How Trump Taught Everybody to Be Obnoxious and Cruel – POLITICO
And there was Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who is on her way out of Congress after losing the primary to fellow Democrat Rep. Jerry Nadler. New York voters weren’t persuaded by her late-in-race suggestions that her opponent may be “senile” and unable to serve another two years.
What’s that you say? Meh….
It’s a reasonable reaction. Connoisseurs of political invective have heard much better. People who fret about the degradation of political culture in recent years have noted much worse.
Yet there were a couple of notable characteristics about these noxious comments. For starters, they may be representative of the Age of Trump, but none of them were uttered by Donald Trump, or aimed at him, or were in any way about him.
What’s more, none of these insults was apparently made in a fit of pique, or were a hot-mic aside not intended for public consumption. On the contrary, they were apparently all unleashed as a matter of deliberate strategy, in the hope that they would be regarded as clever by the political class and strike a resonant chord with voters. In other words, they were at least trying to play the game by the rules as they are now understood.
The implications are significant, even as the insults themselves are likely too lacking in impact, or wit, to linger in mind for long. Here is another part of Trump’s legacy: Other political actors are mimicking his instinct for casual savagery. It is now part of the everyday diet of American political life.
If one is feeling pessimistic about the future — that’s been a safe enough bet lately — there are a couple of possibilities to consider. It could be that even after Trump is finally routed, by prosecutors or voters or old age, he will have to be recognized as the supreme political innovator of his age. For a generation after FDR, or JFK, or Reagan, even politicians who did not embrace their policies often wove elements of their styles into their own public presentations. Perhaps that is what we are seeing again, when even a Democrat like Maloney talks trash about a fellow Democrat, in uncomfortably personal terms, with language that would have been astonishing seven years ago but is now only of passing note.
A more troubling possibility, however, might be that Trump is not the cause of the new crudeness and rudeness of contemporary politics — just an especially florid manifestation of much deeper trends. The paradox of modern technology, especially as harnessed by social media, is that it is especially proficient in unleashing primitive dimensions of human character. That suggests a renaissance of insult, indignation and conspiracy theory — the signatures of the politics of contempt — is going to be with us for a long time to come no matter what happens to Trump.