"we instinctively abjure reckoning directly with the subject of manners—and yet it goes to the heart of everything that is happening. There’s a culture-wide unease with the discussion of manners—which in turn conceals a larger and far more momentous breakdown in a viable understanding of manners in today’s America...
Lately the youthful adherents of the Trumpian right have returned to an allied preoccupation with civilizational collapse as a product of the permissive society—even as they enthusiastically championed Trump for ripping up other forms of self-restraint...
But it’s hard to think of anything more “degenerate” in the American context than Trump’s own famous style, fanatically mimicked by his followers, and the image boards that developed the aesthetics we now associate with the alt-right. These right-wing culture-jammers have gained a certain avant-gardish notoriety for creating images so stomach-churning and morally repugnant they “can’t be unseen.”
The new youthful rightist movements are ambivalent about the modern aesthetics of shock and transgression; they oscillate between horrified critics and prolific producers of shock. Similarly, Trumpians celebrate their leader’s id-driven defiance of the harsh constraints imposed by strict liberal etiquette and sexual mores—evinced in their indifference to his coarse “pussy grabbing” comments—while also bemoaning the general conditions of cultural decline ushered in by the liberalism of the sixties. To them and to the rightist trolls, the shock of throwing off liberal etiquette is a pushback against the civilizational decline brought on by those Baby Boomers who threw off their own set of constraints...
The problem in our current, unacknowledged controversy over manners is that while both sides seem to implicitly accept this premise, they have directly opposing views of what our system of manners should be doing and what values it should be normalizing. "
let's talk about what we're talking about - I am weirdly here for a fussy conversation about manners.
FB: " Indeed, simply to utter the word manners would be to fulfill the stereotyped view of Trump’s detractors as elitist cultural authoritarians—the storm troopers of the liberal language police. And yet right now we are renegotiating the very profound question of manners even as we studiously recoil from naming it as such."
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