The Age of Assholes
The Rules of Civility in an Antisocial Era
The summer after seventh grade, I spent a few weeks at Goucher College attending what I can only describe as a nerd camp. By day, I learned about equine veterinary medicine, but by night, I got my first glimpse of campus and dorm life. We ate at dining halls, hung out in common areas, and spent evenings circulating around the dorm, eating Papa John’s Pizza Product in hallways and popping into each other’s rooms until curfew. It was in this new social environment that I first heard Denis Leary’s satirically antisocial song, “Asshole.” The song is at once a skewering of a kind of Middle American worldview, in which the protagonist rebels against the stultifying complacency of bourgeois life to climb Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, achieving self-actualization by becoming, well, a colossal asshole.
What made the song satire is that Leary’s Asshole is in on the joke—he knows what he’s doing is wrong. I worry today that the song, or at least its spirit, has become something of an American anthem.
Leary identifies the core aspect of what it means to be an asshole: “I gotta go out and have fun at someone else’s expense.” Being an asshole is when you externalize the costs of your actions onto other people. You expect other people to clean up your dogshit. You force pedestrians to jump out of the crosswalk as you speed to your hot yoga class. You hold up the line at Starbucks waffling between the Trenta Iced Ozempic Latte and the MrBeast Protein Mocha with G.O.A.T. Milk.
Assholes have always roamed amongst us. What seems to have changed is that we once considered being an asshole a bad thing.
Today, we exhibit a much higher tolerance for what past Americans would have considered extremely antisocial behavior. Yet civil society depends on members of society conforming to certain social norms. If your parents weren’t savages, they probably taught you to say “please” and “thank you,” to wait your turn in line, to hold the door open for the next person, to wash your hands, to respect your elders.
As I enter my millennial dotage, my patience for the flouting of the basic social norms wears thin. The particular inciting event for today’s jeremiad was a bit of assholery I encountered earlier this week. We were walking our dog when a Waymo stopped in the road and began honking—unusual, since self-driving Waymos are the most courteous and cautious drivers on the street. As we rounded the corner, we saw why: a man was standing in front of the car, a few feet from the open door of his parked truck, intentionally ignoring it. This wasn’t some act of pedestrian protest; he was simply daring the Waymo to wait. It wasn’t until we made eye contact—and another car pulled up behind—that he moved.
He was caught in the act of being an asshole.
Now, people being assholes around Waymos is already a well-documented phenomenon, particularly in Assholetopia (i.e., California). But it seems like driving-related douchebaggery has accelerated in recent years. Legions of drivers have simply stopped using their blinkers to signal that they’re turning—frustrating to other drivers, but incredibly dangerous for pedestrians navigating an already hostile terrain. UPS vans and Ubers park in bike lanes, treating flexposts meant to separate rights-of-way as in-the-way, forcing bicyclists and scooters into traffic. Speeding is out of control. By prioritizing driver speed over the safety and convenience of anyone else, our roadways are engineered to create assholes out of all of us—but too many of us choose our convenience over responsibility on the road.
Of course, this pattern doesn’t stop at the curb.
Plenty of people act like assholes outside their cars. The dogwalker who leaves shit on the sidewalk isn’t just being gross, she’s forcing others to clean up her mess. The subway rider blasting TikToks in a packed car is turning a shared space into their private living room. The Instagramming mom ignoring her elementary school kid as he beats up a toddler is modeling antisocial behavior for the next generation. Even seemingly small acts like littering, spitting gum, or smoking around nonsmokers are all variations on a theme: I do what I want—fuck you very much. I can’t prove this behavior is on the rise, but it feels like this breakdown in social infrastructure—how we expect people to behave in shared spaces—is happening everywhere.
It’s tempting to think none of this matters, and I’d forgive you for dismissing these as the senile ravings of an Elder Millennial. But here’s what concerns me: a society that can’t sustain basic norms in low-stakes shared spaces shouldn’t be surprised when it can’t sustain them in high-stakes ones, either.
When George Washington was a teenager, he religiously copied and adopted the 110 Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation, a text originally written by French Jesuits. The Jesuits used the word bienséance, meaning “propriety” or “decorum”—words that Washington carried with him throughout his career and tried to imbue into the office of the president. Rules about not spitting in fires, killing vermin in the sight of others, or how to properly soak bread might strike the modern ear as peculiarly dated, but the bulk exhibit the timelessness of good manners, hospitality, and basic hygiene. The very first echoes the Golden Rule: “Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present.”
In other words, don’t be an asshole.
The rotunda of the US Capitol is painted with an allegorical fresco called The Apotheosis of Washington, showing Washington sitting in heaven between the goddesses Liberty and Victory. In Leary’s song, his narrator also rises to the full height of his character, ending with a ridiculous but unapologetic rant in which he fully embraces his base(d) nature. Call it The Apotheosis of the Asshole. Leary’s Asshole is gonna eat Big Macs and wipe his mouth with the American flag as he drives his ugly-as-sin gas-guzzler at 115 miles per hour only to “toss the styrofoam containers right out the side.” And why not? As he proclaims, “there ain’t a goddamn thing anybody can do about it,” because we’ve got “nuclear fucking weapons.”
In other words, we’ve got the power, so we might as well use it. And so Leary concludes: “I’m an asshole, and I’m proud of it.”
Washington understood—like a certain superhero—that with great power comes great responsibility, including when to show restraint. After winning the Revolution, Washington could have easily declared himself king. Instead, he surrendered his sword to Congress and retired under his own vine and fig tree—until he was recalled to serve as president under the new Constitution a few years later. As the first occupier of the office, Washington had enormous latitude to shape it. He rejected monarchist stylings, embraced civilian leadership, and elevated republican virtue—including punctilious good manners. Washington, as president, chose not to be an asshole.
But the framers knew they could not rely on the better angels of every future president’s nature. They created a system of checks and balances—courts, competing power centers, a Constitution—to provide guardrails. They tried, in other words, to build a system that was asshole-proof.
The problem is that the Constitution is only a piece of paper: it has no power of its own to preserve, protect, and defend itself. The formal guardrails only hold if people believe in them. As the Founders well understood, the self-government of a free people requires the self-control of free individuals. When that self-restraint erodes, when the rules of civility no longer govern civil society, the erosion of constitutional norms is the inevitable next step—and there is no reason to expect that an unscrupulous elected official will feel bound by them, either.
When we excuse small acts of assholery in everyday shared spaces, we pave the way for much graver acts at higher levels of public life.
Which brings us to Washington’s final Rule of Civility, the 110th: “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.” Civility isn’t politeness or a mere inconvenience. Individually, it’s what makes a person more than a robot or a monster; collectively, it’s the moral technology that makes a free society possible. As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, the question is whether we’ll rediscover pride in what it means to be American—or will we, like Leary, take pride in being assholes?
A society that elevates assholes will inevitably be ruled by them.
I don’t have anything profound to add except to say it’s the small things that grease the wheels of civility, like letting someone enter your lane in front of you and them giving you a little wave, or holding the elevator door open so the next person makes it. Those tiny things can make or break someone’s motivation to pay it forward and be willing to compromise on the really big things.
I wish you had also addressed the less visible/intangible side of assholery, like not abusing public services, cheating the tax system, doing ANYTHING to avoid jury duty (my favorite hill to die on), or abstaining from voting.
I feel people have stopped seeing these things as obligations--maybe because they didn't personally vote for them, or maybe just because it's unlikely their peers will ever find out and judge them for it--but it results in the same kind of displacement of responsibility for cleaning up the mess. I don't think the work of labor organizers would disappear, for instance, but the effort might not be so Sisyphean if we all saw ourselves as contributing parts of the same system. Or maybe people could actually be guaranteed a speedy (or speedier) trial as the Constitution intends if everyone would just stop playing hooky.
This behind-the-scenes civility may cost each of us a few thousand dollars to enact (and I agree that's a substantial sum for most people) but in avoiding the individual up front cost we're sacrificing that fundamental element of respect for those others that are present--read: our fellow citizens, down the street and across the country. In behaving so selfishly, secret assholes are creating generalized problems that take longer and cost exponentially more to address in organizing, lobbying, legislating, litigating, and missed opportunities... and it all rolls back down the hill anyway to hit the the asshole just as hard as anyone else.