i can feel myself slowly morphing into a social democratic george will. complaining about the lack of manners, consideration and due regard for others but from the left
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Mostly I agree with you. But there’s a small part of me that wishes we had a pithy bumper sticker slogan, like “Let’s go Brandon” That we could plaster everywhere for the next four years
“America's founders actually thought and wrote a lot about manners….The founders worried that a society without an aristocracy would lack obvious standards of propriety. But it is good manners that allow citizens to argue without coming to blows, and even to find productive compromise”
“Manners are practical rules for living together. …Good manners involve an affirmation that we, all of us, are part of the same community and deserve respect. Poor manners can indicate the dehumanization of individuals and groups. The boor is often the bigot.”
I think that’s actually a key challenge for liberal theory, to be able to articulate a theory of moral sentiments that embraces pluralist axiology without compromising a parsimonious but stern condemnation of civic vice and wickedness.
If you set aside their politics for a minute, what's striking about most MAGA people is they're the type of people you would actively avoid in a social setting. It's just a a degenerate, anti-social movement.
Yep. Next door neighbor has a Trump 2020 flag nailed to his garage that says “No More Bullshit” on full display in a suburban neighborhood two blocks from an elementary school. What the fuck do we do with these people
And make it look like I care about accepting people for who they are? Why do that when I can spend every second of every day acting like the entire world is against me and specifically me (a straight white man)
Seriously, I think it might be a good idea. Clearly, when social justice messaging is framed in academic-bureaucratic language and mores it lacks power. Maybe framing it as good old fashioned civility would have more rhetorical weight.
Adhering to societal norms and notions of common decency is for the woke left cucks. Real men do what they want, and especially if it triggers the libs.
Isn’t this calculated, open belligerence the animating principle of the MAGA right? Letting people say f-you to people who think they’re better?
I don't feel like that shirt should be officially disallowed by authorities, but I do think there should be social consequences. We need someone to bring some Mean Girl energy to him.
The Carlin bit is funny because it's things you weren't supposed to say for no real reason other than "propriety." And you knew it was a sham, because you'd hear people say them and it affected nothing.
That is very different than "fuck your feelings" which is aimed *at* someone.
Luckily I’m from the south, so I have a lot of good substitutes, and I mix in exclamations in other languages for color, so it’s like “cheese and rice oy vey ainakot ai-ya, ai-ya, ai-ya” when I’m upset in public, and I probably just sound nuts.
I remember when I huffed at my father in the early 2000s about him saying that some television show or another “represented the coarsening of American society” and, like, damned if I’m not here agreeing with the man at this point.
Like I don’t want my kid to be under the power of people who don’t like cussing and then there’s just a public stream of profanities around her. System breakdown in simultaneously opposing directions
And it’s making me into a real dorkus. I’m like, 1 biscuit away from sourly pursing my lips at people’s Calvin piss stickers and talking about “there ought to be a law”
Imagine how Bill Watterson must feel. He famously didn’t do licensing deals on principle and the most famous merch featuring Calvin shows him peeing on the Red Sox logo.
I used to say something like this because I thought broken window theory meant hey, let’s fix broken windows but it was actually more let’s throw people in jail more and for longer for smaller and smaller “offenses”
But I am guessing you mean more what I used to think it was
Eh. If the shirt said "I don't care about your feelings", ah well, lame but not as offensive.
Using the expletive in that setting is worse. The message including it just makes it...moreso.
This. When I’ve worked in service jobs, I didn’t mind hearing the word “fuck” from a customer. But the moment it was directed as an attack at me or a coworker, I was done dealing with them.
It’s still there, they’re just super hypocritical about it. I’d imagine that person and their family would clutch all of the pearls if they saw someone wearing a shirt that said “Fuck Trump” at the same event.
Kind of, but I bet some edgy kid wearing a shirt that simply says “FUCK” would be criticized by them as well. Anything aimed at “the libs” is fair game, but nothing else.
We've gone from
Avoid the Appearance of Impropriety
Degraded to
Maintain Plausible Deniability
The bar lowered to
Can't Prove it in a Rigged Court, fuqk you
We've bullied both the police and "Karens" out of maintaining social order so public spaces devolve into their worst versions. People with money can afford to flee these spaces and move to privately maintained spaces. But the poor and civic life suffer.
I dunno, there's a fine line between social decorum meaning "please don't wear profane t-shirts to the kids game" and "please conform to traditional gender aesthetics in public".
Love the concept of a social democratic George Will. Maybe instead of longing to return to the Gilded Age you can pine for the Paris Commune or something.
Nowhere near as bad as wearing that t-shirt to an elementary school event, but the amount of people who take speakerphone calls in public with no headphones is…concerning.
Manners are a shared code that allows our social interaction to function more smoothly, with perhaps less stress. Do people remember how to be respectful?
I was at my daughter’s cheer competition & there was a maga truck in the parking lot with a huge FJB flag and he’s just cruising around the lot looking for attention. Everyone ignored him.
Same, I'm even hyper aware of how much I swear and low key think I should stop dropping so many f bombs if I want to be taken "seriously" by people manners.
Ditto. My current beef is about those traipsing about in public during morning work hours reeking of weed. C’mon man, if you are going to wake and bake just stay home.
It's an underappreciated effect of Trump that he and MAGA force people into stances they don't want to take. Not that everyone doesn't know this, just that it isn't acknowledged how pervasive it is.
so much of the trans panic would be alleviated if people just remembered to be polite. if someone tells you who they are the polite response is to accept it and treat them accordingly. I really don't get the problem, other than people have an interest in being assholes these days
Go for it! We could use more of such genteel impatience over here on the leftish side. (But I'll bet you had to scrunch up your face to write the words "George Will".)
There needs to be social norms.
It’s how we keep a decent society for all.
I swear like a drunken sailor, but not in public. I say excuse me, thanks and you’re welcome. I hold doors for older folks and women with strollers. It’s how we are supposed to behave.
Please list for us those on the Left you believe lack manners, consideration, and due regard for others.
I will contact each person on that list and encourage them to persist!!!
There was nothing civil about the Civil War.
This is not a tea party, it’s a fight to the death.
Yearning for a time and place where social decorums are present, but not to where they stifle others or mask bigotry, prejudices & such. We stop wearing pjs in public, relearn how to drive and nail polish on anyone who wants is fine as long as it’s not chipping.
The thing that enrages me most is that the “fuck your feelings” guy probably spent my childhood bashing the left for their lack of manners and consideration.
That, that deep sense of rage is growing up liberal in the 90s when people "held their nose" and voted for Bill Clinton, that disgusting low class man, and then they presented us George W Bush and now Donald Trump. With GLEE. (I refuse to forget American history from 9/12/01 to 11/04/08).
that guy could learn a lot from reading Democracy in Retrograde: How to Make Changes Big and Small in Our Country and in Our Lives by @emilyinyourphone.bsky.social 🙄
You’re right to! We have thoroughly lost the thread as a society. We have confused being a mean dickhead with “telling it like it is” and bullying as a strength.
If my kid said some of the stuff the incoming president has said, id lose my shit.
It’s bizarre to recall a very pro-Reagan prof back in 2007 trying to explain to us students that the Democrats failure to disavow Jon Stewart demonstrated that the party was driving the “coarsening” of American politics.
rural dem in trump county. car keyed, gun violence threats, etc. don't accept the rules we have to behave by but they have no obligation to act by the same rules. ever had a firearm held to your chest, telling you who you should vote for? your ancestors did, i still do. also fvk george will
A certain kind of trashy person really really wants you to call him trash to his face, directly or indirectly. Then they can kick you in the nuts and say you deserved it for being snobby and rude.
That might be the case except for the fact that people who wear those types of shirts probably wear the same shit to church and profess their faith. Garbage human being.
It's crazy. A few years ago, people on the right were so worried about civility, propriety, and the sacred inviobility Constitution. And now, since trump, none of that is important to them.
Not gonna lie, this would definitely put me in the “enforce social norms and basic decency immediately and definitively” camp. Out the door with the imprint of a size 11 nursemate on his posterior. What old women are good at, and old nurses are better at.
If it weren't for the fact that everyone around here carries and is a crank I'd do the same thing. It was absolutely amazing to explain my then 8yr old why our neighbor had a Fuck Biden flag on their house and what it meant.
I took my daughter to Six Flags in suburban Buffalo in Summer 2023 and saw a teen wearing a “Let’s Go Brandon” shirt and all I could think was “Really dude? At Six Flags?”
Good manners towards others is the most honest way in which we demonstrate a belief in shared human rights. Anyone who marches for all the right causes and used all the cool vocabulary but treats others poorly does not really believe all people are created equal -- created equal to them, that is.
Just saw someone on another thread posit that COVID was a contributor in emboldening assholes, in that once the initial shock was past, going around gleefully flouting health regs and not giving a shit if you killed old or disabled people had no consequences or shame attached to it
Well, it’d be far far more coherent from the left.
Will’s whole thrust has been that the taking of rights and benefits from his inferiors should be accomplished all genteel and gentlemanly by all sides.
Yeah, I feel like one of the prescient aspects of Idiocracy was how much more vulgar the future dystopian society became (e.g., Fuddruckers evolving into Buttfuckers).
Speaking for myself, it wasn’t solely this, but a lot of what drove me from the right/conservatism is that it’s now just a celebration of bad behavior. Rude. Indecent. Boorish. A fundamental part of it is a rebellion against decency and outrage you could be judged for being indecent, cruel, etc.
That was the point at which I realized that as an institution the Republican Party no longer had anything useful to contribute to the country. BTW, I used to lean Republican and even was one for a while.
That’s an interesting and relevant issue to point to. I have a conservative bg as well. Have your views on the deficit changed at all, or was it the hypocritical grandstanding that started chipping away at the veneer?
I used to be the friend on the left that always engaged with & listened to conservatives & libertarians but after a while, it became almost performative levels of asinine. Like acting like we don’t have basic reasoning or understand the topic was almost the conversational litmus test. Big eye opener
A lot of Trumpy and anti anti Trumper types liked to reduce the conservative opposition to him as mad about “mean tweets.” And it wasn’t just that. But decency does matter!
(I'm also confused by anti anti Trump types who say they don't like the tweets either. The tweets accurately reflect Trump, without the veil of propaganda.)
Watching the white people at Carnegie Hall jostle and elbow Black patrons in the aisles as we took our seats to see the Kanneh Mason siblings perform, manners & consideration felt urgent indeed. Without due regard for others, community cannot be.
Also listening to or watching anything in public without headphones. (My partner is 10 years younger than me and thinks this is totally acceptable behavior, so maybe it’s generational?)
It’s about respect vs disrespect. If you respect the students, other parents, teachers, & staff, you show up like a person you would respect and take seriously. When I see this I want to shout, “Look in the mirror.”
Etiquette has been defined as making others feel comfortable on our presence;
Liberal democracy is making other people feel comfortable in our society.
Revolutionaries reject the existing society and seek to dismantle it in favor of their preferred norms.
Its important, IMO, to evaluate the existing order and the proposed new ones.
Our existing order holds that trans people be addressed as they wish;
The revolutionaries want to institute a norm where trans people are insulted and shamed.
Us socdems be figuring out that the basic consensus "it's good to be kind to others" - necessary to soc OR lib dem politics - is in fact socially and historically contingent, and the right is currently engaged in a project to undo that contingency.
"It's good to be kind to others" is a pretty well accepted tenet of community building regardless of politics, though. If everyone's out for themselves, the community falls apart.
Yeah, the “get off my lawn” feelings are middle age (though what is wrong with that man that he doesn’t like E.T.?!), but I grew up inside the Beltway and went to elementary school with a lot of kids whose parents were famous for DC, and they all hung out and it was fine.
The Capital and Capitol culture started to change during Clinton, and more specifically Gingrich, and was way worse when the guys like Paul Ryan came in, who didn’t even bother to get apartments in DC.
And talk radio, fox, youtube, websites, and podcasts just poisoned the well for everyone.
I've still got memories of a Che shirt I wore which raised a ruckus back in the day... Times be changing. And I don't think it's an endorsement of Ben Shapiro. Ben ain't hip. I think it's a condemnation of an uncaring, morally bankrupt system which produces and elevates mediocrities like Ben. Maybe.
Please, both of you, stop. George Will's fixation on etiquette was nothing compared to his fixation on putting an intellectual patina on reactionary assholery.
Had this moment in rural west Texas recently, sitting down to lunch at a family restaurant (literally in the name) with my kid, next to a guy with a shirt that said "Fuck around and find out"
Sort of agree, but also, IMO for Trump it's helpful to distinguish bad manners, from corruption/authoritarian impulses. Both of which get lumped in as "he says bad things". I'd take a lot of bad manners from someone who wasn't trying to arrest political opponents.
I notice this more in just general interactions. People will just randomly park in front of a store entrance, because the lot is crowded and "this will only take a minute."
Yes. As a teacher, I would be tempted to tell the person their shirt does not meet dress code and a student in that shirt would be sent home. I would say we do not want to have to tell five year olds what fuck means and that they need to at least turn it inside out if they are staying.
There are dozens of us. I get so mad when I see shit like that at the grocery store. I got shit at 18 for wearing a Kid Rock shirt with him flipping the bird as the primary visual element and now I see grown ass dad's dragging their kids through the mall with "Fuck" in bd font on a right wing tshirt
I feel like the profanity is not really the problem at all. who cares? it's just a rude word, not like it's a slur.
the problem is normalized gleeful hostility & hatred toward your neighbors and the refusal to accept even the smallest personal inconvenience to share a society with others
He was at an elementary school. I don't care about curse words in and of themselves, but I also don't want my eight year old running around town saying fuck all the time
I mean that's fair but this is pretty far down the thread, I wasn't responding to the elementary school anecdote I was responding to the comment above me. But yes obviously wearing a shirt with "fuck" on it at an elementary school is in bad taste no matter what
These dipshits: queer people existing is paedophilia
Also these dipshits: I'm going to have my child walk round wearing an explicitly sexual misogynist joke on their shirt.
I have very clear memories of an elementary school classmate wearing an "I'm Bart Simpson, who the hell are you?" t-shirt with a bandaid taped over the word hell.
I work retail and I see those awful fuck your feelings shirts all the time, and they always have young kids with them. They always yap about protecting children while ignoring that most people don't want their kids seeing that kind of language
civic culture had an important if imperfect structural role
no idea how to square the circle of public culture as leveler versus excluder, but one reason the civil rights era succeeded is its regard for other tentpole norms of civitas
The conservatives who castigated the left for enabling anti-social behavior turned out to not be the actual conservative movement, who itself was actually also into antisocial behavior, just of a different nature. The higher anti-social trend is secular.
Ditto… where did they go??
I miss them. Manners, should be a basic requirement. Along with being a decent human being and treating people with some respect and dignity.
What really got me going was the “Christian” right saying and having banners saying Let’s Go Brandon. What’s ironic about that is the left did not come up with anything crude like that for DT who completely deserved it!
Father of one of my kids’ (7 years) friends was driving them to a bday party and thought it would be a good idea to play a remix of “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” for the children. Needless to say, my child is not allowed with him unsupervised anymore
Yeah it’s considered hack among lefties but I maintain the salience of civic duty is still relevant and the hollowing out of basic social etiquette has made the country more crass in other important ways, albeit less critical than *gestures at revanchist conservatism and its economic policies*
This is like me about classic American architecture. I moved to boston 8 years ago and as I approach hopefully buying a house I am so RETVRN about proper proportions on dormers, gable end returns and keeping as much original woodwork as humanly possible. but from the left
I just find those types of people to be really annoying and obnoxious, call them out on it and they’ll get all in their fee fees. Unfortunately, I’m surrounded by these fake toughies.
Multiple “fuck Joe Biden” flags around me (still!) and I feel like it’s turned me into the “won’t someone please think of the children” Simpson’s lady.
What's your "America was a land of achievers until the welfare state, we need to end all handouts. Except for baseball stadiums for major league teams" issue going to be?
At the grocery store an older (60s) women kept her bags and herself at the end of the belt, after her checkout, blocking us from bagging, for 5 minutes, bc she was filling out a store promotion on her phone and periodically asking the cashier for tech support. It was maddening.
I know I'm old and washed because I'm mad about people's headlights nearly every day (many are stupid bright, many other drivers will not use them in daylight hours even if visibility is like 100m)
This is why I read what people like you and Chris Hays write about. The incivility anymore is disgusting. Please keep doing what you're doing. It's appreciated.
Yes. Manners and consideration are part of (though not the whole of) the idea of respect, which has been a core part of liberal/left thought since Kant
Marx would say you're worse than the capitalists, b/c soc-dems won't use violence to save the prols. *rolls eyes* We are so f*cked in this country. Left, right insane, and center ineffectual.
Man, I've always been there. My motto for the past 30 years has been "Kindness...and no assholes." And I won't wear it on a t-shirt or shout it at others.
My son ran a children’s race last week - ages 4-13 - and I saw a mother of very small children with a t-shirt that “badass woman” and had a number of AR-15 and bullet graphics. And I thought, come on ma’am, this a children’s event. There are bounce houses at the finish line. Show some restraint.
Something that I changed my mind about during Trump's first term is that the founders were right that civic virtue was both a real thing (not just the behavioural product of institutions) and also important.
There used to be a picture of George Will in green pants on the internet, but it appears they’ve done a good job of scrubbing it. Just ghastly. Upsetting possibly.
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1. Be Cool.
2. C'mon.
3. Niiice.
Someone wearing a Fuck Around shirt. Look at them and say "C'mon. Be Cool." Someone without one...Niiice.
Old enough from the left, of course...
The Joad Family wasn't kept from seeking opportunity by government hand outs in Oklahoma.
“I don’t find him all that bright,” Cosmo Kramer on George Will.
I would be tempted to ask him whom it's directed at.
Isn’t this calculated, open belligerence the animating principle of the MAGA right? Letting people say f-you to people who think they’re better?
Like I was on the George Carlin side twenty years ago but this... feels like maybe an overcorrection???
(Obviously not the only issue here)
That is very different than "fuck your feelings" which is aimed *at* someone.
Luckily I’m from the south, so I have a lot of good substitutes, and I mix in exclamations in other languages for color, so it’s like “cheese and rice oy vey ainakot ai-ya, ai-ya, ai-ya” when I’m upset in public, and I probably just sound nuts.
The old norms of decorum genuinely sucked in a lot of ways! So liberals naturally embraced social anarchism
But then it turns out... you do kind of need some sort of norms of decorum! Just, preferably ones that don't suck
But I am guessing you mean more what I used to think it was
The meaning of the sentence is what is offensive, however it is worded because the operative word is always YOUR feelings, never theirs.
Using the expletive in that setting is worse. The message including it just makes it...moreso.
Avoid the Appearance of Impropriety
Degraded to
Maintain Plausible Deniability
The bar lowered to
Can't Prove it in a Rigged Court, fuqk you
Is it a Che! t-shirt? I think it is.
(not saying for Bouie to do, he’s brilliant at what he already does, but for someone else’s rollo)
that I just took a hot piss on an American flag.
Permission to Be an Asshole is
It’s how we keep a decent society for all.
I swear like a drunken sailor, but not in public. I say excuse me, thanks and you’re welcome. I hold doors for older folks and women with strollers. It’s how we are supposed to behave.
I will contact each person on that list and encourage them to persist!!!
There was nothing civil about the Civil War.
This is not a tea party, it’s a fight to the death.
Or let it chip. Who cares. Be kind.
If my kid said some of the stuff the incoming president has said, id lose my shit.
"Don't you know there's more to life than a little bit of money??"
Will’s whole thrust has been that the taking of rights and benefits from his inferiors should be accomplished all genteel and gentlemanly by all sides.
Movies? Photos?
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/08/12/ten-to-one-isnt-good-enough-for-the-gop/
Liberal democracy is making other people feel comfortable in our society.
Revolutionaries reject the existing society and seek to dismantle it in favor of their preferred norms.
Our existing order holds that trans people be addressed as they wish;
The revolutionaries want to institute a norm where trans people are insulted and shamed.
And talk radio, fox, youtube, websites, and podcasts just poisoned the well for everyone.
People should be publicly shamed for their public behavior.
the problem is normalized gleeful hostility & hatred toward your neighbors and the refusal to accept even the smallest personal inconvenience to share a society with others
(TBC obviously the hatred is worse, yes)
Also these dipshits: I'm going to have my child walk round wearing an explicitly sexual misogynist joke on their shirt.
no idea how to square the circle of public culture as leveler versus excluder, but one reason the civil rights era succeeded is its regard for other tentpole norms of civitas
I miss them. Manners, should be a basic requirement. Along with being a decent human being and treating people with some respect and dignity.
“I want my mommy, I want my daddy, and I want my lawyer.”
Ma'am. This is a library.