On October 14, Politico reported on a group chat in which leaders of various Young Republicans groups seemed to vie with one another to see who could say the most offensive thing. Brianna Douglass, a Vermont national committee member, chided another member of the chat for “expecting the Jew to be honest.” When Peter Giunta, head of the New York State Young Republicans, was asked whether he was watching an NBA game, he replied: “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.” Other members responded approvingly.
As I read these messages, I recalled a seemingly very different exchange. In the spring of 1908, Virginia Woolf and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, were sitting in a London drawing room. In walked Lytton Strachey, whose Eminent Victorians appeared ten years later. He pointed at a stain on Bell’s white dress and asked, “Semen?”
Woolf later described her incredulous thought: “Can one really say it?” She and her sister burst out laughing. “With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down,” she recalled. This moment marked a revolution in the mores of the Bloomsbury Group. Modesty and reserve gave way to the thrill of transgression. “We discussed copulation with the same excitement and openness that we had discussed the nature of good,” Woolf wrote. From that point on, the word “f*ck” sprang to their lips.
Quentin Bell, Woolf’s nephew and biographer, would later suggest that this moment marked a transformation not only in the manners of the Bloomsbury Group, but in the manners of the middle classes more generally. Judging by present evidence, he was right. The word that Woolf once found so delightfully shocking is now commonplace, broadcast to millions on television and radio, and regularly used in what was once called polite company.
The culture of transgression has been universalized. There are advantages to this—most notably, the spread of what Woolf’s husband Leonard called a “sense of intimacy and complete freedom of thought and speech”—but there are also downsides. When it is unremarkable to say “f*ck” in polite company, then other things become sayable as well. And when the thrill of transgression is pursued not only by a daring artistic set but by the culture at large, a great deal of crude transgression will result. The average man is not as clever as Lytton Strachey. He will try to get his friends to think, “Can one really say that?” by posting a Hitler meme.
This is the logic of edgy group chats like the one in which the Young Republicans took part. Seeking a feeling of intimacy and freedom, people say shocking things. But four-letter words no longer suffice. Our society is no longer structured around the observance of sexual propriety; it is structured instead around the value of tolerance. In order to be transgressive, one must speak in intolerant terms.
Our culture of tolerance is supported by two triumphal narratives: America’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II and the success of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Both narratives are now subject to challenge. One reason for this is the simple passage of time. When I was thirteen, my grandfather, who had fought the Germans in World War II, died. As my grandmother went through his things, she asked me to try on his old dress uniform. It was too small.
Young people who lack such memories are more likely to share Hitler jokes. They may also be tempted to transgression by the sense that these triumphal narratives have not always been invoked for good ends. The Churchill cult has been repeatedly invoked to justify ill-advised wars. Similarly, the moral prestige of the civil rights movement is now used to harass people such as Colorado baker Jack Phillips, whose only crime was to refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding.
In this way, America in the 2020s may be somewhat like the England of the early 1900s. The old values are losing their sway. Then it was moral correctness that lost its grip on those who wished to transgress boundaries; now it is political correctness. The former is necessary for a decent society, but there is little left of that kind of constraint. Properly understood, the latter encourages civic politeness, a socially useful notion in a pluralistic society. But political correctness became a progressive weapon decades ago and was thereby discredited, especially among young people on the right, who have known no other use. Nothing new has arisen to take the places of these two forms of correctness.
After the Young Republicans chat was leaked, Chuck Schumer called on all Republicans to denounce the remarks “swiftly and unequivocally.” Several did, including the New York Republican Elise Stefanik. The Kansas GOP disbanded its Young Republicans group. The party in New York followed suit.
Vice President JD Vance, however, dismissed the response as “pearl clutching” and pointed out that the Democratic nominee for Virginia attorney general, Jay Jones, had fantasized about shooting a Republican colleague and expressed hope that his children would die because “only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.” Andrew Kolvet, a leader of the conservative group Turning Point USA, likewise declined to condemn the remarks.
Is America simply too polarized to engage in universal condemnation of any specific instance of crude and offensive speech? Possibly. For that reason, I would like to make a proposal that can be regarded as perfectly non-partisan. Swear words should once more be rigorously excluded from any polite or public setting. This measure would elevate public discourse and diminish the cult of transgression, thereby reducing both the opportunities for and the appeal of offensive speech.
This idea came to me after I read an essay by the English professor Mark Edmundson on how inescapable swearing has become. Not only in the military barracks, but in many offices and middle-class homes, one hears “f*cking” this and “sh*t” that. Such words erode our respect for others and ourselves, an issue not unrelated to the kinds of demeaning speech found in that group chat. Their use promotes the idea that a man who wants to seem honest or real must speak impolitely. At some point that impulse will migrate from four-letter words to slurs. Edmundson ended his essay by observing that his father, who never swore, was “one of the very few white men I knew well growing up whom I never heard say anything racist.”
His experience was not unique. Growing up in small-town Nebraska in an evangelical church, I never heard my parents or their friends make racial remarks or other slurs, just as I never heard them say “sh*t” or “f*ck.” Those kinds of speech were unthinkable for them, and for related reasons. Their entire outlook opposed the valorization of transgression. Restraint is required for politeness—regarding race as much as sex.
The situation was slightly different when I started doing construction work. But not every place has to sound like a job site. Until we once again build a culture of modesty and restraint, we will continue to learn of offensive statements by people who aspire to public roles. They are only doing what they were taught by a society that has ceased to believe in anything except the value of transgression. Blame Lytton Strachey.
