DEFINING DEVIANCY DOWN
"We are getting used to a lot of behaviors that are not good for us."
So said Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in an article he wrote in early 1993 entitled "Defining Deviancy Down".
Moynihan's claim back then was that previously condemned (or -- using his adjectives -- "abnormal" or "stigmatized") behaviors of all manner and type were being accepted for one reason or another and that we were kidding ourselves into thinking this a good thing. The originality of the piece was not in linking acceptance to increase, which seems obvious, but rather in highlighting the tricks we devise to kid ourselves.
Moynihan isolated three -- altruiism, opportunism and denial. The first redefines erstwhile deviance under the banner of care and concern. The second accepts it because doing so creates advantages that remedy would remove. And the third just ignores it.
Many reading Moynihan's article today might be offended.
His examples of altruistic and opportunistic redefinition were, respectively, the movement to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill and the explosion of out-of-wedlock births, single-parent households and broken families. He argued that the former had led to the crisis of homelessness as the mentally ill were sent to the streets, while the latter had permanently disadvantaged a generation of children economically, educationally and socially, and thus made poverty and violent crime more likely as Dads moved out.
As I said, we might take offense to these claims today.
De-institutionalization of the mentally ill was supposed to be accompanied by community care. When it wasn't, the problem became the absence of altruism, not its presence. And divorce was not supposed to create a fatherless America.
Daddy and Mommy were de-coupling.
Not Daddy and the kids.
Still, much of what Moynihan said made sense.
Though crime had exploded by the '90s relative to its mid-century levels, our collective sense of outrage had been overcome by its frequency. As Moynihan put it, "the vocabulary of crime reporting moved toward the normal". What, for example, shocked the nation in 1929 and led to new laws against machine guns (the St. Valentine's Day Massacre) had been routinized by the 1990s such that deaths by firearms exceeded those by auto accidents and even simple legislative fixes were avoided.
At the time, Moynihan noted that the country had a two-century supply of handguns but only a four-year supply of the ammunition -- .25 and .38 caliber bullets -- needed to make them lethal. But his proposal to cap that supply (as he put it, "Guns don't kill people, bullets do") went nowhere.
Generally speaking, denial doesn't get a real footing until altruism and opportunism have plowed the field and made it fertile. And so it was (and remains) on the gun front. Gun lovers treat firearms as means of protection that advance the altruistic goal of individual safety. Politicians view them opportunistically as both a source of votes and campaign contributions. And then the rest of us are forced to live with a new normal . . .
Bearing the names Columbine, Sandy Hook and Aurora.
Given that defining deviancy down has become so widespread, it's a small wonder that we do not seem to care, or for most of us even notice, when it infects other precincts.
Like, for example, politics.
It is late January 2022.
We witness two anniversaries this month -- the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol and the January 20 inauguration of Joe Biden as the nation's 46th president.
A normal -- or, if that bothers you, perfectly acceptable -- view of these anniversaries is that the nation a year ago escaped a violent and illegal effort to overturn a completely valid election helmed by the demonstrably false claims of a psychopath.
The evidence for this view is overwhelming.
About sixty courts, numerous recounts, more than a dozen administrative officials (many of them self-identifying Republicans), and even a few partisan "audits" have all made it clear that Trump lost and Biden won the 2020 presidential election.
At the same time, more than 700 people have been criminally charged in connection with the assault on the Capitol, numerous experts have testified to Trump's psychopathologies -- his narcissism, sadism and sociopathic dishonesty -- and the bi-partisan House committee investigating January 6 has published the blueprint he agreed to in his effort to have Vice President Pence reject certified electors that day and either declare Trump the winner or send the election to the House where Trump would have won under the unit state vote rule.
Nevertheless, approximately 30% of America, and anywhere from 50-70% of Republicans depending upon how or when they are asked, do not accept this view as fact. Unbelievably, the architect of January 6, Trump himself, is the leading (by a substantial margin) candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
Almost the entire class of GOP office holders either endorses Trump or at the very least appeases him by refusing to rebut his false election claim or hold him responsible for January 6. And those that don't are now considered apostates. Some -- like Liz Cheney and Senators Romney, Rounds and Cassidy -- soldier on; others -- like Pennsylvania's Sen. Pat Toomey or Illinois' Rep. Adam Kinzinger and New York's Rep. John Katko -- are retiring.
Facing this apparently impregnable lie, the Biden Administration has been forced to operate in a political ecosystem that guarantees its inability to get much of anything passed.
Critics assert that the president has moved too far left, that his messaging has been at best flat-footed, that he now owns the bad news (Afghanistan, Covid, inflation), and that there are bi-partisan "wins" out there were he to simply jettison the moralizing and govern.
The factual support for this argument, however, is thin to non-existent.
Everything in the (apparently) now dead Build Back Better and voting rights bills is supported by significant public margins; indeed, the Congressional GOP had told its caucus that their own voters support the voting rights bills and that, consequently, those bills must be killed via a silent filibuster rather than an open debate, the latter of which would hurt them in the mid-terms.
If the Afghanistan departure was bad (and it was), the fault is certainly bi-partisan; Trump agreed to a drop dead departure date before Biden was even inaugurated and had Biden rescinded that agreement (as it was, he delayed the departure date by a few months), the country would have had to send significantly more troops than the 3,000 or so there by the end and the commitment would have had to be open ended, neither of which Americans support.
As to Covid and inflation, the two go hand in hand. The former created the supply chain bottlenecks that created the latter and right-wing vaccine deniers allowed variants to emerge.
Where are the putative "wins" critics claim to be available?
The infrastructure bill passed earlier this year was bi-partisan by today's standards. But three of the GOP Senators who voted for it are retiring and those that are staying want to avoid primaries if they can (and at least one, Lisa Murkowski, won't; she already has a Trump opponent). So, despite their popularity, you can't find ten Republicans willing to allow BBB to go forward on an up or down vote, and breaking BBB into individual pieces (early education, climate change, community college) doesn't move the needle.
On voting rights, there is talk that the GOP might be willing to reform the 1887 Electoral Count Act to remove whatever ambiguities Trump tried to exploit in his run-up to January 6. But maybes have not turned into actuals in the past, and there is at least one Republican who thinks the ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act are just fine.
That Republican is Donald Trump.
Even the current fight about the filibuster is anchored in consequences he created.
The filibuster itself is an anti-democratic charade. It does not preserve debate. It aborts it. Historically it was used to protect slavery and then Jim Crow even though it could have been utilized in other contexts as well. Once the speaking filibuster was functionally eliminated in the 1970s, however, and all a Senator had to do was place a hold on a bill via a call to the cloakroom, the filibuster became cost free.
And once it was put in the hands of Mitch McConnell during the Obama Administration, its use metastasized.
One of the highlights of the 1960s was the Voting Rights Act. It was the most important piece of federal voting legislation ever passed and it ushered in a period of bi-partisan agreement that suffrage had to be available to all and color blind. That began to end when the Supreme Court, in 2013, declared the Act's pre-clearance provisions void and states became free to enact voting rules which had previously required Justice Department and (often) court approval.
In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election and Trump's continuing lie that it had been stolen, nineteen states controlled by the GOP have passed thirty-three laws suppressing Democatic vote by limiting the mechanisms (excuse free absentee voting, early voting, voting by mail and drop boxes) that materially increased turnout that year. Some of these laws also vest the power to count and certify the vote in partisan legislators rather than neutral administrative professionals.
Not surprisingly, Democrats in Congress have proposed counter-measures designed to preserve the practices that increased turnout and preclude partisans from overruling counts and certifying their own choices, the latter of which is exactly what Trump wanted Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin Republicans to do in 2020.
In the Senate, the GOP is filibustering this Democratic effort and thus ensuring that the state-based restrictions designed to suppress Democratic vote and, if necessary, count and certify a Trump return are fully enforced. And Trump himself has made his support for these moves more than clear. "We have to be sharper the next time when it comes to counting the vote," he said last Saturday at a rally in Arizona, "Sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate."
Somehow, with the GOP, it always comes back to him.
Why is that?
A resurrected Moynihan would say we have defined political deviancy down.
And he would be right.
In 1974, Richard Nixon resigned in the face of almost certain impeachment and conviction. His crime was that he covered up the burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee by the committee created to re-elect him. Once the smoking gun in his taped White House conversations revealed this to be the case, he was gone in a matter of days.
In 2021, Donald Trump orchestrated a violent attack on the US Capitol in order to force the Vice President to refuse to recognize certified electors so that he could either illegally declare Trump president or illegally send the election to the House of Representative where Trump would have won. Compared to Nixon, Trump's crimes were worse by orders of magnitude.
Nixon broke the law in search of dirt or intelligence on the opposition.
Trump broke the law in support of a coup.
In the half-century between these two events, however, political rules and norms changed.
Until the mid-90s, for example, elections for the House of Representatives were relatively tame affairs. The gloves came off with Newt Gingrich, who decided that the only way he could beat Democrats was by smearing them. The Bushes, father and son, tried to stay above this messy fray. But they were more than willing to get their hands dirty when necessary -- father with his infamous Willie Horton ad and son with henchmen claiming that the "judicious study of discernible reality" is just "not the way the world really works anymore . . .[W]hile you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other realities, which you can study too".
Along the way, the altruistic and opportunistic steered the boat.
Some regretted it.
As The Washington Post put it just after he died this past fall, "Colin Powell knew his name would be forever tied to the ill-fated 2003 invasion of Iraq, and that lending his reputation and personal prestige to the faulty intelligence used to justify the ensuing war was an indelible stain."
Some even apologized for it.
In 1991, shortly before he died, Lee Atwater (Bush Senior's presidential campaign manager) said, "In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said I 'would strip the bark off the little bastard' and 'make Willie Horton his running mate.' I am sorry for both statements; the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not."
From smears, naked cruelty and created reality as acceptable means to political power, it is not a particularly large step to Donald Trump.
To his profanity-laced calls for physical (or state based, as in "lock her up") violence, his 30,000 lies or Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts".
Indeed, the mother of all "alternative facts", the one half or more Republicans accept as their latest "created reality", the one driving their Congressional filibuster and their state suppression machines, is the claim that Trump won in 2020.
It just doesn't get any more . . .
Alternative.
Or deviant.
Or dangerous.
So, once more . . .
Moynihan into the breach.
"We are getting used to a lot of behaviors that are not good for us."
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