When liberals lose elections, they always retreat behind "norms."

In a recent blog post about the NYT's Linda Greenhouse, I wrote:

Ms Greenhouse can't engage the substance of Justice Gorsuch's arguments, so, instead, like the well-entrenched New York saloniste she is, she seeks to assassinate his character with her best cocktail party sniffs and condescensions. According to Greenhouse, Gorsuch violates the "habits, norms, unwritten rules" of the Supreme Court. When liberals lose elections, they always retreat behind "norms."

No sooner had I written this, than now Emily Bazelon writes an article in the New York Times Magazine entitled How Do We Contend With Trump’s Defiance of ‘Norms?’

Until that moment, it went without saying that a presidential candidate would not use his platform to vilify an ordinary young woman — a wildly disproportionate unleashing of power against a person with little of her own. But assumptions like these are more traditions than formal rules — boundaries made of sand. They’re norms, imprecise and ambient. They lay out what ought to be, according to unwritten social expectations, and not what must be, according to law. Norms are entirely up to us — they exist only as long as there’s a consensus, even unspoken, to preserve them. Such consensus is probably as important as law to the functioning of a democracy. But it’s also fragile. We say that laws are ‘‘broken’’ — a definitive act of rupture. Norms merely erode, slowly, amid argument and equivocation about the significance of a breach, until they’ve been destroyed.

According to the liberal mindset, it is, of course, liberals who are the arbiters of what the norms are. "Trump's wildly disproportionate unleashing of power against a person with little of her own" is, apparently, according to these arbitri morum, a violation of norms. But, the fact that left-wing shock troops on our college campuses today engage in violence to suppress the discussion of opinions they disagree with apparently is not.

Also, where were the liberal complaints about the defiance of norms when President Obama, quite legally, but certainly in defiance of "unwritten rules" governing the behavior of presidents, resorted to "pen and phone" and began governing by executive order? This was not just a matter of poor taste, but an attempt to circumvent an uncooperative Congress. In times past, a president who found himself in office while the opposite party controlled Congress abided by the time-honored norm of compromising with Congressional leaders of the opposite party to see what common ground they might have. Instead, on issues like climate change, the EPA, immigration, and Iran Obama simply barged ahead with his own agenda. Where were the liberal howls about the violation of norms then?

Update: For more liberal whining about Trump and norms, see here.

Update 2: And now, 8/4/2017, we have this column in The New Yorker by the reliably liberal Adam Gopnik. Apparently, the liberal elites have realized how weak their whining about norms comes off. So Adam 'splains that it is not so much the fact that "norms" are being violated that has liberals pissed off, but the fact that the "principles and premises of social contracts" are being trampled, with, of course, Adam and the rest of the liberal mob still getting to define what those principles and premises are. High dudgeon, indeed!