Jedediah Purdy, law professor and author of a chapter in Law for the New Economy: Sustainable, Just, and Democratic, (Melissa K. Scanlan ed., May 2017), takes aim at what he terms “crisis-of-democracy literature” in his review of five books typical of the burgeoning genre. These titles posit the Trump presidency as an unprecedented threat to the “norms” of liberal democracy. But they seldom reckon with the “perennial carnage of American capitalism” and its relation to democracy, which made Trump’s ascendance possible. Overcoming this existential crisis demands more than a slavish devotion to restoring the norms Trump so gleefully tears asunder; it warrants bold political imagination. Purdy argues a “more robust approach would have been to ask how political leadership and mobilization can open up new ideological frontiers, for better or worse.”

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/normcore-trump-resistance-books-crisis-of-democracy