Normative politics is an ambitious project. It wants to tell us how we should live. It wants to say how society should be arranged. It wants to define what justice really requires. At its best, it keeps us morally awake. At its worst, it becomes a sermon with a checklist. Modern normative politics is moving disturbingly toward the worst version. It often feels like a performance. Everyone acts with virtue. But they quietly avoid difficult questions. These questions are about power, exclusion, and human complexity. These things actually shape political life.


One big problem today is an obsession with categories. Modern discourse insists on putting people into boxes. This is sometimes done for recognition. Sometimes it is for policy clarity. Sometimes it is just an institutional habit. Every political identity gets a subcategory. Every subcategory creates its own moral expectations. The intention may be noble. But categorization begins to harden into destiny. People become "types." They stop being seen as complicated beings with relationships. A framework that began as liberation soon risks becoming rigid. It mimics the very hierarchies it once resisted.


However, we must be careful not to dismiss categorization entirely. The human mind craves structure to navigate a chaotic world. Categories are not just traps; they are survival tools. The danger lies not in using them, but in believing they are eternal truths. We must adopt a stance of Strategic Essentialism i.e. using identities (like "indigenous" or "worker") as shields for resistance and tools for solidarity, while remembering they are constructed, not inherent.


When we forget this distinction, the tool becomes the master.


This focus on categories leads to moral certainty. Normative politics today is often quick to claim things. It says certain groups should act, feel, or vote in predictable ways. Entire communities become flattened into moral archetypes. The oppressed must speak. The privileged must be silent. The activist must stay active. The citizen must be engaged. Even introverts are gently shamed. They might prefer to write, observe, or contribute quietly. But the culture treats "visible action" as the main form of political virtue. Politics becomes a moral performance. People who do not fit this performance style are treated as ethically deficient.


This links to another common problem. It is the glorification of activism as constant motion. Movements increasingly reward people who are loud, busy, and always in public. But some of the most important political contributions are invisible. They come from people who think deeply. They interpret complexities. They tend to emotional wounds. They preserve community life in unglamorous ways. The ethic of perpetual action risks burning out a generation. It also marginalizes anyone whose political mode is reflection, not spectacle. Thinking is action. In a world where reality is socially constructed, those who reflect deeply are rewriting the source code of society. A politics that values noise over nuance forgets that sustainable change requires the architecture of meaning, not just the adrenaline of protest.

Underneath all this is a more structural problem. Modern normative politics tends to assume universality. It declares principles that claim to fit everyone. This includes the billionaire and the villager. It includes the urban cosmopolitan and the indigenous elder. But universality often masks domination. What is called "universal human nature" is usually a cultural imagination wearing a lab coat. The political "oughts" in global discourse often carry specific assumptions. These come from Western liberal individualism, technocratic rationalism, or secular moral psychology. But they rarely acknowledge their local origins.


The result is a subtle arrogance—and a subtle exercise of power. Political theorists speak as if the world's diversity could be tidied up into a clean moral system. But human beings are relational and symbolic. They are culturally textured and sometimes joyfully irrational. Any system that pretends otherwise invites disappointment. At worst, it invites authoritarian correction. Yet, we should not discard universal concepts like "Human Rights" simply because of their origins. Instead, we must engage in Pragmatic Decolonization: translating these tools into our own contexts, stripping away the colonial arrogance while keeping the utility that serves the Common Good.


Even well-intentioned agendas fall into this trap. For example, social justice movements sometimes produce moral hierarchies of suffering. Liberal institutions generate endless guidelines. These guidelines pretend to capture all moral complexity in bullet points. Governments design policies that assume people behave according to neat rational incentives. These pitfalls are not failures of morality. They are failures of humility and imagination. Normative politics forgets something important. It is not discovering eternal truths. It is making educated proposals inside a turbulent and living world.


A healthier approach needs a dose of Political Friendship. Political life requires shared norms. But those norms should behave more like handrails than commandments. We need principles that guide without imprisoning. They should support pluralism without collapsing into relativism. They should allow communities to adjust their moral frameworks as circumstances shift. Instead of one universal morality, we might adopt a relational model. Ethics would emerge through dialogue, negotiation, and mutual recognition. They would not descend from an abstract idea.


This does not mean abandoning normative claims. It means grounding them. A good political "ought" invites responsibility, not obedience. It names harm without moralizing difference. It acknowledges its own limits. Normative politics should illuminate paths, not impose destinies. It should foster solidarity without forcing uniformity. It should remember that meaning requires boundaries. But these boundaries must remain open to revision.


The real problem of normative politics today is not that it dreams too much. The problem is that it forgets the fragility and constructed nature of its own dreams. If it could temper its confidence with a little relational skepticism, it could become morally vibrant again. It would be less a script of obligations. It would be more a dialogue about how to live together. And it would stop pretending that one blueprint can fit us all.