WELCOME TO THE TWITTER ELECTION, FEATURING SNARK AND MORE SNARK:

Although this post focuses on Twitter, it’s not only Twitter. I’ve noticed over and over—on blogs, on television, in comments, in life—that snark has become the dominant conversational style, the coin of the realm these days. And the phenomenon is only growing.

Nearly everything is irony or mockery, coming from what appears to be a very deep public cynicism, fed in turn by the constant cynicism and mockery. No one is really laudable any more. Elect a narcissistic con man? Why not? They’re all narcissistic con men, so let’s back the conny-ist and most narcissistic con man of all. And let’s laugh about it, and taunt the opposition. Integrity is for suckers, and only saps would believe that anyone smart has it. Except, paradoxically, the snarky, who show the depth of their integrity by the depth of their mocking cynicism.

You might say in response that their cynicism is deserved: we’ve been betrayed by everyone, in government especially, Republicans and Democrats, they’re all lying thieves, yada yada yada. I’m not at all sure it’s that much worse than it used to be. But even if it is, it’s certainly not everyone, and what I see is an incessant, petulant, nit-picky fault-finding on the part of a public that rejects good (or good enough) people in public life for one mistake, one bad judgment, one intemperate remark, and tars them as forever beyond the pale.

The public wants—as I put it a while ago—madder music and stronger wine. Trump gives it to them today, but it needn’t be Trump—next cycle it will be someone else. It’s not about Trump, it’s about what the public has come to be interested in, and what the public demands.

As Allan Bloom noted a quarter century ago in The Closing of the American Mind, American intellectual life and pop culture is already a colonial outpost of the Weimar Republic. What’s next? Idiocracy, or something worse?