The ‘Natural Order’ as Un/Common Sense: About ‘the Normal’, ‘the Natural’ and Emancipatory Dis/Order

“[N]obody’s ever had crowds like we’re having. It’s a movement. It’s a movement for common sense”, proclaims Donald Trump on October 25, 2016. The appeal to common sense has been at the heart of fascist and authoritarian strategies ever since (Mayer 2012; Crehan 2018). The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (2012) already emphasizes in his prison notebooks – written as a political prisoner of the fascist regime – the necessity to analyse the masses’ common sense to understand the popular turn to fascist ideology. For him, it is in the (un)consciousness of common sense that consent to power and domination is organised as universal, self-evident truths. I will show that common sense is still useful for analysing the popular appeal of the authoritarian in the 21st century in the appearance of a ‘natural order’. In a first step, the paper identifies normalisation and naturalisation as constitutive aspects of common sense’s ‘banality’: While common sense appears banal (common-sensical) to some, it threatens the everyday life of ‘the others’ (Butler 1999). The paper argues in a second step that the imagined ‘natural order’ can also be called into question via common sense itself: Drawing on Gramsci’s concept of common sense and queer-feminist critiques as “ideology and hegemony” (Ahmed 2022), common sense itself has subversive potential: strategies of “queering common sense” (Geller 2017: 82) include deconstructive, critical reflections on the conventional and the supposedly obvious, messing up the common ‘natural order.’