Representing Excellence Matters, and Can Restore the Right

Old Forms, New Forms, and Stagnation

Welcome back, everyone, and thank you so very much for reading! Today’s article is related to something about which I have written before—the cultivation of beauty—but from a somewhat different angle that I hope you find interesting. It is, I have been told, one of the better articles I have yet written. It is also primarily paywalled. Paid subscribers: thank you so very much for your support. All those who are not yet paid subscribers: while some of this article is free, please subscribe for just a few dollars a month to support this project, get access to audio episodes, and read this article in full. As always, please tap the heart to “like” this article if you get something out of it, as that is how Substack knows to promote it! Here is the audio version:

[AUDIO] How One Dresses Is a Political Act

A much-lamented aspect of modern life in America is the phenomenon that Professor Robert Putnam identified so poignantly in his famous Bowling Alone: our public life and public spaces are dying.

A few clubs remain, of course. Each metropolitan zone has its increasingly motley assortment of city, country, and athletic clubs. A few genealogical societies are holding on, though with most members in their “golden years”. Some charities still command the resources and influence to host events of some sort, though typically not the tremendous balls for which they were once famous; no one knows how to dance now, after all.

But, generally, we no longer engage in the sort of commendable and vibrant public life characterized by a plethora of voluntary associations, clubs, leagues, and so on that used to exist. Those voluntary gatherings of the like-minded, a phenomenon that de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America and countless others recognized as well, have died out.

So too has much of the related public social life that was once taken for granted. “Rowdy teens” hang out at malls, not people with whom one wishes to associate. Public restaurants are increasingly an ordeal rather than gathering spots. Streets are ugly war zones infested by vagrants and covered in detritus, not promenades. Hotels are an appendage of the Patel mafia, not nice places. And so on. Some nice things remain behind the gates and walls of private clubs or massive costs. But public life is dead.

The reasons for that are manifold. There is the obvious issue of the Civil Rights Act making it essentially impossible for public places to remain nice, as they cannot keep out the sort of biological refuse that has turned Miami into a war zone for “Spring Break” this year. As Bennett's Phylactery put it on X, “When public spaces are unlivable, people demand more private space. It’s stupid & wasteful for every house in the Texas suburbs has a private pool, but we can’t have nice public pools.”¹ Indeed.

But that’s not all of it. Regardless of the diversity menace, to be in public now is to have every sense assaulted by the tangible, visible manifestations of a demoralized populace. The slovenliness problem has gotten so bad that the Trump Department of Transportation has taken to begging Americans to please wear real clothes at the airport.² To be in line at a service counter, to sit at a table in a restaurant, to pop into a store, is to hear rudeness and vulgarity between the employees and the customers at an unprecedented level, and one that crosses racial barriers. Then, of course, there are the issues with obesity, Third Worlders loudly jabbering on their phones, the vast proliferation of bodies covered in multifarious assortments of tattoos and piercings, and so on.

In short, public life has become depressing. The old world, including America before the cultural devastation of the 1960s and ‘70s, was characterized by a general sense of public decorum, decency, and manners that were generally enforced. This is why men wore suits, women wore dresses, and disorder wasn’t tolerated. Though it’s from a later period and features a gangster, this fun clip from The Sopranos gets to that:

Manners were prized because they made life more livable when out in public, as Sophy Burnham puts it in her The Landed Gentry: “Manners. Courtesy. They are intended to make more bearable the harshness of life, to reduce its pain.” Indeed. And the fact that all the little things that used to go into taking that harshness off—namely, manners and a sense of decorum—have fallen away means that those places known for being unrefined, which is to say most public places, are unbearably unpleasant. Too much disorder exists.³ They reek of entropy and its rotten wages, for the standards that maintain civilization have been wiped away.

Which leads me to something I’ve had fun going back and forth about with John Carter and others recently⁴: the matter of dress, and the fact that how one dresses is a political act. I’ll explain why below, along with why it matters, and give some fun examples and suggestions in the process.

The Restoration of the Right, and How to Manifest It