Despite all the money in politics, a skilled, educated reader is a very powerful thing. Those able to influence policy with their money spend billions of dollars putting words in front of readers, words designed to manipulate the way we think about issues. And yet skilled readers who understand rhetoric can pull apart manipulative words and images, exposing them for the propaganda that they are. One manipulative technique we should be paying more attention to is the rhetorical definition of normal.
In academia, the politics of normal is alive and well. One can take a class in '20th century American Literature,' and one can take a class in '20th century feminist American literature.' The designation 'feminist' added to the subject matter 'American literature' is doing something very important here. By modifying the baseline 'American literature,' 'feminist American literature' reads like a special subset of American literature. In fact, when we title courses this way, this is exactly what we mean. What we perhaps don't mean to do, however, is to define the normal--'American literature'--with an implicit assumption about what constitutes 'American literature' but not 'feminist American literature.' Put simply, you might expect to read authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, T.S. Eliot, etc. in a '20th century American literature' course; you might even expect to read female authors, like Toni Morrison or Joyce Carol Oates, in such a course. But you won't expect this course to have anything to do with 'feminist literature,' even if the American 20th century featured landmark developments in women's rights, as well as an abundance of feminist literatures. The designation of 'feminist' as a special subset of the normal '20th century American literature' makes the implicit assumption that feminist literature is not part of the 20th century American 'normal,' when in fact it very much was. This might seem like a small, even nit-picky detail; but this detail fundamentally changes the expectations we have about what constitutes 'normal' and what is an 'additional' or 'special' category in relation to normal.
A second and more overtly political example of the rhetorical definition of normalcy is the discourse of 'class warfare.' When we invoke 'class warfare' in contemporary American politics, we mean to suggest that those who are in the poorer classes of American society are agitating with jealousy and scorn to bring the rich back to earth. Thus, when a celebrity billionaire complains that he feels persecuted by those who are jealous of his wealth, the plea is to stop the 'class warfare.' The reason such a plea is so effective is that it rhetorically constructs normalcy as the rich already having justly earned their money and the poor already having failed to do so for themselves. The rhetoric of class warfare depicts a scenario in which everybody started from the same line, and those losing the race are just sore losers. If we look at it from this standpoint of normalcy, the poor complaining about what the rich have does indeed look like an act of aggression; hence, 'class warfare.' Looking at it another way, however, we might see redistributive policies that the rich lobby for and that benefit the rich as acts of 'class warfare,' too. If we rhetorically redefine the normal as a competitive market system in which those who already have an advantage work effectively to manipulate that system to solidify further advantage at the expense of the poor, this, too, looks like 'class warfare.' A tax policy that redistributes wealth from the poor to the rich--like mortgage tax deductions and the carried interest loophole--might also look like class warfare. But if you use rhetoric to set the status of 'normal' at a point in the political process AFTER which all of this kind of policy manipulation has happened, then 'class warfare' becomes the poor's aggression, rather than reaction. A similar resetting of normalcy is at work in discussions of who gets 'government welfare,' even if a vast majority of government spending is, via the tax code and via subsidies for large industries and corporations, spent on the rich, not the poor.
A third and final example of resetting the normal is to do with how we think about the 'free market' itself. The current debate over the minimum wage is good place to start with this example. Opponents of minimum wage increases--or of the minimum wage itself--argue that the 'free market' isn't setting the wage increase, therefore such an increase would be a regulatory and 'artificial' imposition on the 'free market.' By defining the 'free market' BEFORE minimum wage adjustments or IN RELATION TO workers' wages as the normal, critics of minimum wage increases can make it seem like anything above this normal is manipulation. But by defining the 'free market' this way, these people are simply aligning market manipulation policies that they like as 'free,' and policies they don't like as 'artificial' interventions into the 'free market.' Of course, the 'free market' is subject to countless manipulations, from tariffs to interest rates (and other kinds of currency manipulations) to government subsidies to governments outright banning some enterprises while awarding government business directly to others (as in New Jersey, whose government is shutting down Tesla sales operations in that state). What we know rhetorically as the 'free market' is really not free, unregulated, or unmanipulated at all. What one person sees as 'artificial' regulation and what another sees as a product of the 'free' market can change entirely depending on how we set and argue for the definitions of 'artificial' and 'free.' So again, by setting 'normal' AFTER the manipulations that give employers leverage over employee wages--which have remained stagnant for decades now, even as the US economy has continued to grow over this time--those with personal and ideological interests in keeping wages low can claim that the minimum wage increase is an 'artificial' act that violates normalcy.
As you can see, then, so much of our political discourse is very crucially affected by how and where we use rhetoric to establish normalcy standards that favor one side over another. Another way to envision how this works in everyday life would be to have a tug-o'-war match in which one side has to pull 3 feet to the other's 7, while the judges are working under the assumption that the distance is 5 to 5. Better reading and rhetorical awareness enables us to judge more accurately in an environment in which we're constantly manipulated to think that there are no ideological advantages, only 'facts.'
