How Low Can It Go?

By Christine Rosen

Thursday, April 17, 2025

 

In 2023, technology activist and science fiction author Cory Doctorow described how internet platforms that start out serving their users eventually decay through a series of self-interested and misguided choices, negatively affecting the quality of experience for everyone who uses the platform. He called this process (with apologies for the vulgarity of the neologism) “enshittification,” and the word stuck because it captured well the way many people felt about the deterioration of their online interactions over time.

 

Something similar has been happening in our political culture.

 

It is conventional wisdom to note that the internet and social media have transformed our politics, as they have our culture, and to lament how ignorant and performative and polarized so much of the discourse has become. Vulgarity and brazen behavior are rapidly becoming the norm, and the collective shrug this now elicits, even among conservatives, is remarkable.

 

It was not that long ago that a public figure indulging in vulgarity in public was still a newsworthy event. In 2004, when Dick Cheney was vice president, he allegedly told Senator Patrick Leahy, who had been publicly criticizing Cheney and his former employer Halliburton, “Go f*** yourself,” while senators were posing for a photo on the Senate floor. Both men downplayed the incident at the time, but it was widely reported because it was unusual. Years later, in an interview, Cheney said, “You’d be surprised how many people liked that.”

 

It shouldn’t have been that surprising; norms can erode quickly. In 2010, when then–Vice President Joe Biden was caught on a microphone telling President Barack Obama that his health care bill was a “big f***ing deal,” no one was shocked. In fact, the Democratic Party started hawking T-shirts celebrating the phrase. By 2016, Donald Trump’s well-known vulgarity was shocking not because he said outrageous things but because he refused to pretend that there was anything wrong with doing so. He was brazen, and many of his voters viewed this brazenness as a stand-in for strength and authenticity.

 

People also used to distinguish between online and IRL (“in real life,” in the quaint, early parlance of the internet) behavior. Researchers studied the “online disinhibition effect,” whereby people who could hide behind the anonymity and physical distance provided by the screen were willing to behave in ways they never would face-to-face.

 

The widespread adoption of social media platforms and smartphones obliterated that demarcation line. Real-world behavior by public figures now resembles the kind of behavior that is common online, notable for its vulgarity, brazenness, and attention-seeking rather than its seriousness, even when ostensibly dealing with serious matters. In March, the official Trump White House X account posted pictures of a crying Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a “previously deported alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking,” as she was being arrested by ICE in Philadelphia. Most people would not be bothered by such a post, unless they believe, as many Democrats mistakenly do, that an open border is a human right. But above that post is an example of our new political culture: The image of Basora-Gonzalez had been turned into an AI-generated Studio Ghibli–style cartoon, with a stern-looking ICE officer holding the arm of a blubbering, handcuffed woman. Like the Biden White House’s attempts to make “Dark Brandon” memes happen, it was gratuitous and unserious at the same time. Yet people loved it; the post received over 75 million views and 161,000 likes. (An earlier, Valentine’s Day post from the White House featured the faces of Trump and border czar Tom Homan with the text, “Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally, and we’ll deport you.”)

 

Serious policy disagreements now play out in public like toddlers fighting over toys. After Trump announced his “liberation day” tariffs, DOGE head Elon Musk, who is not a fan of tariffs, called White House trade adviser (and tariff superfan) Peter Navarro “Peter Retarrdo.”

 

As Noah Rothman has noted in National Review, vulgarity is a game everyone plays. After Trump’s joint address to Congress in March, Ken Martin, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, responded with, “Go to hell,” while Senate Democrats posted videos describing “sh** that ain’t true” that Trump had said. Politico devoted an entire story to the various techniques that Democrats were employing to swear more effectively. “I don’t swear in public very well, but we have to f*** Trump,” Democratic Representative Maxine Dexter said at an anti-Trump rally.

 

Perhaps the most instructive case study in the growth industry that is political vulgarity and brazenness is Representative Jasmine Crockett, the Democratic congresswoman from Texas’s 30th district, who regularly uses curse words to express herself. An interview she gave to Vanity Fair in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election is typical: A self-involved logorrheic mishmash littered with “ain’ts” and f-bombs and complaints about her “old as sh**” colleagues, it is what you might get if you prompted ChatGPT to write a profane, delusional hero’s journey.

 

After Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene made an obnoxious remark about Crockett’s fake eyelashes during a hearing, she was scolded by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said, “How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person!” Crockett responded by asking the committee chairman, “If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach blonde, bad built butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?” The first woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, Jeannette Rankin, must be spinning in her grave.

 

Crockett reserves her vitriol for her political opponents, and it can verge on the threatening and deeply offensive. During a virtual rally to oppose Elon Musk, she said, “On March 29, it’s my birthday, and all I want to see happen on my birthday is for Elon to be taken down.” (When asked by a reporter a few months earlier what her message to Musk was, she responded, “F*** off.”)

 

In an echo of Trump’s seeming to mock a reporter’s disability during his first run for president, Crockett, referring to Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, who uses a wheelchair, told an audience at a fundraiser for the LGBTQ group Human Rights Campaign: “We in these hot-ass Texas streets, honey. Y’all know we got Governor Hot Wheels down there, come on now. And the only thing hot about him is that he’s a hot-ass mess, honey.”

 

It’s not surprising that Crockett also spends a lot of time making TikTok videos of herself dancing and lip-synching to Kendrick Lamar songs and dropping the word “bullsh**” as often as possible. Her official X account feed is an exercise in performative vulgarity. This isn’t code-switching; it’s class cosplay. Crockett is the daughter of a pastor, and as a child she attended an elite private school in St. Louis, Mo. In interviews from only a few years ago, she speaks in complete sentences devoid of curse words and slang. Like too many elected officials on the left and the right, however, she thinks posturing, profanity, and producing TikTok videos is the same as governing.

 

They do this because it works. It’s not just grandstanding politicians who are to blame. It’s us. We spend most of our time consuming political news in isolation through screens and social media platforms that shape how we see the world, and we have become habituated to seeing and hearing this way of interacting and attention-seeking. Many of us do this ourselves on a smaller scale. Just as the online disinhibition effect has migrated to the real world, so, too, has the “very online” tone of political culture become mainstream. The behavior of our politicians reflects this.

 

The erosion of norms is a choice, however. In a study in the British Journal of Social Psychology in 2023, researchers studied bystanders who witnessed a social confrontation to better understand how social norms erode. “Observing deviant behavior can lead to norm erosion, where a norm is no longer seen as relevant and compliance with it is reduced,” they noted. But they also found that “when bystanders explicitly supported the confronter against the rule breaker, the norm was perceived as stronger.” In other words, standing by passively watching people being uncivil to others reinforces the idea that norms of civility no longer matter, but supporting someone who calls out such norm violations does reinforce the norm.

 

Other studies of peer behavior have reached similar conclusions, including one study that questioned what happened when bystanders witnessed others stealing from a charity versus donating to it. Alas, our better angels do not always prevail. “Observing other anonymous individuals violating the norm (taking from charity) increased the likelihood that the observers transgress as well,” researchers found. “Observing that others donate to charity, however, did not increase donations to the charity.”

 

What does this mean for the current state of our political culture?

 

Our age would benefit from the satirical eye of a Juvenal. Instead, we have the juvenile behavior of an ever-increasing number of elected officials competing for our attention alongside influencers and celebrities and pundits online. The old bread and circuses were meant to distract the public and keep them passive and manipulable while those in power maintained control. Today, too many of our leaders are eager to become starring acts in the digital circus rather than do the work of governing at all. We would do well to consider why we are so happy to watch them perform, and what it might be doing to us.