THE IDEA THAT America harbors an epidemic of “assholism,” as Geoffrey Nunberg has it, is one that most people would spontaneously accept before feeling an urge to temper it. No doubt people in 1932 or 1872 had a similar feeling that their age was coarser than the last. Nunberg knows that they did, but he proposes that assholism is more rampant in society than ever before. This latter thesis, despite yielding some deft anthropology, is less successful than the first.
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