"For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal"
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Bernstein’s line lands like a status report delivered with a wince: not just that culture is getting tackier, but that tackiness is being promoted as a virtue. The bite is in the escalation. “Weird” can be creative; “stupid” can be harmless; “coarse” can be cathartic. Put together, they become a triptych of decline, and Bernstein’s real target isn’t eccentricity but the machinery that rewards it. He’s describing a shift from subculture to default setting, where what once lived at the margins is now the algorithmic center of gravity.
The syntax matters. “For the first time” is provocation and alarm bell, inviting debate while smuggling in a claim of historical rupture. Bernstein came up in an era when institutions still pretended to be gatekeepers: network news with standards departments, newspapers with prestige, politicians who at least tried to sound serious. As a Watergate-era journalist, he’s attuned to the way performance corrodes accountability. When “coarse” becomes an “ideal,” public life tilts from persuasion to humiliation, from argument to dunking. The subtext is moral, but it’s also strategic: if attention is the currency, then vulgarity is liquidity.
He’s also mourning a particular civic bargain. Democracies can survive disagreement; they struggle when the common language is degraded into spectacle. Bernstein isn’t nostalgic for elites so much as wary of a culture where seriousness is treated as naivete and cynicism is marketed as authenticity.
The syntax matters. “For the first time” is provocation and alarm bell, inviting debate while smuggling in a claim of historical rupture. Bernstein came up in an era when institutions still pretended to be gatekeepers: network news with standards departments, newspapers with prestige, politicians who at least tried to sound serious. As a Watergate-era journalist, he’s attuned to the way performance corrodes accountability. When “coarse” becomes an “ideal,” public life tilts from persuasion to humiliation, from argument to dunking. The subtext is moral, but it’s also strategic: if attention is the currency, then vulgarity is liquidity.
He’s also mourning a particular civic bargain. Democracies can survive disagreement; they struggle when the common language is degraded into spectacle. Bernstein isn’t nostalgic for elites so much as wary of a culture where seriousness is treated as naivete and cynicism is marketed as authenticity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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