ELITIST AND TRIVIAL.

Over the weekend Our President hosted a semiquincentennial cage match on the White House grounds, to the dismay of Excessively Earnest People everywhere.  I borrowed the title of this post from Paul Krugman's "The Theory of the Vulgar Class" that dreads "Collapsing norms, cage matches, and a republic in danger."

It's not about the restoration of bourgeois norms.  Rather, it turns into a lament for a previous era's leisure class, who at least maintained the impression of polite behavior when others were watching.  The professor opens, though, with dismay over such tacky show business in the Federal Capital.

On Sunday Donald Trump celebrated his 80^th birthday with a cage match on the White House lawn. The match and the events that surrounded it — especially the press conference with UFC fighters, shown above, held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial — were a desecration of America’s capital, whose monuments and buildings have always endeavored to represent small-r republican virtues. The whole affair was an affront to the values on which this nation was founded and also unspeakably vulgar.

The prize fighting also bothered Steven Harper, whose "We Are Better Than This" asks "President Donald Trump used the White House lawn to host a 21st-century cockfighting match where the birds were human beings. Is this rock bottom?"

It's all as James "Long Emergency" Kunstler foresaw last Friday.

Imagine what Victoria Nuland, Robert Reich, George Stephanopoulos, Elizabeth Warren, and other good folks of that ilk must be thinking. The. . . (Sputter sputter) indelicacy of it all! A freaking peace deal, and now this low-rent spectacle of ultra-violence! Like their whole world had turned out to be the meanest, lowest, most sordid backwater of the Marvel Comics universe where no one has ever heard of Chardonnay. The ape-men slugging, kicking, gouging, and head-butting each other half to death is one thing. . . but to let slip the opportunity to continue the Iran War with its downstream emoluments for another nineteen years. . . well, now that is an affront to all that is holy in the sub-basements of Foggy Bottom and the broom closets of Langley.

It's way too soon to see sixty days of discussion that will likely be interrupted by further episodes of violence as a peace deal, but that's for another post.

Mr Harper develops his complaint by appealing to the aesthetic sensibilities of public radio listeners, you know, the sort of person who might be receptive to a cruise line that doesn't operate casinos or book children with their parents.

President Thomas Jefferson first opened the White House lawn in 1801 when he invited the US Marine Corps Band to perform. Since then, it has been the scene of children’s Easter Egg Rolls (begun by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878), a tennis court (President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902), a performing arts venue (President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965), Willie Nelson’s performance (President Jimmy Carter in 1980), the Beach Boys’ South Lawn Beach Party (President Ronald Reagan in 1983), youth T-ball games (President George H.W. Bush in 2001), and a collaborative arts festival (President Barack Obama in 2016).

The good news is that a recent Reuters poll revealed that only 16% of Americans—including one-third of Republicans—said that holding UFC events on the White House lawn was appropriate.

Somewhere, I suspect, Militant Normals are wondering why Mr Harper didn't call attention to assorted lawn parties for the sexual underground during the Jarrett regency.  That's not relevant today.  Mr Harper's use of the word "sacrilegious" to describe the prize fighters using rooms in the White House to change.  What were they supposed to do, pitch a dressing room top on the South Lawn, in the fashion of the itinerant circus?  But that's not relevant either.

Rather, what Messrs Harper and Krugman are doing is reinforcing the conceit that they, and their regular readers, and their sympathetic followers on social media, are Better People who Care More.  You know, dear reader, the sort of person who reads "World Cup Fans in the U.S. Are Sightseeing at … Buc-ee’s and Bass Pro Shops?" and concurs with the sub-headline describing those places as "the more mundane parts of American life."  Such people, who might upon hearing "Cracker Barrel" ask, "Do you mean Crate & Barrel," really ought be pitied for revealing how nontrivially sealed into their elitist bubble they actually are.

And those lost bourgeois virtues that Professor Krugman laments?

[M]embers of the Gilded Age elite didn’t solely aim to display their wealth. They also tried to appear respectable. There were surely many private affairs and betrayals we will never know about. But the important point is that the super-wealthy of that era presented to the American public an image of being responsible members of society

John D. Rockefeller supported the Baptist church and handed out dimes.  Elon Musk is sanguine about rockets failing and sires babies.  Thus, the professor's E-T-T-S moment.

Today’s oligarchs, by contrast, have largely given up on the old norms of social and individual responsibility. They give very little money to good causes and their vulgar taste reflects their in-your-face attitude towards the public. In our current hyper-Gilded Age, extreme vulgarity and the decline of philanthropy are really different aspects of the same phenomenon: the rise of an elite so disconnected from ordinary Americans that it feels no need to even appear to be honorable.

So in a real sense we are living in the midst of a reenactment of the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, not a second American Gilded Age.

He could have continued with observations about Our President's "extreme vulgarity" and all the rest.  His close doesn't require such observations.

The vulgarity of the Trumpian elite isn’t in itself that important. But it’s a symptom of a collapse in values and norms that, unless confronted and reversed, may herald the end of the American experiment. We should heed the words of the Stoic philosopher Seneca about the rise and fall of the Roman Republic: “Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.”

That collapse, though, has long been coming, and socially "progressive" creative types have been transgressing values and norms for a long time.

The trickle-down effect of Weimar mores on the living conditions of people living in modest circumstances has been something cultural conservatives have recognized long before Roger Simon had his road-to-Gomorrah moment: it's been around at least since Emmett Tyrrell wrote The Liberal Crack-Up, and that book was in print before an obscure vice-president named Dan Quayle made a cause out of the "lifestyle choice" of a television character called Murphy Brown.

In the scheme of things, a mixed martial arts show on the White House lawn is only a small step on the way to ruin.  What might the bigger steps be?  Fans of a basketball team use their championship as reason to celebrate by trashing their downtown?  No, that's authenticity.  Publicly promiscuous polymorphous perversity permeates pride parades?  No, that's freedom.

No wonder the Militant Normals rage.