The Theory of the Vulgar Class
Collapsing norms, cage matches, and a republic in danger
On Sunday Donald Trump celebrated his 80th 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.
That last criticism may strike some readers as elitist and trivial. Yet the vulgarity that is the hallmark of Trump and his surrounding circle of oligarchs is a symptom of something not at all trivial: The collapse of social norms. As I argued yesterday, these norms historically played a key role in mitigating abuses of power and privilege during the Gilded Age, the last time America suffered from extreme income and wealth inequality (though not nearly as extreme as what we have now).
Norms matter. In his classic book The Theory of the Leisure Class — published in 1899, at the apogee of the Gilded Age — Thorstein Veblen famously argued that much of the behavior of his era’s elite was driven not by the desire to enjoy life but by the desire to impress others. Partly they did this through conspicuous consumption. Thus they built lavish mansions staffed by legions of servants.
However, members 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 and family
The contrast with the public behavior of Trump’s band of uber-wealthy is startling:
In addition to modeling upstanding behavior, the extremely rich of the Gilded Age were expected to have, or pretend to have, some virtues that were part of the aristocratic ideal, including a sense of noblesse oblige displayed by good works. Veblen was quite cynical about philanthropy, yet even he didn’t dismiss it completely, stating that:
The fact itself that distinction or a decent good fame is sought by this method [such as the endowment of a university, public library or museum] is evidence of a prevalent sense of the legitimacy, and of the presumptive effectual presence, of a non-emulative, non-invidious interest, as a consistent factor in the habits of thought of modern communities.
(Veblen’s lasting intellectual influence did not come from his sparkling prose style.)
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. No, I’m not one of those men who thinks about ancient Rome all the time. But there are some obvious parallels.
While the causes of the decline of republican government and Rome’s eventual transition to one-man rule were doubtless complex, there is broad consensus among historians that a key factor was the emergence of extreme inequality. A handful of men became incredibly wealthy from the spoils of Rome’s eastern conquests, and their wealth and power eventually became too great for the rules of constitutional, republican government to contain. Sound uncomfortably familiar?
The death throes of the Republic went on for many years. Politicians declared their rivals enemies of the state, deployed violent gangs to disrupt the rule of law, established temporary dictatorships, and more. The installation of Augustus as emperor in 27 BC was just the final act.
And during this long twilight of constitutional government, one of the ways the extremely wealthy and powerful sought both to demonstrate their wealth and to curry favor with the mob was by sponsoring gladiatorial games:
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.”
FYI: I’ll be doing a live conversation with Heather Cox Richardson tomorrow:
Link here.
NONMUSICAL CODA
Vulgarity is only the surface symptom. What matters is the disappearance of restraint.
A republic can live with conflict, inequality, partisanship, and even corruption. These are not new features of political life. The more dangerous moment comes when power no longer feels bound by shame, convention, or the need to justify itself in public terms. Formal institutions can regulate ambition only up to a point. They also depend on a wider moral and cultural environment: a belief that officeholders should show some measure of restraint, that wealth should at least present itself as connected to public responsibility, and that political victory should not be converted into personal domination.
This does not require romanticizing the old elite order. Earlier elites were often exclusionary, self-serving, and hypocritical. But hypocrisy itself tells us something. It means there was still a norm powerful people felt obliged to acknowledge, even if they violated it in practice. They still had to speak the language of duty, philanthropy, patriotism, constitutional order, or public service. The performance was often false, but the need to perform it revealed that society still imposed some symbolic discipline on power.
A more dangerous stage begins when the pretense is discarded. Billionaires can openly display contempt for public responsibility. Political leaders can turn state rituals into personal theater. Public spaces can be repurposed as stages for spectacle, intimidation, and loyalty performance. At that point, the republic does not need to be formally abolished. Its institutional shell can remain in place while its underlying political culture is steadily emptied out.
This is why vulgarity matters politically. It signals that oligarchic wealth has escaped not only economic constraint, but also symbolic constraint. The elite no longer seeks legitimacy through service, sacrifice, learning, refinement, or stewardship. It increasingly demands attention and submission through spectacle, money, personal charisma, and the aesthetics of domination.
The danger, then, is not simply that politics becomes uglier. It is that ugliness becomes a governing style. Cruelty becomes entertainment. Public office becomes performance. Violence becomes aestheticized. Loyalty to institutions gives way to loyalty to a person. The constitution, courts, elections, and official procedures may still exist, but the habits that made republican government possible begin to decay before the formal structure collapses.
A republic usually dies first as a moral order. Only later does the institutional order catch up.
Krugman is way too focused on the vulgarity of the American elite. The American people are pretty vulgar, too. The public is addicted to bombast, coarse entertainment, soft (and hard) pornography, and trashy social media. Trump shares these traits, obviously; he could be a character from a Reality TV show (which, in fact, he was). Vulgarity is a big part of his appeal. It makes him seem "authentic."