Our Culture of Cheapness and Vulgarity

There are many things in short supply these days, but cheapness and vulgarity are not among them. They’re everywhere right now — in politics and pop culture, among the royals, within the legacy media and across social media. Most obscene is the cheapness and vulgarity that has pervaded the conflict between Israel and Hamas and its accompanying explosion of global antisemitism.

It would be easy to attribute this collective rot to mere coincidence, but it’s more a case of compounded indecency. And nowhere more so than at the top. The coarse bravado of then-candidate Donald Trump a decade ago metastasized during his presidency into the corruption and cravenness that now dominates — and could possibly derail — his third stab at the White House. Even as Trump lays relatively low, his relentless legal circus continues to confirm he’s little more than the “carnival barker” ex-president Obama said he was back in 2011.

A similar — if not greater — sense of ick courses through the Biden family as it navigates Hunter Biden’s recent firearms and tax indictments. The charges are louche and lavish and detail Hunter’s bacchanal sex and drug romps — with the selfies to prove it. It’s the first son in prime OnlyFans-mode, and nothing could be more vulgar.

[The dominant cultural slide into cheapness and vulgarity began long before Trump. It began long before Bill Clinton seduced a vulnerable and star-struck intern into cheap and vulgar acts in the Oval Office and then let her twist in the wind as the cad he was, although that certainly helped to mainstream it. It even began before rap and hip-hop culture monetized violence, misogyny, and vulgarity, although that gave it counter-cultural cred. It began when we decided to dispense with the transcendent in favor of conscience-negating moral relativism and when we rebelled against the classical values that built Western civilization. Vulgarity is now the norm, and the classical values are almost toxic these days. — Ed]