How ‘Normal Country’ Became Internet Shorthand for ‘Bad Country’

As a catch-all phrase for everything that is wrong with America, "normal country” is difficult to beat—which is probably why you've probably been seeing it a lot on Twitter. It's a way of registering our horror at the news of rising demand for insurance for mass shootings, which occur on a nearly regular basis—272 in this year alone. It's the perfect sarcastic rejoinder to one registered nurse’s dubious testimony about the COVID-19 vaccines causing people to be "magnetic"—or to a fact-checking rebuttal of a video that claims President Biden is not a human.

A Twitter search of “normal country” yields an endless buffet of the worst stories of unimaginable violence, disregard for humanity, and other dysfunction across the world. But how did it become such a widely applied meme?

Experts VICE consulted described “normal country” as an easy-to-reach reply, one that acknowledges that something is deeply wrong while pointing to the seeming futility of even trying to make sense of it. 

“I think the glib, sarcastic nature of the phrase fits within the style of communication that is popular on social media,” Dr. Erin Vogel, social psychologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, told VICE. “People want to call attention to issues they care about, while also minimizing emotional expression and personal self-disclosure.” 

This characteristically biting and bleak sense of humor is particularly common among millennials and Gen-Z, Vogel said. And for good reason: “These generations of Americans have been through a lot: a long war, multiple economic recessions, a global pandemic. I think there is a sense, among younger people, that widespread crisis is a normal state that one must adapt to.”

Ryan Milner, a communications professor at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, described the “normal country” posts as part of a broader “lulzy” humor popular online today. “It's disaffected, it's distant,” he said. “It’s about creating this bulletproof satirical laughing ‘us’ who’s laughing at this ‘them.’” 

The roots of this “lulzy” ironic glibness can be traced back to more niche internet communities on anonymous online forums of 4chan and SomethingAwful, Milner said, communities whose linguistic sensibility then seeped out to the more “normie” spaces, like Twitter, online. “Normal country” is relatively new in this current usage, and appears to have become popular in 2017, the same year Donald Trump was sworn into the White House. 

Milner, who co-authored a 2017 book called The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online with fellow internet scholar and professor Whitney Phillips, attributes “normal country”'s growing meme status on Twitter to “this increasing sense—especially on the left—that this country isn't how it should be.” As Milner sees it, it's a counter to American exceptionalism. "A lot of us grew up learning implicitly or explicitly that America is the best, and [that] it's unfair to think we're not the very best,” he said. 

“Normal country” may also serve another linguistic need: Summing up our emotional response to events for which we have no words—and that we feel we have no power to control. In a 1991 journal article responding to the proliferation of “disaster jokes” following the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle in 1986, which killed the entire seven-person crew, folklore expert and academic Bill Ellis outlined what is basically the “normal country” posting process. First: “A tragic event is pressed on millions of people who otherwise would be unaffected by it and who cannot respond to the initial shock with cathartic physical labour.” As they digest this terrible news Ellis writes, people “are bombarded with stimuli to act while in reality they can provide no actual help. Thus individuals must fall back on a variety of improvised passive activities.”

Seen in this light, a phrase like “normal country” allows people to signal their dissatisfaction with the dysfunction of the world—without necessarily having to diagnose the problem or prescribe solutions. 

“It's a way—in shorthand—to say, 'Here are all the systemic reasons the system is shitty, and I'm over and exhausted how shitty this system is,'” Milner said. He described the phrase as a “textual version” of the “This Is Fine” meme, a snippet of a 2013 comic strip showing a smiling dog saying “this is fine” while sitting in a room engulfed in flames. 

Like all memes, Milner said, “normal country” can be both empowering and limiting. “It allows you to connect to a resonant idea, but it also can limit getting beyond that idea,” he said. 

Both Milner and Vogel stressed that a term like “normal country” can be useful on a short-form communication platform like Twitter, but expressed a wariness that it can also prevent meaningful conversation from taking place. “It takes you half a second to roll your eyes at it and then move on,” Milner said, whereas a more specific reading of the situation would likely earn less engagement. 

“It's fun and easy to dunk on stuff and move on,” he said. “But what does that get you? What does Resistance Twitter get us by replying to everything Donald Trump said with some kind of dunk? I don't know if it got us much.”

If you spend the majority of your time communicating in a certain way online, [this way] will spill over into your broader thinking and communication patterns, said Milner. “When you're talking about things in certain ways, you're training yourself to see the world in those ways.”

Anyone who identifies as Extremely Online can likely note a time when their thoughts began to take the maximum shape of 280 characters, because that’s what Twitter allows. But falling into this detached style of posting can influence one’s larger worldview, and it may even cause us to feel detached about the very thing we're talking about. Therein lies the downside: it If you say “normal country” enough, you might trick yourself into thinking this is normal.