“I follow on social media fixtures of the MAGA movement. They say of each other in public what in politics 40 years ago people said in private and when drunk. FRAUD, LIAR, GRIFTER, WHORE. What a hothouse. Do they expect that with a nature like that they can go into the future as a serious force and a movement that coheres? They don’t seem to worry about it. Why not?” Those lines are taken from Peggy Noonan’s column in the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago. They formed part of Noonan’s discussion about the ongoing controversy within the MAGA base over the Jeffrey Epstein files.

That part of the article caught my attention because it touched on something I have been thinking about a lot lately. Noonan is clearly baffled by the MAGA base. But as I reflected on her words, it occurred to me that she perhaps should have shone the spotlight on American society as a whole. To pose the question that has been on my own mind these past few months, I decided to change the pronouns in her last three sentences above and rephrase them thus: “Do we expect that with a nature like that we can go into the future as a serious force and a movement that coheres? We don’t seem to worry about it. Why not?”

I am endlessly mystified by how we all seem unbothered by the rapid coarsening of our national culture. I think Noonan goes back too far to set a baseline for when this corrosion began. Having been in America for only thirty-three years, I would say, on the basis of my observation, that the changes she describes have occurred mostly in the last decade or so. Up until the mid-2010s, some of the things we see and hear today would have been unimaginable to most of us.

The things Noonan says she sees on social media nowadays have probably always been said. The difference is that in the old days, most of us recoiled in horror when we heard such talk. As a result, the people who held those types of views and thought about espousing them were well aware that the larger society had zero tolerance for that kind of language and behavior. They were afraid of becoming pariahs if they exposed themselves to the public so they stayed in the dark shadows.

For some reason, we, the broader public, have suddenly developed a high level of tolerance for lewdness. That has emboldened the foul-mouthed crowd. Now they spew their toxic stuff openly. Language and behaviors that should be completely unacceptable in any normal society have become normalized. We have to hope and pray that somehow, this genie can be put back in the bottle.

In the past few years, I have heard a few historians and social and political scientists say that America has experienced worse social convulsions in the past and survived them. The Civil War, Vietnam and Watergate are frequently offered as examples. Watergate is of course a minor spasm compared to the other two, which were hot wars in which hundreds of thousands of Americans died. It might seem therefore that we need not be too alarmist about our current national condition. We shouldn’t be too complacent though.

As a trained engineer, I know all about rusting and how damaging it is, given its irreversibility. That is why this acceleration of cultural deterioration in our society makes me so nervous. Where is the sense of urgency that is required to stop this corrosion? Collectively, we don’t seem too worried about it. Why not?