Most conservatives find the Trump presidency highly distressing for a variety of totally valid reasons—the ideological mishmash, the dysfunction, the lack of any political principle guiding the nation’s chief executive. But there is one part of the present era I can’t help enjoying, and that’s the way liberals so often sound like conservatives—confused and rather dim conservatives who’ve only just realized what’s been done to their culture.
It happened about the time Donald Trump clinched the Republican primary in 2016: Suddenly liberal commentators began lamenting the destruction of time-honored conventions and generally sounding like defensive traditionalists. Trump wouldn’t release his tax returns—an outrageous flouting of a decades-old tradition! He openly used profanity—a gross transgression of the time-honored customs of our politics! He was toying with the idea of living in New York instead of Washington—is nothing sacred? And at one point there was talk of doing away with the White House press briefing—what was the world coming to?
I shared all these anxieties, and still share them. But I was surprised and amused to see people on the left reveal an almost Burkean affection for habit and convention. Who knew that progressives—the very word implies a repudiation of things as they are—had such a high regard for the old ways of doing things?
Consider a recent column by Emily Badger in the New York Times, “Showdown Over How Fringe Views Are Defined in America.” “Today in the United States,” Badger begins,
This sounds to me like a fancy way of saying moral customs change over time. Are there people who don’t know this already? Evidently there are—and in case you’re one of those people, the online version of the column supplies a helpful line graph that plots the gradual acceptance of fair housing laws, the idea of a female president, same sex marriage, and so on.
“But these norms may be fraying,” Badger continues. Uh oh. “Since the last presidential election, and particularly since white supremacists rallied this month, unmasked, in Charlottesville, Va., the line between acceptable and ostracized views has started to become less stark.”
So it turns out—am I understanding this correctly?—that deviant behavior, when engaged in openly, tends over time to accustom the public to that behavior. And as the deviant behavior becomes more commonly and openly engaged in, it’s seen less as deviant and more as normal.
That’s heady stuff, so Badger turns to Tina Fetner, a sociologist at McMaster University in Ontario. “This is exactly the process of how social change happens,” Fetner says. “It’s not because all of a sudden there is more racism now than there was a few weeks ago. It’s that the absolute condemnation of those most abhorrent views is crumbling away because the president isn’t fulfilling that role.”
So, summarizes the Times columnist, “when norms of acceptable behavior and speech start to shift, it can disturb the shared beliefs, values and symbols that make up our culture.”
So that’s how it happens!
For Badger and Fetner, then, and I suspect for most Times writers and readers, American society had lately developed into a thing they believed in and approved of. The prevailing worldview was liberal in its dimensions; sensitivity about racial equality was prized above all things, and they liked it that way. And now Donald Trump’s ruining it. The cultural consensus they and their forebears worked so hard to build is now at risk, thanks to this irresponsible celebrity-politician saying scandalous and disgraceful things.
How strange that today’s most influential liberals—journalists and academics at esteemed institutions—now sound like wearied guardians of a threatened consensus. They’re making essentially the same complaint about Trump that cardigan-wearing establishmentarians of the mid-1960s made about beatniks and rock singers. Only I imagine those establishmentarians in the 60s didn’t feel the need to express their complaints in highfalutin abstractions and accompany them with line graphs.
I imagine they just said, Damn those crazy hippies! The Times is far too sophisticated for talk like that.
