Normalization seems deeply wrong to me (even if you disagree with polarization.)

"Normalization" seems to be looking at things relative to the population median. If you're a middling American, you're normal, and you should feel normal, and be treated as a normal tribe member.'

This is a very different viewpoint than looking at things relative to an objective external benchmark, and it means that you can't track societal drift. If you "normalize", you won't notice that, say, societal attitudes on LGBT issues have liberalized a lot very fast, or that the omnipresence of the Internet is societally very weird. You won't notice when certain issues have outsize objective importance in the number of people they affect (like x-risk or global economic growth.)

If, indeed, Trump is an unprecedentedly terrible president (I'm not confident he is, but he might be) then it is really counterproductive to "normalize" him, in the sense of saying "this is the new normal, because this is typical of today's world." That's like those sitcoms that go on for twenty years without the characters ever getting older. It's an illusion of stasis in the midst of rapid objective change.

The way you would notice that slavery was wrong, in 19th-century America, would be to set your benchmark somewhere outside a mere opinion-poll average of typical Americans. "Normalization" never gives you the chance to personally be more ethical than your generation.