Vintage footage of air travel opens a new informational video from the US Department of Transportation. “Flying was a bastion of civility,” a narrator says over Sixties-style images of pleasant, well-dressed travellers and airline workers. “But today…” The film cuts to clips of shameful flyers, operating seat screens with their bare feet, fighting to pull each other’s hair out, and biting the sleeve off a flight attendant. More chaos, then Secretary Sean Duffy appears to remind Americans of basic courtesy: help a pregnant passenger with luggage, say please and thank you, keep children under control, and dress “with respect”.

The idea of wearing a suit to catch a flight might seem excessive, but Duffy’s call for dressing up is more than a gripe against athleisure. The campaign to make air travel civil again has a simple but profound message: social norms matter. Stating and enforcing norms has become unfashionable, but it’s a reliable way to keep public spaces safe.

This renewed commitment to decorum is needed. Since the pandemic, air travel has become less pleasant and more violent. The average number of “unruly passengers” reported across 2023 and 2024 more than doubled those of 2018 and 2019. Only a few thousand cases are reported — a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions flying — but one person can disrupt entire flights of people. This month, a DC-bound flight carrying four members of Congress had to be diverted when a passenger became uncontrollable, raging that “we live in a fascist state!” as she was escorted off the landed plane. In April, 270 transatlantic travellers departed JFK Airport but were forced to return four hours into the flight when a passenger, angry about not getting his choice of meal, charged the cockpit.

What’s happening at 30,000 feet mirrors a trend of less personal accountability and more public disorder infecting American life on the ground. On the New York City subway, felony assaults and rapes are dramatically above rates in 2019. Homelessness is at record highs while men’s labour force participation is at historic lows. Norms and expectations appear to have been forgotten. Even misbehaviour in classrooms is bad enough to be driving teachers out of the profession.

Reactions to the DOT’s campaign for courtesy support a culture of lower expectations and excuses. Most have superficially latched onto the call for dressing up as impractical for comfort and unlikely to eradicate air rage. Others abdicate passengers from blame: bad behaviour stems from “alcohol, drugs, and mental health issues”, as CBS News explains away, “as well as stress from dealing with crowded airports and problems like flight delays”. Airlines make civility harder by cramming people into tight seats, according to one traveler quoted in USA Today: “[W]hen the airlines treat people like animals, it encourages people to act like animals.”

These arguments are precisely why the campaign for civility matters. It rejects the idea that bad behaviour is inevitable and instead tells people, in plain language, that they are responsible for meeting certain expectations — without a new set of government mandates.

Excusing “animal” behaviour as a function of alcohol, travel stress, or the smaller seats of democratised air travel is not only absurd but enabling. I’ve experienced this firsthand. Last year, a 200-pound man seated next to me managed to board our flight completely inebriated. As passengers took their seats, he sexually assaulted me and then a flight attendant, groping us both as his equally inebriated wife looked on. The flight attendant’s response — quickly and unemotionally summoning security to remove them — suggested this situation was nothing unusual.

In decades past, this man might not have felt so comfortable turning up to an afternoon flight absolutely incoherent. But a culture war against “stigma” has furnished endless excuses to do so today.

Stigma is not inherently cruel. It’s one of the cheapest, most decentralised ways a society can enforce rules short of formal punishment. When a behaviour is stigmatised, people avoid it not because cops are watching but because they don’t want to be seen as “that person”. Without stigma, deciding what’s acceptable is left to distant authorities, while ordinary people are stripped of a powerful, informal way to maintain the safety and order of their own communities.

Over 6 million Americans are expected to fly this Thanksgiving week, the busiest travel period in 15 years. Many will head to the airport on edge from recent shutdown-induced cancellations and delays. That’s still no excuse to forget dignity and respect. Travellers should take Secretary Duffy’s reminder seriously and act presentably. As Duffy has reminded us: “Manners don’t stop at the gate.”

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Carolyn D. Gorman is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute.

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