America’s future looks vulgar
From our US edition
The latest Super Bowl offers the most recent opportunity to reflect on the terminal state of our national culture, held together chiefly by a distractive and unhealthy mania for commercial sports and perfectly exemplified by the infantile yet aggressively transgressive nihilism of a brainless showoff calling himself Bad Bunny and dressed all in white, suggestive perhaps of an anti-Easter Bunny. Why, one wonders, has no political theorist from Hobbes forward posited the ideal human community as one which would combine political democracy with cultural and intellectual aristocracy – as, indeed, America at the time of her founding and for several generations thereafter did? Such an arrangement might satisfy critics of democratic society on the anti-egalitarian right, such as T.S.
