I’ve fretted over the innocents wrongly accused of the Boston marathon bombing; the killing of Ibrahim Todashev; denying Muslims the right to travel abroad when they decline to be informants; questioning the patriotism of Muslim Americans; ways that NSA spying imposes especially heavy burdens on immigrants; more religious profiling by the NYPD; undermining due process rights and travel rights in ways likely to affect Muslim Americans most; the risk of an anti-Muslim backlash after terrorist attacks; and the threat that Donald Trump poses to religious liberty.

All those articles offer substantive reasons to reject illiberalism. And some of them appeal to a sense that U.S. leaders were violating norms that ought to be sacrosanct.

If I had it to do over again, I’d spend less time invoking those norms.

It isn’t that my substantive beliefs have changed. I still think, for example, that Michael Bloomberg perpetrated horrific wrongs by presiding over stop-and-frisk and intrusive surveillance of Muslim American students for no reason save their religion, that he ought to be regarded more like Joe Arpaio rather than like an enlightened centrist. But I no longer think that the normative argument swayed anyone who wasn’t already with me on substance. I certainly can’t see how my complaining about the glowing journalistic profiles Bloomberg receives did any good. He was invited to speak at the 2016 Democratic convention and cheered by the same people who celebrated Khizr Khan and claim to abhor Trump’s targeting of Muslims.

Had The New York Times, circa 2008, hosted a Room for Debate feature raising the question of whether the NYPD should spy on Muslim American college students, I might well have objected that the newspaper’s editors were normalizing discrimination. Now, convinced as ever that my position on such spying is substantively unassailable, I wonder if open debate could’ve helped me to persuade and win. Knowing what happened, it’s hard to conclude a debate would’ve done harm.

Trump’s willingness to discriminate against Muslims on the basis of religion is known in advance. That transgression against liberal norms did not cost him the 2016 election. Will calling anyone out for normalizing anything prove effective at this point?

Consider me skeptical.

It’s more convincing, I think, to oppose illiberalism on the merits. As Noah Millman put it:

I think what people mean when they say that we can’t “normalize” Trump’s behavior is some some version of “we need to keep reminding people that this is not normal.” But the “we” and “people” in that sentence are doing all the work. Whoever says that Trump shouldn’t be “normalized” is implying that somebody — the press, perhaps? — is in a position to decide what is normal, and to inform everybody else of that fact. But that’s not how norms work, and neither the press nor anybody else is in a position either to grant or withhold recognition to the new government. In fact, the word is a way of distracting from one of the crucial jobs at hand. Trump, for example, is on strong legal ground when he says that he is exempt from conflict of interest laws. But laws can be changed — and perhaps they should be. To achieve that requires making a case, not that what Trump is doing isn’t “normal,” but that it is a bad thing worth prohibiting by law. Saying “we mustn’t normalize this behavior” rather than “we need to stop this behavior” is really a way of saying that you don’t want to engage in politics, but would rather just signal to those who already agree with us just how appalled we are. And haven’t we learned already the dire consequences of substituting virtue signaling for politics?

Matt Yglesias has reached similar conclusions.“Normalization, in this context, is typically cast as a form of complicity with Trump in which the highest possible premium is placed on maintaining a rigid state of alert and warning people that he is not just another politician whom you may or may not agree with on the issues,” he wrote. “But several students of authoritarian populist movements abroad have a different message. To beat Trump, his opponents need to practice ordinary humdrum politics.”