I tend to think that, among the many ways in which this country has failed or degraded itself in substituting sentimentality for ceremony, one of the more prominent examples is the excessive frequency with which government officials order that the flag be flown at half-staff. (I was pleased a while back to see the Atlantic making the same point.) If I had my druthers, flying the flag at half-staff would be limited to the deaths of former presidents and VPs, current Supreme Court justices and congressional leaders, the death of any Medal of Honor winner, and a stringently limited number of national tragedies, rather than tragedies in general.
Every now and again, though, the nation diminishes its own dignity by engaging in insufficient ceremony. And so I note the remarkable fact that the president–who in the past two days has on social media celebrated himself in the neighborhood of three dozen times in addition to discussing the elections, the price of a turkey at Walmart, Joe Scarborough’s ratings, his own ratings, who Jews are allowed to vote for, the alleged “Golden Age” of America, and a half-dozen books he’s hawking–has yet to make a statement about the death of a former two-term vice president, and, although it shouldn’t matter, one from his own party at that. Certainly not on his social media outlet, which essentially is his primary channel for official communications; and definitely not on the White House website’s list of official official communications. (The president’s chief liar has noted curtly that Trump is “aware” of Cheney’s passing.)
Issuing at least a boilerplate statement on the death of a former high elected official–as opposed to, say, remarking that “Joe Scarborough’s Television Ratings…have gone, as they say, ‘down the tubes'”–is one of those “norms” whose “disruption” we’re always hearing about, sometimes in rhapsodic terms. It’s a pretty good norm! We should keep it. Its absence is a small but remarkable thing. Just as administrations of both parties should not normalize a frequency of flag-lowering that turns a meaningful formal gesture into an empty and/or cheaply sentimental one, so we shouldn’t normalize the idea that it’s okay for a president–even this one–to have absolutely, utterly, not a shred of class. (LBJ, a rather vulgar man, once found himself in trouble for lifting up one of his beagles by the ears. If Johnson had not only picked up the beagle, but killed and eaten it as the press watched, he would still be by far the classier president.)
Trump’s lack of class with respect to Cheney’s death dovetails nicely with the ongoing discussion, illustrated by the Heritage Foundation’s self-inflicted wounds and the intramural urgings of others that a Nazi in need is a friend indeed, about the relationship between actual conservatives and the non- and anti-conservative right. All of Trump’s actions and statements are best understood as personal–emanations of hatred, greed, selfishness, lust, resentment, childishness, and so on–rather than political, partisan, philosophical (as if), or ideological. Still, it’s no stretch to see his failure in this instance as further evidence that his civil war against his own country is being waged against not only Democrats and citizens of whatever party in large stretches of the country that have Democratic elected officials, but conservatives as well.
What’s perhaps more striking is what it says about the relationship in the other direction. I don’t think Trump’s failure to perform the basic ritual obsequies in this case is being ignored by those who support him because it’s trivial, or more important things are going on, or because they reject basic formalities (although some surely do), or even out of hypocrisy. They’re ignoring it because they expect it from him. They don’t think he’s even capable of behaving better–of acting presidentially.
As with many things, there are questions of degree here. If one moves to a greater level of abstraction, one can observe or imagine bipartisan equivalents of this. There are always corrupt members of Congress, for example, and there have been (and doubtless still are) plenty of corrupt Democrats in the House whose corruption goes largely unmentioned by their allies in part because no one expects anything better from them. And, of course, it’s not at all unique if we understand the regime in terms of royalist court politics rather than democratic party politics.
Nevertheless, we should not neglect what is remarkable, if not unique, about this. The dominant political movement of our time is a cult of personality in which most of the officials in that movement–including, notwithstanding the sycophancy and the loyalty-obsessed hiring, a large percentage of the executive branch and almost all of that branch’s officials who are connected to or sponsored by the vice president–think the leader of that movement is useful but contemptible, a unique but also uniquely monstrous figure to be flattered and endured until a successor can be placed on the throne. That’s not a terribly healthy thing. (Nor was the related phenomenon of living with a superannuated Democratic president). And it certainly doesn’t relieve them of moral and spiritual complicity for what they are going along with. But it’s a hell of a fascinating phenomenon.