Why 2026 Will Be the Year American Politics Finally Returns to Normal

Here is a very abbreviated list of key events from the first year of the second Trump era: The world’s richest man took a hiatus from his companies to threaten the federal government with a chainsaw. The president upended the entire global system of trade guided by what appeared to be calculations from ChatGPT. The Homeland Security secretary hung out in a pink Lego Cadillac in Las Vegas and took glamour shots at a notorious Central American detention center. The misadventures of a young person nicknamed Big Balls led to the deployment of the National Guard in Washington. We were all subjected to Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book, Larry Summers’ requests for dating advice and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s alleged love poetry. Manosphere influencer, accused rapist and Trump supporter Andrew Tate declared, “If you’re a straight man with a girlfriend in 2025, you’re gay.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, broke with Trump.

To quote FBI Director Kash Patel, the year has been “completely effing wild.” Or, to steal a concept from Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the political life of our country has become fundamentally weird.

And all of this is putting aside the human toll of the decimation of foreign aid, the terror experienced by immigrant communities, the rollback of decades of scientific progress on vaccines, and a prolonged government shutdown — tragedy going hand-in-hand with plumb crazy.

At least half of Americans were appalled, grossed out or simply exhausted by these events. It’s depressing to imagine the possible futures suggested by this year, where shared truth dissolves in an acid tide of AI-generated slop, the balance between government branches totters or collapses, and the country becomes an irrevocably different place.

For anyone stuck in that particular funk, I bring reason to hope: Changes in culture often preview changes in politics, and if you really pay attention to American mass culture — which Washington often neglects to do — then you can see a striking desire for normalcy starting to reassert itself. In politics, meanwhile, it’s clear that a lane is opening for candidates who are not suffering from extreme internet poisoning. Yes, our country may, on the surface, feel collectively bonkers as 2025 ends, but the quiet signals are pointing toward one conclusion: People have had enough of weird, and 2026 will be the year America finally trends back in the direction of normal.

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The biggest pop-culture story of the year was Taylor Swift’s engagement to Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, which was announced in an Instagram post that doubled as an argument for ultra-normalcy: “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” A year earlier, Swift had identified herself as one of the “childless cat ladies” mocked by then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance. But on her post-engagement album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” she drew a contrast between her longing for “a couple kids” plus “a driveway with a basketball hoop” and the aspirations of people who “want those three dogs that they call their kids.” Always the good, non-judgmental liberal, Swift insisted in the same song that people with different ambitions “should have what they want, they deserve what they want, I hope they get what they want” — even as she placed herself firmly in another camp.

Swift was not the only singer offering odes to normalcy. Responding to the astonishing recent rise of polyamory — “How Did Polyamory Become So Popular?” asked The New Yorker in 2023 — Lily Allen’s album “West End Girl” delivered a lacerating rejoinder to the concept of ethical nonmonogamy. In her telling, a request for an open marriage was an attempt to slap an enlightened veneer on sordid cheating. To accommodate her husband’s needs, Allen’s narrator negotiates a deal in which he is supposed to “Be discreet and don’t be blatant / There had to be payment / It had to be with strangers.” But when he inevitably steps outside the terms of their agreement, Allen sings sadly that “I tried to be your modern wife, but the child in me protests.”

Elizabeth Gilbert, the writerly patron saint of romantic self-actualization, also came clean. In her book “All the Way to the River,” she acknowledged that when she’d left her second husband for her terminally ill best friend, she had not actually found true love or performed a selfless act. Instead, she’d descended once again into sex and love addiction and enabled her lover’s drug relapse. Gilbert ends up apologizing to her friend — and in effect, to the readers who embraced Gilbert’s adventures as a guide to a fulfilling life: “We are trapped in a codependent relationship, and I am every bit as responsible for that reality as you are. I am deeply sorry for my dysfunction and my own insanity.” After years of making the case for ’round-the-world quests and grand romantic gestures, Gilbert now promotes quietness, steadiness and the discipline of 12-step programs.

While singers and writers championed domestic normalcy, movie directors took up the question of how and whether the public sphere might regain equilibrium. Ari Aster’s film “Eddington,” set during the first year of the pandemic, explored the multiple ways civic and community life went off the rails during this period. In a fictional New Mexico town, a smooth, tech-industry-friendly mayor imposes all sorts of small cruelties on his constituents in the name of public health compliance. On the other end of the spectrum, an asthmatic sheriff whose sense of decency is offended by mask mandates ends up violating every possible norm in his quest to liberate a town that doesn’t seem to want his help. The sheriff’s wife runs off with a QAnon-adjacent cult leader, the only person who actually listens to her. One teenager responds to the internet’s incentives by embracing Black Lives Matter; another becomes a celebrated conservative live streamer.

In real life, endless debates over who was correct about COVID-19 and the Great Awokening have still not produced a consensus. But in “Eddington,” Aster suggests the only path towards reconciliation might be to acknowledge that, in 2020, we all experienced a moment of collective insanity.

The notion that ideas propagated on the internet are driving us nuts is also a thread in Yorgos Lanthimos’ acerbic comedy “Bugonia.” That film follows a man named Teddy who, having cycled through being “alt-right, alt-lite, leftist, Marxist,” settles on the idea that Earth is controlled by aliens. In particular, he believes that Michelle, a girlboss founder of a pharmaceutical company, is one of these extraterrestrials.

Teddy kidnaps Michelle, and the result is a black comedy of mutual misapprehension. Michelle speaks in Instagram captions; Teddy is a creature of chat rooms. The irreconcilability of their worldviews ends up in catastrophe. And as it turns out, Michelle (spoiler alert!) really is an alien. Her contact with Teddy convinces her that humanity is irredeemable. She pulls the plug on Earth, and the movie ends with a series of shots of people who have died on their wedding day, on yachts, on their prayer mats. Who, Lanthimos seems to ask, will speak for the normies placed at risk by the fringe?

Other 2025 movies suggested that society can still claw back from the brink. Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt” chronicles a graduate student’s allegation of sexual misconduct against a professor and the response of her adviser. But in a coda set five years later, all the characters seem to have moved on. The accused professor is making a fortune advising political candidates. The student has abandoned her radical politics and aesthetics and is sporting an enormous engagement ring. And her former adviser, whom the student accused of being insufficiently supportive, survived a critical media storm to become dean.

Bob, the radical bombmaker played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” extricates himself from extreme circumstances through a universal experience. When he becomes a father, he leaves terrorism behind to raise his daughter. Is there anything more normie than suggesting that children are our future?

Normalcy appeared ascendant in other areas of American life as well. All three Thanksgiving Day NFL games set ratings records, reaffirming that the country still has a few broadly shared cultural rituals. After a long decline, religious belief now appears to have entered a period of sustained stability. More states enacted bans on cellphones in schools, making the classroom a temporary bulwark against the weirdening influence of the internet and social media. Tech giant Meta in effect acknowledged that virtual reality is unlikely to replace the real world any time soon. HBO’s “The Pitt” made medical dramas, and respect for good, old-fashioned competence, hot TV again.

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Politics, for better and for worse, can’t move as quickly as mass culture. American elections take place on predetermined dates years apart; the mood on a social media platform can shift in an instant. Still, the November elections provided some early signs that a renewed hunger for normalcy is making its way downstream from the headwaters of culture.

In Virginia, where slashing cuts to federal agencies and a government shutdown rocked the economy, CIA veteran Abigail Spanberger was elected governor over Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who staked out far-right positions on social issues. In the New Jersey governor’s race, retired Navy pilot Mikie Sherrill posted a much-larger-than-anticipated margin of victory over Jack Ciattarelli. Ciattarelli’s embrace of MAGA-aligned figures such as Benny Johnson and Jack Posobiec, as well as Trump himself, gave Sherrill an opportunity to nationalize the election. But Trump’s declaration that he would cut funding for a new rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey also let Sherrill position herself as the champion of those most normie of all voters: beleaguered commuters.

Many interpreted the election results across the Hudson River — where a self-described democratic socialist came out of nowhere to win the race for mayor — as an unusual development, and in some ways it was. But seen through another lens, Zohran Mamdani’s triumph may in fact have been one of the more normal things to happen in New York City politics in years.

We are talking, after all, about a city where recent mayors have pursued a vendetta against ferrets, blundered into a Borat film, mishandled a groundhog and put themselves on the dating market in The New York Times. This year’s race featured Curtis Sliwa’s army of rescue cats, allegations of sexual harassment against Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams’ fondness for Turkish Airlines business class seats. Faced with those possibilities, voters instead opted for the cheerful, non-corrupt, recently married Mamdani, who talked relentlessly about a highly normal political issue: affordability. Then, once elected, he did many of the things a normal big city mayor would be expected to do: retain a popular police chief, appoint serious housing experts to his administration and charm a president who could help or wreck his plans.

And though the Trump administration embarked this year on a radical project to reshape government, as well as the traditions governing the use of presidential power, 2025 did begin to establish the limits of what the law and the public will tolerate. A judge rejected efforts to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey as retribution for their treatment of the president. ABC briefly pulled Jimmy Kimmel off-air after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr threatened the network over a line in one of the comedian’s monologues — but then reversed course and renewed his contract. Senators drew the line at the appointment of a wildly unqualified U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., and refused to end the filibuster. Lawmakers are using the Defense Department’s authorization bill to try to force Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to release videos of American strikes on boats alleged to be involved in drug smuggling. The federal government even rehired a number of the workers targeted in DOGE’s rampage through the civil service.

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Of course, if there is one lesson of the past decade, it’s to never count weirdness completely out. Donald Trump really can be elected president — twice. Joe Biden’s vanity really did force a wild election season. A whole bunch of luminaries really did feel comfortable hanging out with a sex criminal. And the conservative coalition really is tearing itself apart over the Groypers and antisemitism — over the question, that is, of whether or not it will be a normal political movement.

No one should expect weird to go away completely. Indeed, it is part of our national heritage. A century ago, H.L. Mencken described America as “incomparably the greatest show on earth,” a spectacle featuring “the ribald combats of demagogues” and “the exquisitely ingenious operations of master rogues.” The question, then, is not whether our national life can ever be weirdness-free, but whether our politics will continue to be completely, rather than occasionally, absurd. As 2026 approaches, there is every reason to believe that Americans are offering a clear answer: Normalcy is ascendant — and this particular show has gone on long enough.

Alyssa Rosenberg is a co-host of the “Across the Movie Aisle” podcast and a writer in Washington.