What's Going On In Trump 2.0?

Just recently, I discovered that as of this past January 25, Spirit Airlines had updated its dress code. Somehow I don't think it's a coincidence that this came within days of Trump's inauguration. According to ABC News,

Spirit Airlines has revised its "contract of carriage" to include updated guidelines for passenger conduct and attire, including a detailed dress code prohibiting provocative or inappropriate clothing.

. . . Outlined in Section 4.3 of the contract, the airline’s policy now explicitly states that passengers must not wear "see-through clothing; not adequately covered; exposed breasts, buttocks, or other private parts."

. . . The new dress code is part of broader rules governing passenger behavior under the "Conduct/Condition" section.

These new rules include, in part,

• Disorderly, abusive, or violent behavior that creates an unreasonable risk of offense or annoyance to others.
• Intoxication or drug use.
• Offensive odors, unless caused by a disability.

One benefit of retirement is that I haven't had to fly anywhere, for any reason, in nearly a decade, and back when I did fly a lot, the budget carrier was Southwest. Southwest is now one of the major carriers and no longer has policies like open seating, and it looks like Spirit has taken its place, but apparently even more so. Every now and then I'll hear a jab from someone like Gutfeld about how bad it is to fly Spirit, but I've never had to do this.

So I did some web searching. I wondered specifically whether people thought flying Spirit was unpleasant because they had to travel with half-naked, offensive, drunk, drug-addled, or smelly passengers, but I saw no mention of that. The most recent discussions focus on the extra charges, narrow seats, and late and canceled flights, but they mention the new dress and conduct rules without comment.

This contrasts with the near-universal recommendations from even Amtrak fans on YouTube that prospective customers not book Amtrak coach seats, because their fellow passengers will be half-naked, offensive, drunk, drug-addled, or smelly, like, er, passengers on Greyhound, which is the same market as Amtrak coach. And by the way, Amtrak is always late and cancels trains. But that's also the same lowest-price travel tier as Spirit. The Amtrak fans do mention that the coach seats are wider than on Spirit, but this only confirms the market they're discussing.

So I'm wondering if the media discussions are deliberately finessing the passenger-conduct problem when they talk about the Spirit dress code. Apparently it's OK to mention the extra charges, narrow seats, and late or canceled flights, but not the more delicate question of the passengers. Except all of a sudden, Spirit has decided the passengers are the big problem it wants to address. This may, of course, be a sensitive matter becsuse it's class-based. The low-fare passengers are also low class.

Just today I found another class-based discusion, this time at The Atlantic, Trump Has Found His Class Enemy, by Franklin Foer. Foer sounds the alarm on the new administration:

Its goal isn’t just to shatter a few institutions. It intends to crush the power and authority of whole professions, to severely weaken, if not purge, a social class.

The target of the administration’s campaign is a stratum of society that’s sometimes called the professional managerial class, or the PMC, although there’s not one universal moniker that MAGA applies to the group it is now crushing. That group includes society’s knowledge workers, its cognitive elite, the winners of the tournament that is the American meritocracy.

. . . Not so long ago, the upper-middle-class Americans who exemplify the PMC would have filled the ranks of both parties. But beginning in the 1990s, professionals began migrating in large numbers to the Democrats. Many affluent people with a cosmopolitan outlook were repelled by the GOP’s social stances and drawn to the economic moderation of politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Doesn't this sound a lot like the views of Foer's colleague at The Atlantic, David Brooks, who in his 2000 Bobos in Paradise announced that in the postwar era, the Ivy League via the SATs had become a true meritocracy? The bobos, bourgeois bohemians with a cosmopolitan outlook, had broken the Jewish quotas and arrived. But even Brooks himself has moved on:

Back in 2000, I wrote a book called "Bobos In Paradise," and I noticed a whole code of conduct, and it had replaced the old WASP code. And it was basically people with '60s values and '90s money who thought it was gauche to spend money on a yacht but supercool to spend money on a $20,000 AGA stove.

. . . So the book I wrote in 2000 was largely quite positive. And one of the things I said in there was that anybody can join the Bobos. You go to college, you get a degree, and you're in. That turned out to be the most naive sentence I've ever written. . . . they've taken over the Democratic Party, and the working class has tended to leave left-wing parties.

It sounds like Brooks and Foer need to get together with Laurene Powell Jobs, their boss, and work things out so they're on the same page. Foer sees the bobos taking over the Democrats, and it's good, while Brooks sees the same thing, and it's bad. But at bottom, both see a class realignment, and that must certainly be correct. I'm intrigued, though, that Foer just this morning insists that the bobos are still meritocratic, "the winners of the tournament that is the American meritocracy", something Brooks would no longer say.

Let's look at what I think is one paradigm of Trump 2.0, the woman fencer who refused to compete against a male in a fencing tournament, the word Foer uses, which I've covered here, especially yesterday. In theory, a sports tournament is meritocratic, the best contestant wins. Except that the bobos have simply changed the definition of woman so that a man identifying as a woman can compete in the women's category and, with greater size, muscle strength, and testosterone, has a much greater chance of defeating a woman, when in fact he would be only a mediocre competitor in a men's competition.

The official fencing authority, controlled by the bobos, insists that the woman must compete against the male and disqualifies the woman for refusing to compete. This is the opposite of meritocracy. But there's also something in that sort of behavior that's deeply related to the impunity of Spirit Airlines or Amtrak coach passengers who've felt, or in the case of Amtrak, still feel, that their fellow passengers are a captive audience on which they can force themselves, half-naked, offensive, drunk, drug-addled, and smelly.

In the case of fencing, the Trump administration is reestablishing true meritocratic standards. In the case of Spirit Airlines, It seems to me that rthe simple outcome of the election is forcing a basic realignment of public decorum that goes beyond social class. In fact, neither issue is really class-based, something Foer completely misses.