patients are thought of as victims. Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by an inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt. (99)

Of course, Sontag’s reservations about the political resonances of metaphors for epidemics, especially war metaphors, could be regarded as too sweeping. In a comprehensive history of writings by epidemiologists, Charles De Paolo (2006) justifiably objected to Sontag’s censorious tone towards them. Scientists trying to convey their findings to general readers necessarily take recourse to metaphor, and where epidemiologists have called upon war metaphors those are often valid in scientific terms. The point, De Paolo suggested, is ‘that a careful balance must always be maintained between the edifying use of language and the factual integrity of the science’ (208). Nevertheless, Sontag’s point remains pertinent. Those metaphors may make scientific sense for epidemiologists for the benefit of general readers, but when an outbreak occurs they are also instrumentalized by politicians, bureaucrats, and businesses for ends which are not simply about conveying truths. In fact, war metaphors for the Covid-19 outbreak were repeatedly used by political leaders in the first instance by, to name a few, Donald Trump (USA), Narendra Modi (India), Xi Jinping (PR China), Emmanuel Macron (France), Boris Johnson (UK), Viktor Orban (Hungary), and Cyril Ramaphosa (South Africa). In Iran, interestingly, the messaging of measures against the outbreak echoed slogans and images from actual wars, especially the Iran–Iraq War, 1980–1988 (Schwartz and Gölz 2020). War metaphors circulated at various levels: in instructional material from various authorities, in public notices, in media reportage, and in social networks. So imperative was their appearance in relation to the pandemic that, with unusual expedition, a significant number of scholarly analyses of these appeared within months of the outbreak (e.g. Caso 2020; Frizelle 2020; Craig 2020; Semino 2020; Gillis 2020). More numerously, news features and editorials noted such metaphors often, not only to deploy them but also to consider what deploying them implies, assuming a kind of metadiscursive stance. Unease was evident throughout. Some weighed the pros and cons of such metaphors for effective communication, others struck accusatory or defensive attitudes. Unsurprisingly, in reflecting upon the metaphoric ‘war’ against Covid-19 the shadow of the metaphoric ‘war on terror’ following 9/11 came up frequently.

The ‘new normal’ of post-9/11 legal adjustments in, to begin with, the USA and thereafter in numerous states, which had seemed to undermine fundamental principles of jurisprudence, cast a long shadow on the pandemic world. The Covid-19 outbreak called for lockdowns and social distancing and other restrictive measures which bore upon legal tenets. Recourse to existing emergency frameworks within the law or legislation of new frameworks were needed wherever the contagion caught on globally. By 22 July, WHO set up a Covid-19 Law Lab to ‘gather and share legal documents from over 190 countries across the world to help states establish and implement strong legal frameworks to manage the pandemic’ (WHO 2020[1]); in December the Lex-Atlas Project was set up to compile sixty to eighty country-wise reports of these responses (Lex-Atlas 2021). Such widespread legal management of restrictions naturally recalled the post-9/11 legal adjustments. For those interested in and involved with legal frameworks, the possibility that the already widely apprehended Covid-19 ‘new normal’ might follow the legal direction of the 9/11 ‘new normal’ was a matter of concern. Most obviously, enlisting contact-tracing methods to manage the spread of the contagion, enhanced policing, and strong enforcement of restrictions suggested an upgrading of the perpetual surveillance regimes after 9/11. A posting by the human rights organization Amnesty International on 3 July raised this concern:

Lessons learnt from recent history tell us that there is a real danger surveillance measures become permanent fixtures. In the wake of the attacks of 11 September 2001 (9/11), government surveillance apparatus expanded significantly. Once these capabilities and infrastructure are in place, governments seldom have the political will to roll them back.

(Amnesty International 2020)

As legal provisions were made in various countries to accommodate such measures, the 9/11 changes were numerously and anxiously recalled in news media and, more carefully, in academic publications (Lazarus ed. 2020: 3; Ram and Gray 2020: 16; Sharon 2020; van Kolfschooten and de Ruijter 2020: 485–86). Each of these insisted that unlike the post-9/11 ‘new normal’ of perpetually enhanced surveillance and policing, the Covid-19 measures had to be planned as temporary, with clear mechanisms for being withdrawn when unnecessary. In a larger way, these concerns echoed those of legal experts contemplating the post-9/11 regime: that is, such measures are undesirable because they undermine some of the fundamental principles of rule of law in liberal jurisprudence.

These fears and anticipations found, in this instance, more sympathetic reception due to one significant difference from the post-9/11 situation. For the latter, responding to terrorist attacks, and indeed interpreting what ‘terrorism’ means in legislative terms, was almost entirely at the behest of ruling political agencies within states. International coordination was generally after the fact of national-level legislation. Though these adjustments were of similar scale in the pandemic context, the impetus for legislation was actually not solely in the hands of ruling political agencies. In fact, the Donald Trump administration in the USA and the Jair Bolsonaro administration in Brazil often found that their policy drives were thwarted; to lesser degrees, in numerous states such agencies found their own choices unexpectedly floundered or proved to be misdirected. From the beginning of the outbreak, the pandemic had to, by definition, cohere with established medical guidance instead of political will, and with constant attention to developments in the international domain. As it happened, the importance of limiting enhanced surveillance and policing and maintaining rule of law was, in this instance, underlined by intergovernmental organizations. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development issued a policy brief on 4 May (OECD 2020) charting ways of ending restrictions when they became unnecessary, also recalling 9/11. The International Development Law Organization (IDLO) issued a statement on 27 March (Beagle 2020), emphasizing the importance of adherence to rule of law in Covid-19 responses, and followed it up with a policy brief in September (IDLO 2020). Unquestionably, the World Health Organization (WHO) came to the forefront as the most important international body for issuing guidance on medical matters and organizing global responses to health crises. Though, for entirely specious reasons, Trump formally moved to take the USA out of the WHO (Hinshaw and Armour 2020) and Bolsonaro threatened to do so too (Elliott and Robinson 2020), the centrality of the WHO in the midst of the pandemic remained unshaken. As already noted, on the front of legal responses the WHO had set up the Covid-19 Law Lab in July; in October, as a second wave of growing Covid-19 cases and mortalities were reported across a number of countries, WHO had the following advice for governments:

One key lesson learned from this pandemic is that clear, caring, inclusive and regular communication from authorities contributes to public trust in the government’s response, which leads to improved understanding of individual responsibility and, subsequently, a greater willingness to adopt infection prevention practices as part of ‘the new normal’. Embedding these practices as part of our ‘new normal’ can be a stepping stone to a ‘new future’, with benefits for other health issues, far beyond the response to COVID-19.

(WHO 2020[2])

Perhaps there was a tacit nod to the post-9/11 ‘new normal’ there. At any rate, this ‘new normal’ clearly had a contrary thrust, no longer heralding a perpetual condition but a ‘stepping stone’ and underlining a soft role for governments. The formulation ‘new future’ was a bit clumsy (can the future be characterized as old or new?), but it did convey that the ‘new normal’ should be temporary and the future should be a departure from this and previous ‘new normals’. The awkward play with the catchphrase revealed a sceptical attitude towards it in much the way that war metaphors aroused doubts.

As discussed in the previous chapter, one of the areas where the catchphrase had an early purchase after 9/11 concerned the consequent mental health crisis. Amidst the Covid-19 outbreak, mental health guidance anchored to the catchphrase was numerously issued in professional bulletins and newsletters, newspapers and magazines, posters and leaflets. The catchphrase had become so squarely denotative for the pandemic condition that it also appeared more or less unthinkingly in all sorts of research publications, including on psychiatry. Unsurprisingly, some of these went back to lessons learned from the mental health crisis after 9/11 to inform managing that after the pandemic outbreak (Polizzi et al. 2020; DePierro et al. 2020; Andoh 2020).

Business and investing

The distinctive turn given to the catchphrase in financial circles after the 2002 dot-com crash and, particularly, the 2007–2008 financial crisis also flowed into the Covid-19 context, but with circumspection. The 2007–2008 financial crisis marked a horizon for changes, the settling of a ‘new normal’ for businesses and investors, which were still very much out there as the pandemic struck. However, after the dot-com crash and the financial crisis it was an upbeat outlook that was imbued in the catchphrase; in the Covid-19 context, an upbeat outlook, however habitual in these circles, could not be assumed without circumspection—or rather, could not be assumed with confidence. Upbeatness became a more future-gazing attitude. The overall economic outlook amidst the pandemic was succinctly captured when the United Nations found it necessary to update its January World Economic Situation and Prospects 2020 report in May under the title World Economic Situation and Prospects as of mid-2020. The subtitles under which it presented the available data at the time give a reasonable sense of the devastating impact of the pandemic: ‘Pandemic destroying jobs’; ‘Trade in goods and services (“Economic pain spreading through global trade networks”, “A sudden drop in global tourism and travel”)’; ‘Commodity prices in a free fall’; ‘Developing countries face mounting financial constraints’; ‘Rapid, bold but uneven policy responses’; ‘Rising poverty and inequality’; ‘Globalization facing an existential threat’. Online services were the only obvious growth area. Asking whether after the Covid-19 outbreak the prospect would be ‘back to normal or a new normal?’, the report observed:

The longer the uncertainties persist, the harder it gets for an economy to return to its normal, pre-crisis trajectory. […] If uncertainties about vaccine, testing and treatment persist, people will return to work with a high degree of caution and risk aversion, which will depress both consumption and investment. People will get used to a new lifestyle, leading to a permanent shift in demand for certain goods and services. Demand for restaurant meals, sporting events, movie theatres, live entertainment and tourism will likely remain low, while demand for existing and new online services will continue to rise dramatically. Social distancing can become the new normal, entrenching and possibly reinforcing fear, mistrust and prejudice among people, communities, societies and countries. Countries may seek to reduce interdependence, and shorten supply chains, as many may consider the potential costs of a crippling pandemic too high relative to the benefits they receive from economic integration and interdependence. The fight against the pandemic—if it continues for too long and its economic price becomes too high—will fundamentally reshape trade and globalization.

(UN 2020: 12)

This bleak prospect, interestingly, confined the ‘new normal’ to a limited purchase—for social distancing—while confirming that ‘back to normal’ is unlikely. The tinge of optimism which the presentism of ‘new normal’ often evokes seemed inappropriate. But, like the WHO’s ‘new future’, a largely despairing report did move towards recommendations on a hopeful note to ‘recover better’:

The crisis presents an opportunity to ‘recover better’, strengthening public health systems, improving prevention and access to treatment and vaccinations, and building capacities to withstand future shocks. […] Recovering better will require building resilience with fiscal buffers and automatic stabilizers to withstand economic shocks, and robust social protection systems to protect the well-being of households. Fiscal stimulus packages rolled out to fight the economic crisis can be targeted to facilitate the transition to a green economy, bridge the digital divide both within and between countries, accelerate structural transformation and promote sustainable development.

(UN 2020: 16)

Though the catchphrase had never been more intensively used before the pandemic, in considered usage most found it unequal to the unfolding crisis.

Nevertheless, some of the heroic investors of the 2007–2008 financial crisis who had taken possession of the ‘new normal’ catchphrase still found use for it. Mohamed El-Erian, now chief economic advisor at Allianz, observed that the prevailing ‘new normal 1.0’ was characterized by ‘frustratingly low economic growth, increasing inequality – not just in income and wealth, but in income, wealth, and opportunity, and central banks becoming more and more held hostage by the marketplace’ (El-Erian and Carver 2020), to a coming post-pandemic ‘new normal 2.0’ of even gloomier prospects. His July article entitled with the futuristic turn of this ‘new normal 2.0’ saw it as ‘a world of even lower growth, even higher inequality, even more tenuous financial stability, and greater pressures on institutional integrity and bipartisan politics’ (El Erian 2020: 1). El-Erian’s advice for dealing with this ‘new normal 2.0’ offered little scope for profits due to investor acumen and heroism in reading shaky markets. Rather, he suggested that governmental policy which supports investors by propping up businesses and controlling markets would be the panacea—not through crisis-struck bailouts but by ongoing policy support. Effectively, this advice banked on the public purse propping up private businesses continuously so that investors were not left out of pocket. Serializing the catchphrase thus shifted the ground from salutary investor-insight in difficult times to beleaguered investor-dependence on states in even more difficult times. In fact, in business circles the catchphrase, serialized or not, was itself beginning to grate. It had lost much of its optimistic varnish now. A Forbes magazine article of April mulled the troubled juncture for the catchphrase, less in its argument and more in its title, ‘COVID-19 And The Corporate Cliché: Why We Need To Stop Talking About “The New Normal”’ (Cox 2020). Its author wondered somewhat indecisively whether the catchphrase was meaningful any longer and how it was misused. More articulately, the title pointed to the nub of the matter: that in a specific domain—corporate speak—the catchphrase was going out of vogue and sounding tired—becoming a cliché. Becoming a cliché is a rather more serious problem in that domain than simply being meaningless at times or frequently misused. The point was: the catchphrase had been overused, its gloss had worn off, it was not cutting it in the way it used to. For this domain, some other catchphrase was needed to do something like the work that the ‘new normal’ did since the 2007–2008 financial crisis, something that would sound encouraging for investors and businesses in a different way, and, at the same time, be properly circumspect amidst unpromising circumstances.

For the 2007–2008 financial crisis, it was a McKinsey strategy article (Davis 2009, see previous chapter) which influentially introduced the catchphrase to lay out encouraging prospects for investors and businesses. In fact, this article used the catchphrase for that context somewhat earlier than PIMCO’s El-Erian and Gross. In a similar vein, in March 2020, McKinsey’s Kevin Sneader and Shubham Singhal introduced the updated catchphrase ‘next normal’. This was done in a deliberate manner. They recalled the 2009 article written eleven years earlier, and observed:

It is increasingly clear our era will be defined by a fundamental schism: the period before COVID-19 and the new normal that will emerge in the post-viral era: the ‘next normal’. In this unprecedented new reality, we will witness a dramatic restructuring of the economic and social order in which business and society have traditionally operated. And in the near future, we will see the beginning of discussion and debate about what the next normal could entail and how sharply its contours will diverge from those that previously shaped our lives.

(Sneader and Singhal 2020[1]: 2)

Evidently, the ‘next normal’ was proposed simply as a phrase replacing ‘the new normal that will emerge’, both overlapping with and differentiated from the ‘new normal’. It had just the right balance of familiar upbeatness and necessary circumspection. In that sense the phrase did not do much more than El-Erian’s ‘new normal 2.0’, or, for that matter, WHO’s ‘new future’ or UN’s ‘recover better’. Where the 2007–2008 financial-crisis ‘new normal’, and earlier the 2003 dot-com-crash ‘new normal’, marked investment opportunities that had already arisen and could be capitalized, McKinsey’s Covid-19 ‘next normal’, like El-Erian’s Covid-19 ‘new normal 2.0’, put opportunities more tentatively in the indefinite future. The opportunities and optimism of the ‘new normal’ were deferred to the ‘next normal’. What Sneader and Singhal presented as portending the ‘next normal’ included, fairly obviously, observations such as the pandemic has given a decisive fillip to online work and digital facilities; automation is thereby more easily grounded; Big Government and higher public spending are back; consumer behaviour has changed and favours caution; and companies that plan ahead and bide their time will have advantages (be ‘resilient’). Such observations did not take a great deal of research and knowhow to produce, and indeed numerous features and reports in the media had already said as much, as did the UN report and El-Erian’s article cited earlier. Arguably, McKinsey’s edge as a consultancy firm has always depended upon being able to package such observations for maximum publicity. That is, their talent lies in being able to restate the obvious such that it seems fresh and becomes memorable and repeatable. Producing the apt catchphrase is a significant element in such packaging. Just as McKinsey had successfully associated the ‘new normal’ with the 2008–2009 financial crisis in investment and business circles (before El-Erian claimed it with such determination), the similar alliterative ring and assonance of the ‘next normal’ was McKinsey’s most significant contribution to analysing prospects amidst the pandemic. Naturally, hitting upon the apt catchphrase needed to be bolstered by frequent repetition, and in subsequent months these points, anchored to the catchphrase, were repeated whenever possible (Sneader and Singhal 2020[2] and 2020[3]).

The ‘next normal’ caught on quickly in corporate circles. Within months, numerous firms produced their own reports, headlining their very similar visions with the ‘next normal’: the professional services firm Deloitte, the facilities services firm ISS, the market research firms IRI and Mintel, the law firm Reed Smith, the technology conglomerate Cisco, and the multinational conglomerate Hitachi, to name but a few. These reports, converging on the ‘next normal’ catchphrase, became a way of announcing their continuing optimism in the face of adversity, of claiming their place in the business club, and of publicizing their intent for their clientele and investors. When UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) took up the phrase in July 2020 to label its ‘global campaign challenging our perception of normality’, the ‘next normal’ began to make inroads beyond the corporate domain in a markedly corporate spirit. The short video that was released by way of launching the campaign made an interesting move (UNESCO 2020[1]). (See Table 3.1.) It picked statements pertinent to the pre-pandemic context which were labelled ‘normal’, then juxtaposed those with statements pertaining to the pandemic context of lockdowns and restrictions labelled ‘not normal’, and left it to the viewer to consider what the ‘next normal’ should be. In every instance, the pre-pandemic ‘normal’ statement referred to an undesirable trend, the pandemic ‘not normal’ suggested an improvement for that trend, and the ‘next normal’ pointed towards continuation of the ‘not normal’ pandemic trend beyond the pandemic with the motto ‘Now is our chance to build a better normal’. Some of the statements in question were as follows:

The ‘next normal’ campaign presented a set of minimally stated propositions, therefore, of things-to-feel-cheerful-about-during-the-pandemic. Thus minimally stated, they seemed more like advertisement logos for tech companies, mobile operators, political agencies, and the like. They gelled perfectly with the many corporate ‘next-normal’ reports that appeared very soon after the McKinsey report.

Table 3.1 Examples of the pre-pandemic ‘normal’ and the pandemic-period ‘not normal’ from the UNESCO 2020 video

Normal (pre-pandemic)	Not normal (during the pandemic)
Air pollution causes 8.8 million early deaths a year.	During Covid-19, Himalayan peaks became visible for the first time in 30 years.
One child dies of pneumonia every 39 seconds, 43 years after the vaccine was found.	Coronavirus leads scientists and tech companies to open-source their patients.
One child out of 5 doesn’t go to school.	During Covid-19, mobile operators grant free online access to educational resources in Africa.
Thirty world heritage sites have been destroyed by wars in the last 20 years.	After lockdown started, 11 conflict-affected countries have declared ceasefires.
Source: UNESCO July 2020 https://en.unesco.org/news/unescos-next-normal-campaign

Work and education

In some areas associated with the catchphrase, its reiteration in the Covid-19 context appeared to mark a leap towards fulfilment or purification, a precipitate settling-in of the ‘new normal’ which was anticipated or had been emerging through a gradual process. In a way, the denotative weight of the ‘new normal’ for the pandemic appeared coterminous with the unarguable fulfilment of a ‘new normal’ in these areas. The most obvious of these had to do with the drive towards ‘flexible working’ in ‘digital workspaces’ discussed in the previous chapter.

When the Covid-19 outbreak appeared, the first and only preventive response was to impose lockdowns and social distancing measures while strategies for treating the infected were explored and research towards developing vaccinations initiated. Alongside policing of public spaces, minimizing contact between persons involved the closure or dramatic reduction of numbers in shared working spaces: offices, shops, classrooms, factories, warehouses, ports, etc. To keep economic activity and productive life alive, it was necessary to move as much of formal work online as possible. The technological infrastructure to enable such a move had become more advanced than at any other comparable juncture in the past. Indeed, even without such a crisis, moves towards ‘flexible working’ and ‘digital workspaces’ were energetically under way over the previous two decades, as noted earlier. That direction had been mooted as a ‘new normal’ for a decade already; a vast policy drive and infrastructural shift was already being implemented to maximize working-from-home across amenable employment sectors (since, at least, Georgetown University Law Centre 2009). In the most immediate sense, the ‘new normal’ of the pandemic was seen as a fulfilment of the long anticipated ‘new normal’ of working-from-home in digital workspaces. This seemed such a natural convergence of a prior sense of the catchphrase with its particular resonance in the Covid-19 context, that it was, in fact, the first direction from which the catchphrase was linked to the context. That occurred before the WHO declared the outbreak a pandemic, that is, when the epidemic was principally centred in China, a country where the catchphrase has had a slogan-like purchase.

In China, in fact, ‘flexible working’ and working from home had not been as forcefully pushed, with as much bright-eyed optimism, as in the USA, Western Europe, and other liberal capitalist countries. The rationale for making working from home the ‘new normal’ had rested, principally, in reducing investments while increasing production and profits in the private sector, and indeed in public-sector organizations which had come to be modelled like their private-sector counterparts. This rationale was powerfully propelled by the ‘doing more with less’ slogan raised during the 2007–2008 financial crisis in, particularly, North America and Western Europe, and persisted in bureaucratic and management circles thereafter. PR China’s response to that crisis, under the slogan ‘new normal’, had been focused less on cutting costs and more on strategic and focused investments. ‘Doing more with less’ was not a publicly declared and publicized impetus there—if anything, the spirit of the policy was simply doing more and scaling up—and, correspondingly, ‘flexible working’ did not seem such a wonderful idea or quite so imperative. However, PR China’s quick move towards lockdowns in January–February 2020 in hotspots for the contagion, naturally brought working from home firmly into the foreground and merged it with its own prevailing ‘new normal’ slogan.

On 11 February, the data-mining and consultancy firm iiMedia Research released figures for the growing use of online working resources in China amidst lockdowns: ‘during the Spring Festival of 2020, there are more than 300 million remote office workers in China, and the number of companies using teleworking exceeds 18 million’. However, the firm was careful about the long-term prospects:

iiMedia Consulting analysts believe that the penetration rate of remote office in China is relatively low, and there is a large developmental space in teleworking industry. Catalyzed by the epidemic, the demand for remote offices surged in the short term, and cloud office concept stocks have been trending strongly in the secondary market during the Spring Festival of 2020. However, the habits of remote office users in China have not yet been established. After the epidemic, more attention should be paid to cultivating user habits, ensuring information security, highlighting the advantages of collaborative office, and increasing user stickiness.

(iiMedia 2020)

English-language reports in Chinese newspapers were quick to declare the emergence of a ‘new normal’ from these figures, such as in the Global Times (GT 2020) and the China Daily (Ma Chi 2020). As lockdowns were announced in numerous countries around the world, the Covid-19 ‘new normal’ of working from home in China became a global necessity. A McKinsey article of 23 March offered lessons from China for implementing remote working in global businesses (Bick et al. 2020). Every significant government agency and commercial firm published guidance on working from home, mostly in the form of sector-specific ‘how-to’ pamphlets. News media carried hundreds of articles declaring that working from home was a necessary ‘new normal’ from which there would be no return. ‘Next normal’ reports of the sort cited above eyed the investment opportunities in working-from-home products and services. Books started appearing in a general ‘how-to’ tenor (starting with Mangia 2020). This was no longer a matter of strategizing how to make working from home a ‘new normal’ as it was prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, as in fact it had been for the previous couple of decades (see Chapter 2). This ‘new normal’ of working from home couldn’t be regarded as emerging or to be achieved. Caught in the larger ‘new normal’ that was the Covid-19 context itself, working from home had already become the ‘new normal’, an inseparable element of this larger Covid-19 ‘new normal’. Its pros and cons did not need to be considered and researched; rather, the pros had to be maximized and the cons minimized after the fact. The issue now was how to make it function adequately and for good.

A distinctive aspect of working from home amidst the pandemic related to education: that is, teaching and learning from home for students in schools and tertiary education institutions. Lockdowns meant that educational activity that occurred in built environments had to be moved expeditiously, insofar as possible, to digital environments: from offices, classrooms, lecture theatres, libraries, laboratories, sports grounds, campuses, etc. to their digital equivalents online. In-person exchanges had to move to technology-mediated exchanges. This proved to be a particularly anxiogenic move for schools (primary and secondary), where the provision for remote teaching and learning had not been pushed forcefully. It has generally been held that in the initial stages of education, developing interpersonal relationships is essential and even digital education resources should largely be delivered in a hands-on way. The Covid-19 ‘new normal’ of remote learning at school level seemed really quite new. Contributions to Doug Lemov ed. (2020) gave a helpful account of how teachers coped, with a beleaguered and compulsory optimism: ‘Since this New Normal began, we’ve witnessed plenty of challenges in the classroom […] but we have seen even more of a can-do attitude, a problem-solving embrace of situations outside our control’ (Lemov and Woolway 2020: 3–4). In any case, governments in various countries made decisive and perceivably risky moves to reopen schools as quickly as possible after the first spate of national lockdowns (eyeing the reopening of schools in the UK, Beaumont 2020 and Penna 2020 reported on the experience in France, Poland, Belgium, Germany, South Korea, Denmark, Israel, Kenya, China, Taiwan, Spain, and Italy). For the tertiary sector, especially universities, the experience of this ‘new normal’ was somewhat different. Here this situation seemed to bring to a culmination the ‘new normal’ of remote teaching and learning that had already been jogging along and gathering pace for a couple of decades. Though universities were also reopened soon after the schools in many countries, remote learning was regarded as permanently ensconced, at least to some degree, across the sector. And this was regarded as being more in line with a chronicle foretold than in a spirit of uncontrollable and temporary necessity.

The drive towards the organized delivery of higher education by digital means had started in the late 1990s, around the time digital workspaces were being constructed. The idea was to push for a convergence of the frontline of technological innovation and the frontline of knowledge dissemination. The ways in which digital technologies may be incorporated in, particularly, higher education were already reasonably defined in the Enhancing Education Through Technology Act of 2001 in the USA; its updated 2015 version gave an itemized list of ‘tools and practices’ which covers the current ground well:

(A) interactive learning resources that engage students in academic content; (B) access to online databases and other primary source documents; (C) the use of data, data analytics, and information to personalize learning and provide targeted supplementary instruction; (D) student collaboration with content experts and peers; (E) online and computer-based assessments; (F) digital content, adaptive, and simulation software or courseware; (G) online courses, online instruction, or digital learning platforms; (H) mobile and wireless technologies for learning in school and at home; (I) learning environments that allow for rich collaboration and communication; (J) authentic audiences for learning in a relevant, real world experience; (K) teacher participation in virtual professional communities of practice; (L) hybrid or blended learning, which occurs under direct instructor supervision at a school or other location away from home and, at least in part, through online delivery of instruction with some element of student control over time, place, path, or pace; and (M) access to online course opportunities for students in rural or remote areas. (Section 2403, Definitions)

Evidently, the thrust of these ‘practices and tools’ are to enable remote teaching and learning in increasing degrees and possibly to a complete extent. Over this period from 2001 to 2015, a slew of direct and indirectly relevant legislation in various countries facilitated the embedding of such tools and practices in, particularly, higher education. The advantages of these have been prolifically publicized: enhanced access to learning material (through open-access publishing, open-source codes, open training data, publicly accessible digital repositories, etc.); increasing student choices and independence; transparency of procedure; overcoming disadvantages due to location or means, or border restrictions; enabling new kinds of professional skills; accessing education while being employed; and reducing the carbon footprint of education institutions. The principal driver for the embedding of these tools and practices were, however, economic rather than progressive considerations. Those considerations were woven through the catchphrase.

Roughly from the 1940s to the 1990s, in most countries the state was the main regulator of the higher education sector and often the main source of funding, with private business interests, where active, playing a relatively covert or seemingly altruistic part. Within education delivery, the intervention of business interests was not considered de rigueur. A notion of ‘academic autonomy’ seemed to guard against the interference of those interests, guaranteed in law, ergo by the state as protector of public interests. But that was always questionable: who is to say that the state would not choose to promote business rather than public interests, or the private desires of the powerful few rather than of the inclusive all? Nevertheless, at least in principle, business interests were kept at arm’s length. The process of embedding technological tools and practices in higher education, which enabled steps from largely on-site or contact-based learning towards increasing degrees of remote and flexible learning, were effectively a gradual reduction of the state’s public-interest role and a constant expansion of the profit-making role of businesses with the state’s support. This was because the technological tools and practices were produced, disseminated, and operated very largely by private-sector companies. Such business-driven remote-learning tools and practices were put in place energetically on two grounds. On the one hand, government spending on education could be reduced by rationalizing the use of built infrastructures, on-site employees, and measured working time. On the other hand, universities could at the same time become arenas for profitable business activity, with students as consumers of universities’ services and universities as consumers for technology services. Technologically facilitated higher education could, then, from this perspective, be regarded as a mechanism for sieving a combination of students’ monies and such direct public monies as universities continued to receive for business to prosper. Meanwhile, universities could also produce low-cost research for technological innovation for businesses to capitalize on. Indeed, early reflections on the advent of digital tools and practices and remote learning in higher education were troubled by the entry of private business interests in what had been considered a protected public-interest sphere. David Noble (1998: 118), contemplating the advent of ‘private vendors of instructional hardware, software, and content looking for subsidized product development and a potentially lucrative market for their wares’, observed that ‘campus commercialization […] has now shifted to the core instructional function, the heart and soul of academia’.

Through the following two decades technologically facilitated remote learning in universities veered between transforming itself into a ‘new normal’ and becoming caught up in a larger ‘new normal’ with a constant consolidation of growing business interests. Through this period, to begin with, ‘blended learning’ became an inner-circle catchphrase. This referred to a mixture of contact (face-to-face) and remote (through online means) learning, or, more precisely, the gradual reduction of contact learning in favour of a gradual increase in remote learning. Numerous academic papers, reports, and guidebooks appeared in a steady stream through the 2000s prophesying, and heartily embracing, a ‘new normal’ of education, and before long it was considered as having become a ‘new normal’. As a case in point, Charles Dziuban, Patsy Moscal, Anders Norberg, and their colleagues at the University of Central Florida, produced a series of reports and papers on blended learning starting from 2004 (Dziuban et al. 2004), and were firmly able to declare that it has become the ‘new normal’ by 2018 (Dziuban et al. 2018)—a ‘new normal’ of education. After the 2007–2009 financial crisis, the larger ‘new normal’ of cuts in public funding interestingly gelled with that direction: the ‘new normal’ of education merged into education in this ‘new normal’. In the previous chapter, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s (2010) enthusiastic call for ‘doing more with less’ in education in the ‘new normal’ was quoted; shortly before that the US Department of Education (2010) had released a paper with advice on how ‘policymakers, educators, and other stakeholders [can] work together to utilize “The New Normal” to improve student learning and accelerate reform’. The only substantive advice there had to do with ‘smart use of technology’ which would allow ‘each person to be more successful by reducing wasted time, energy, and money’. The financial logic of this kind of education policy in the ‘new normal’ caused some unease, but not much (e.g. Bruininks et al. 2010; Goldstein et al. 2011). From around 2012 onwards, the new buzzword, or buzz-acronym, was MOOCs (massive open online courses): online platforms delivering, initially, courses and, later, whole degree programmes for contact-free remote learning. That effectively moved from a blended to a ‘pure’ model, with an air of preferring pure malt to blended Scotch whisky. Some of these platforms were set up by private firms, some by universities (like Coursera, EdX, FutureLearn), where the latter had become increasingly dependent upon being entrepreneurial as state support dwindled. Numerous news media and education-service-provider firms published reports on MOOCs as opening up another ‘new normal’ of education. By 2019, almost all universities globally had in-house blended learning tools and practices in place, and many had partnered in or set up their own platforms to make some of their offerings fully online.

When the Covid-19 outbreak appeared in 2020, it seemed to be but a final push for remote learning in universities as a ‘new normal’ of education merging into the needs of education in this larger ‘new normal’. It was considered that universities can only be resilient if they can capitalize on remote learning, and such resilience is the future of universities as a sector. That, at any rate, was the foregone conclusion in more considered academic and policy publications on this ‘new normal’ education in general (such as Xin Xie et al. 2020; Pacheco 2020; d’Orville 2020; Quilter-Pinner and Ambrose 2020; World Bank 2020) and the innumerable such publications about higher education in specific disciplines and regions. The gist of such publications was that the Covid-19 ‘new normal’ had made the remote-learning ‘new normal’ a fait accompli, and all that remained was for a few little creases to be smoothed out: such as, digital divides among students, variable infrastructure in regions and institutions, perceived alienation in the learning process, and resistant attitudes among some stakeholders. Relatively little attention was given to what had been the main driver of remote learning throughout: the embedding of private interests working through technology providers in the education process. But the situation in this regard could be gauged in a tangential way. The largest coordinated response for education to the Covid-19 context was launched by UNESCO in March 2020, the Global Education Coalition, to, mainly: ‘Help countries in mobilizing resources and implementing innovative and context-appropriate solutions to provide education remotely, leveraging hi-tech, low-tech and no-tech approaches’ (UNESCO 2020[2]). The coalition consisted of 140 partners from ‘international organizations, civil society and the private sector’. The partner listings were instructive (UNESCO 2020[3]). The only way in which governments featured there was through transnational organizations which act as global ‘third sector’ bodies (promoting ‘social enterprise’ and private–public partnerships), usually receiving governmental contributions. The majority were private-sector firms and foundations (presenting public-spirited agendas of generating benefits-with-profits). Evidently, the Covid-19 ‘new normal’ had enabled a consolidation of business interests as the bedrock of education globally, with states taking well-mediated back seats. At the same time, there was growing concern that sustained dependence upon, ultimately, privately sourced online education provision was steadily exacerbating digital divides, in both affluent and less affluent countries (UNICEF and ITU 2020; Shackleton and Mann 2021; Coleman 2021).

Polarized politics

There was obviously a deep irony in the various modes of denoting the Covid-19 social condition as the ‘new normal’. At the heart of the catchphrase was a familiar medical counterpoint: between medical normality (good health) and pathology (disease). The next chapter considers this and other counterpoints in some detail. No particular medical knowledge was needed, however, for this counterpoint to play in usage of the catchphrase. All sorts of consequences of the contagion could be seen as a ‘new normal’: fear of infection, constraints in everyday life and work, dramatic policy moves, economic hardships, and even the continuing incidence of the disease. But all that was on the understanding that the pathology itself, the infection-ridden bodies, the real encounter with morbidities and mortalities, could not be understood as normal under any kind of circumstance. By definition, the pathology itself is not normal, though all the ways of reckoning with and addressing it may be normalized. The pathology that was the pandemic was the absolutely unnegotiable core in counterpoint to which all kinds of ‘new normal’ situations may be understood as such.

Where, prior to the pandemic, the catchphrase was applied bitterly to some areas of social injustice and dysfunction, that now seemed inappropriate even as a despairing rhetorical ploy. The year before, as noted in the previous chapter, Isabel Ortiz and Matthew Cummins (2019) had declared austerity as a ‘new normal’ with a global overview. The idea was that policies around the world (reports on 161 countries were surveyed) of cutting support for public services and privatizing them, and deregulating commercial activity, with consequent exacerbation of social inequality and precarity had become so pervasive and persistent since the 2007–2008 financial crisis that they had ceased to trouble. Such policies and their consequences had become normalized, a ‘new normal’. In fact, so widespread had austerity measures become that they were accepted even by those who suffered their deleterious consequences, and were taken simply as the-way-things-are. As morbidities and mortalities from the pandemic grew inexorably, however, it now appeared that austerity was an aspect of the pathology itself. In a way, austerity has emerged from a pervasive and imperceptible spread, normalized, to combining with the infectious virus and becoming a joint cause of explosive morbidities and mortalities—therefore (re)pathologized. Instead of austerity as ‘new normal’ and Covid-19 as disease, now Covid-19+austerity seemed to be the disease. As a synecdoche for austerity at large, the struggles of public health services, stripped bare by cutbacks and the interference of profit-making practices, against the pandemic could not but trouble now. Their struggles were felt particularly by those in financially straitened circumstances, since the latter rely predominantly on public health provision. Thus, in a single equation, the pandemic magnified the effects of austerity and sharp inequalities in terms of morbidity and mortality figures. Public health officials, medical bodies and associations, epidemiologists and health-policymakers pointed to the obvious relationship between austerity and the deadliness of the disease more or less unanimously. Media reportage on the issue proliferated. Broad-based studies of the relationship between public health provision, inequality, and the effects of the virus presented very similar patterns across regions and countries (e.g. Shadmi et al. 2020 reporting on thirteen countries in different continents; Bambra et al. 2020 drawing upon data for USA, UK, and other high-income countries; a Dialogues in Human Geography special issue with commentaries from forty-two contributors from different countries, introduced in Rose-Redwood et al. 2020). If the ‘new normal’ came up here at all, it was with a shudder at the prospect of an enhanced version of the pre-pandemic ‘new normal’ of austerity:

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a global crisis in which the ‘normal’ conditions and structures of societies have been upended. Much of the rhetoric […] is about returning to ‘normality’, but it is clear that whatever happens we will be entering a ‘new normal’, whether that be altered social practices, truncated mobility, reconfigured labor relations, increased precarity, deepened inequalities, or more cooperative, communal, caring arrangements. There are also increasing concerns that governmental attempts to deal with the pandemic without further disrupting the market may ultimately lead to the emergence of a new neoliberal authoritarianism.

(Rose-Redwood et al. 2020 104)

When the IMF seemed to make its pandemic lending and recovery packages conditional on the worn privatization and deregulation model, 308 organizations from around the world signed an open letter demanding that those conditions be removed in October 2020 (Eurodad 2020): ‘Ahead of the 2020 IMF Annual Meetings, we call on the IMF to turn away from the mistakes of the past and finally close the dark chapter on IMF-conditioned austerity for good’. The intergovernmental United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s Trade and Development Report 2020 (UNCTAD 2020) unambiguously denounced a ‘lost decade’ of fiscal austerity and corrosive inequality. It was, in fact, extraordinarily forthright about the disastrous consequences of global austerity policies since the 2007–2008 financial crisis, and the need to withdraw them after the pandemic. But even amidst these confirmations of the pathological nature of austerity, an upgraded version of austerity as the imminent ‘new normal’ featured implicitly in government policy documents, and offered hope for the ‘next normal’ in various corporate strategy reports.

Movements which were more optimistically declared ‘new normal’ prior to the pandemic also developed a more troubled association with the catchphrase, or, to put that another way, troubled the catchphrase. In relation to these, the catchphrase seemed to flicker between optimistic and pessimistic cadences or become dissociated from its referents. The rousing announcement, ‘Protest is the New Normal’, with which Le Monde diplomatique had greeted the new year is a case in point. The kind of crowd protests in various countries this referred to—against austerity measures, neoliberal policies, inequality and discrimination, corruption and authoritarian governments, and climate change—hit a wall as lockdowns and restrictions were implemented following the outbreak (see Gupta et al. 2020: Ch. 5). The very authorities that these were directed against found an unquestionable reason to shut them down in February and March, with only weak resistance. Within a month, such crowd protests started again, either continuing after an imposed hiatus (e.g. Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile, Algeria, and Iraq) or picking up long-drawn grievances with renewed impetus (e.g. Nigeria, Cameroon, Belarus, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Mexico, and Thailand). Naturally, all crowd protests now went against the grain of measures to contain the spread of the contagion. The very elemental form of protesting as a crowd in a public space was out of synch with the ‘new normal’ that was the Covid-19 context. The reappearance of such crowds after being precipitately stopped with the first round of lockdowns was riven with new anxieties.

The most explosive impetus to crowd protests of this period indubitably came from the USA, following the public murder of George Floyd, an African American man, by a White police officer in Minneapolis on 26 May. This was a spark that reignited a powerful anti-racism protest, principally under the banner of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement (and slogan), which assumed unprecedented scales across the USA, and spread to the UK, Brazil, Germany, and other countries. BLM had been formed after the acquittal in 2013 of the man who had shot Trayvon Martin (February 2012) in Sanford FL, and following the regular occurrence of such killings. Despite increasingly desperate protests since, African Americans dying at the hands of the police had continued with grinding regularity. With the victory of Donald Trump in the presidential elections of 2016, white-supremacist nationalist alignments received a decisive fillip. Confrontations between such groups and antifascist formations (notably in Charlottesville VA in August 2017) became repeated occurrences thereafter. The George Floyd BLM protests were a sustained outburst of the gradually growing rage at racial injustice in the USA and elsewhere. However, in the context of the pandemic, such protests could no longer be dubbed as expressing or auguring an optimistic ‘new normal’. Rather, racial injustice, in line with austerity-induced inequality, could now only be regarded as a social pathology of which these despairing protests were a consequence and symptom. As with austerity and inequality, in fact, the Covid-19 contagion seemed to reflect racial schisms, as if the schism itself magnified the contagion and was contributing to the pathology. In the USA and UK particularly, numerous research papers and reports noted the heightened effect of the contagion on particularly Black and ethnic minority constituencies (such as Millett et al. 2020; Pareek et al. 2020; Kirby 2020; Hacque et al. 2020). In the USA and UK, government strategies were developed to address this unevenness (CDC USA 2020; Race Disparity Unit UK 2020). Those observations gelled with the global picture of higher Covid-19 deaths among vulnerable populations, including ‘older adults, people living in densely populated areas, people with lower socioeconomic status, migrants and minorities’ (Shadmi et al. 2020:1). The magnification of Covid-19 morbidity and mortality along the lines of racial inequality in the USA, UK, and elsewhere merged with the immediate causes of the BLM protests: racial injustice appeared now to be not just an endemic pathology but one assuming pandemic proportions in synch with the Covid-19 contagion itself. The only optimistic ‘new normal’ that could be mentioned here seemed to lie in the distant future. Former US president Barack Obama evoked it three days after Floyd’s death in an Instagram post:

It will fall mainly on the officials of Minnesota to ensure that the circumstances surrounding George Floyd’s death are investigated thoroughly and that justice is ultimately done. But it falls on all of us, regardless of our race or station – including the majority of men and women in law enforcement who take pride in doing their tough job the right way, every day – to work together to create a ‘new normal’ in which the legacy of bigotry and unequal treatment no longer infects our institutions or our hearts.

(Quoted in Danner 2020)

The use of the word ‘infects’ was of its time. Apart from Obama’s statements, the catchphrase understandably did not come up in this connection. But other social forces which had, for a while, been associated with the catchphrase, were beginning to congeal alongside and against such protests: exclusionary nationalist forces.

Those had also manifested themselves in the form of crowd protests, but by associating themselves with protests against the governments’ Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions. Anti-lockdown demonstrations appeared in spates in, among other countries, Israel, Serbia, Germany, the UK, Ireland, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Argentina, Australia and, particularly, the USA. In the main, their initial appearance had little to do with exclusionary nationalist alignments. These were, in some measure, inevitable surges from below. Covid-19 restrictions exacerbated long records of austerity policies and growing inequality, with the effects being felt particularly adversely among small businesses and those in straitened circumstances. Not only did the contagion have a markedly virulent effect on the latter, the lockdowns and restrictions themselves put small businesses at risk, unemployment went up sharply, and the marginalized seemed to become more disposable than ever. Understandably, protests against long-term austerity policies, corruption, and growing inequality were accentuated by the Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions, and often took issue with the latter. But these were different from the exclusionary nationalist kind of crowd protest against lockdowns and restrictions, which were less about their consequences and more about claiming the prerogative to speak for the nation. The focal point of such protests was in the USA and Western Europe, and they seemed to form an ideological front against the BLM and anti-austerity protests. Typically, along with strident exclusionary nationalism, these fostered absurd conspiracy theories and took political positions now familiarly dubbed ‘rightwing populist’. Those included notions such as that the pandemic was a fiction put out by a shrouded global elite to consolidate its murky control of populations and wealth, and vaccinations were a means of achieving such consolidation of power. Some popular nationalist leaders (particularly Donald Trump in the USA and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil) were heroically pitted against that deeply embedded global elite: the latter were promoting multiculturalism, movements of peoples, and globalization where the call of the moment was for defending national sovereignty and purity (understood in ethnic and racial terms) and economic protectionism. These notions coalesced into a distinctive set of mass demonstrations against Covid-19 restrictions and lockdowns. The latter provided the superficial reason to piggyback on calls for defining nationality in dominant ethnic terms, dismantling liberal institutions, disinvesting from transnational commitments, and championing authoritarian nationalist leaders.

Crowd protests in the Covid-19 context, then, appeared sharply polarized between inclusive and exclusive, marginalized and dominant, representative democratic and majoritarian democratic, deliberative and authoritarian, and transnationalist and nationalist political prerogatives. A concomitant of polarization was that in some respects the boundaries between the polarities were blurred, or convictions on one side seemed like mirror images of the other at times. For instance, reductive concepts of race and ethnicity were, in fact, propounded on all sides; an entrenched global elite was discerned as the ultimate adversary on all sides; and articles of faith were preferred over reasonable arguments at times on all sides. Also, somehow the rationales of austerity policies—widely understood as derived from global neoliberal and technocratic capitalism—played an ambiguous part on all sides. Austerity policies appeared to be, at the same time, props for majoritarian nationalist regimes and the bulwark of a democratic transnational order.

This polarization was, obviously, not of the Covid-19 context. It had been exacerbating worldwide for a considerable period, at different levels across numerous political territories. The pandemic had merely materialized this effervescent trend, again. In fact, at various stages the key factors that fed into such polarization had been noted, explored, and declared, with growing unease, as dangerous ‘new normals’.

Of particular moment in that polarization was the concerted global rise of exclusionary nationalism and ‘right-wing populism’ of the sort just outlined, mainly within the decade after 2010. That meant the rise of aggressively nationalist parties and leaders in state politics, aligned with or giving coherence to conservative majoritarian forces, hostile to transnational and national liberal arrangements and even more so to what remained of socialist subscriptions therein. This seemed new, at any rate, within states with formally democratic processes, that is, with arrangements for multiparty elections with universal suffrage to appoint governments, alongside institutions designed to protect minorities and maintain parity between different interest groups. The tendency of these nationalist parties and leaders to undermine formally democratic institutions within and across states presaged a momentous and widespread ideological conflict. There was, thus, a significant rightward turn in politics across EU member states, threatening the integrity of the transnational formation itself (see Wodak et al. 2013; Lazaridis and Campani, eds. 2017; Gupta and Virdee, eds. 2019; Massetti et al. 2020). In the four years preceding the Covid-19 outbreak, various elections seemed to confirm the powerful emergence of exclusionary nationalism against the grain of formal democratic principles as a global trend. Those included, notably, Trump’s 2016 election as president in the USA, Bolsonaro’s in 2018 as president in Brazil, Modi’s as prime minister for a second term in India in 2019, Johnson’s as prime minister in 2019 promising a culmination to UK’s secession from the EU, and Erdoğan’s as president of Turkey in 2019 following the 2017 constitutional reform which established a presidential system there. A shift in the normality of mainstream politics in formal democracies was, unsurprisingly, mooted—in fact, a ‘new normal’. Since what seemed new was the growing popularity of right-wing forces among electorates in formal democracies, the ‘normalization’ of those worldviews where they had previously been eschewed or marginalized was much discussed in academic and policy circles. These studies covered a range from the larger structures of ideological alignment to the minutiae of everyday communications (e.g. Wodak 2015; Sa’adah 2017; Schuhmann 2018; Freeden 2019; the special issue of Social Semiotics, Krzyżanowski, ed. 2020). The pandemic ‘new normal’ seemed to challenge and, because of that, raise the stakes of the normalization of right-wing populism. On the one hand, aggressively nationalist parties and leaders often did an indifferent job of coming to grips with the pandemic (Katsampekis and Stavrakakis, eds. 2020); on the other hand, right-wing populist formations managed to become strongly associated with anti-lockdown/restrictions protests (what Vieten 2020 called ‘anti-hygiene mobilization’), to the extent of using that as a front against anti-austerity and inequality protests. With the pandemic ‘new normal’ squarely in view, the ‘new normal’ of right-wing populism seemed set to mould a larger ‘new normal’ in transnational arrangements themselves—most cogently, in the most formalized transnational formation of the time, the EU:

[Even] after emerging strengthened from the political, economic and fiscal threats of the Covid-19 pandemic, the EU is facing more fundamental challenges in the coming decade. The rise of populism in Europe (and elsewhere), the growing contestation of expertise and the demise of liberal trade all imply that the EU has to adapt to a new normal. These developments are linked, and they have in common the erosion of the system of rules and norms on which the EU has based not only its actions, but indeed its legitimacy.

(Christiansen 2020: 23)

At least three senses of the catchphrase seemed to converge in such anxious observations.

Folded in within the ‘new normal’ of right-wing populism and of sharply polarized politics, was the wider ‘new normal’ of the digital mediascape. There were four main developments to reckon with here. First, the internet had gradually become the main source of news and social commentary for consumers, shouldering (gradually shouldering aside) older mainstream print and broadcast channels. Now mainstream channels had to vie for attention with each other and with a range of alternative and variously unregulated news sources. In this relatively inexpensive environment, instead of news providers presenting a consolidated set of reportage and commentary, consumers could cherry pick or scan offerings from a range of sources according to their interests. Second, technological capacities had been developed by, in the main, internet service providers to customize and target news according to the pre-existing interests of segments of consumers (or even individual consumers). This meant that internet service providers (and third parties with suitable access to the technology) could feed consumers only that which complied with their pre-existing interests. Consumers could thus be exposed only to news and commentary which bolstered their biases and prejudices. Third, internet service providers also developed capacities which allowed consumers to form social networks according to their pre-existing interests and share information easily with each other. Thus, consumers could easily dispose themselves into well-connected segments with shared interests and attitudes. They could form, so to speak, bubbles of confirmatory—and mutually confirming—consumption. Fourth, the presence of unregulated and alternative news sources, as well as of third parties (like internet service providers themselves), allowed such a mediascape to become a system for variously manipulating consumers. A much-discussed kind of manipulation has been the deliberate dissemination of disinformation or ‘fake news’, which is fed to those who are inclined to absorb it and to share it in their bubbles of like-minded segments. Technological tools to misleadingly enhance the appearance of consumer response to reportage and commentary (such as, trolling using bots) play a tractable part in manipulation.

The gradual grounding of this mediascape has been understood, prolifically in reportage and scholarship over the previous two decades, as opening up a ‘new normal’ with wide-ranging effects. This digital media system is regarded as having transformed commercial and political campaigning, enhanced the organization and effectiveness of protests (including crowd protests), disrupted democratic practices and procedures (like elections), restructured interpersonal and group interactions at all levels, and, particularly importantly, reshaped modes of developing social awareness and worldviews—often captured by the phrase ‘post-truth era/age’. At times, this digital mediascape has in itself been considered responsible for the polarized politics described here. Polarization, it is often argued, is corollary to forming self-confirmatory bubbles of consumption which are cut off from each other. Of the polarities, the right-wing populist agencies are regarded as being particularly savvy in using digital manipulation tools, and the consumers of right-wing populism especially vulnerable to being manipulated and buying into outlandish conspiracy theories. Insofar as the latter played amidst protests against lockdown and restrictions during the pandemic, observers of the digital mediascape usually confirmed these much discussed trends (see, for instance, Sturm and Albrecht 2020; Duplaga 2020; Shahsavari et al. 2020; Vieten 2020).

In the upper echelons of politics, as 2020 waned, the most hyped event was the US presidential elections in November. Incumbent Republican Party candidate Donald Trump had associated himself firmly with anti-lockdown and anti-restriction positions since the Covid-19 outbreak, and with the least palatable aspects of right-wing populism throughout his tenure. He was regarded as a factory of ‘fake news’ while he denounced all critical reportage of being such. A personality cult had formed around him peopled by conspiracy theorists and exclusionary nationalists. His much-trumpeted economic policies had widened inequalities and weakened public support systems and, in any case, their seeming benefits had crumbled during the pandemic. Contender Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden, who had appeared as a compromise at the expense of more progressive options, had all progressive and establishment expectations antithetical to Trump pinned on him. The competing candidates appeared to embody the political polarizations of the time. The flickering shades of the catchphrase ‘new normal’ played in the interstices of their corrosive campaign, amidst the constantly spiralling mortality and morbidity rates in the USA, and came with an ironic ring. The ‘new normal’ that was the Covid-19 context in the USA had itself split along party lines or candidate lines, in terms of racial fissures, the fault-line of states that are controlled by the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, and the visible split of who wears face coverings and who does not. In some instances, a hopeful future ‘new normal’ was prophesied as possible from the ravages of the Covid-10 ‘new normal’, naturally from the Democratic Party side. Having declared one of the strictest lockdowns in the country, the Governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, for instance, observed in April:

Let’s say that where we‘re going it’s not a reopening, in that we are going to reopen what was. We are going to a different place, and we should go to a different place, and we should go to a better place. If we don‘t learn the lessons from this situation, then all of this will have been in vain. […] So we’re going to a different place, which is a new normal. We talk about the new normal. We’ve been talking about the new normal for years. We are going to have a new normal in public health. By the way, the way we have a new normal in an environment, the new normal in economics, a new normal in civil rights, a new normal and social justice, right? This is the way of the world now.

(quoted in Arter 2020)

Cuomo’s was a studiedly deliberate use of the catchphrase. In fact, more than using it Cuomo reflected upon its current denotative thrust and it manifold past associations as a catchphrase. He seemed to embrace what it stood for at the time, signifying a context of lockdowns and restrictions. But he did so with an ironical awareness of its overused catchphraseness. At the same time he extended its multiple resonances to give his message an optimistic turn. That is to say, he used the phrase while talking about how the phrase has been used; he owned it and yet he put the onus of owning it more on ‘the way the world is now’ than on himself.

With regard to the presidential candidates themselves, the phrase seemed even more awkwardly placed. In July, a Wall Street Journal article observed:

In the age of coronavirus there is a lot of talk of a ‘new normal’ emerging. Yet in the presidential campaign of 2020, both President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden actually are promising a return to an old normal – albeit in dramatically different, almost diametrically opposed, ways.

(Seib 2020)

Trump, the article said, was campaigning for a return to normality when ‘the nation’s Founding Fathers were honored as visionaries rather than villains’ and those anti-racism and anti-austerity protests had not tarnished their vision. Biden was looking for a return to the normality before Trump’s presidency, but with some signs of a forward-looking agenda building upon Obama’s legacy. Apropos of the pandemic, Trump had already rejected the phrase in favour of a premature ‘Opening Up America Again’ campaign to end the first lockdown, as an article in the conservative New Republic magazine observed (Smith 2020). Insofar as the ambiguities of Biden’s backward/forward looking campaign went, those too were noted with the catchphrase in mind in an essay in the libertarian Reason magazine in February, before the pandemic had squarely hit New York:

Biden is running a markedly conservative campaign in the literal sense of the word: He wants to go back, to conserve what we had under Obama. The contrast is stark with the socialists and progressives otherwise dominating the Democratic hold. What if, the Biden campaign seductively asks, we could simply pretend the 45th presidency never happened? The idea of a ‘return to normalcy’ has worked before. Warren G. Harding ran for president under that banner exactly a century ago.

(Mangu-Ward 2020)

The essay went on to argue, however, that ‘when it comes to politics, normal is terrible’, and Biden’s promise to return to normalcy à la Harding may fare no better than it did in Harding’s tenure.

As it happened, the Biden campaign stayed well away from referring to a ‘normal’—whether ‘new’, ‘next’, or to ‘return to’. Instead, it chose a slogan which accurately reflected the forward-looking conservatism that was evident: the similarly alliterative ‘build back better’. Biden’s 9 July speech laying out an economic recovery plan had it labelled as ‘build back better’ (see Goldmacher and Tankersley 2020), and it became one of his campaign slogans thereafter, alongside ‘battle for the soul of the nation’. ‘Build back better’ had exactly the conservative thrust of building back with a little concession to looking forward. It had the staid and yet upbeat establishment conservatism that appeared in the UN’s ‘recover better’. Indeed ‘build back better’ proved to be an apt slogan for Conservative Prime Minister Johnson in the UK too, and was tagged to his economic recovery plans from August. An article in the British newspaper The Independent in November wondered who had touted the slogan first, Biden or Johnson, and unsurprisingly settled for Johnson (Forrest 2020). In synch with that, the slogan was also taken up in Britain by a coalition of Third Sector organizations in a spirit of charitable liberalism, including, among others, Green New Deal UK, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Quakers in Britain, and New Economics Foundation. The slogan itself had a chequered past, recalling Bill Clinton’s aid package after the Haiti earthquake in 2009, and the UN’s Disaster Risk Reduction framework of 2015 (see UNISDR 2017). But that’s a different story from the one followed here. In any case, the slogan contributed to Biden’s victory in the presidential elections at the end of 2020; which is to say, Trump lost the elections as gracelessly as possible.

A conceptual shift

Even as the use of the catchphrase ‘new normal’ reached an unprecedented frequency of usage in referring to the Covid-19 context, its glib deployment began to flounder in 2020. In some respects, while continuously denoting the pandemic condition, it seemed to reach a kind of self-fulfilment or culmination of applicability (with regard to work and education); in others, it appeared to have run its course of catchiness (business and investment); and in yet others, it flickered indecisively and gratingly between optimism and pessimism (in polarized protests); and further, it was considered as having become ironic and redundant (mainstream politics). Nevertheless, the catchphrase continued to carry all the accrued and complex resonances it had acquired through its career from 2001, which fed into its more nuanced or interrogative uses in 2020. When alternatives or replacements were taken up—from ‘next normal’ to ‘build back better’—those were nevertheless threaded through the received associations of the ‘new normal’.

The history of the catchphrase, woven through contemporary times, says much about how catchphrases work amidst social ideas and forces. The fluid semiotics of the catchphrase reflect the structures and processes of social systems. Through the in-process relationship between semiotics and systems, a general conceptual shift of some importance may be discerned via the catchphrase ‘new normal’. Underpinning the catchphrase is a well-established concept of considerable complexity, to do with ‘normality’ or ‘the normal’. It is a concept of critical importance across a wide range of discourses, powerfully centred in various areas of contemporary intellection and practice, and indeed a fulcrum of modern knowledge formation. The sustained usage and wide reach of the ‘new normal’ over two decades bear upon the idea of the ‘normal’ itself. The next chapter explores what the rich connotations of the catchphrase ‘new normal’ imply for the seminal concept of normality.