Defining Deviancy Up & Restoring Rectitude’s Rise
Many of the things that increasingly divide and weaken us as a people, I believe, can be associated with Patrick Daniel Moynihan’s adept use of the phrase, “defining deviancy down.” In examining intellectual history, William Raspberry explained the phrase as “Behavior that once was deviant and punishable (whether by law or social sanction) can, when our correcting mechanisms are overloaded, be redefined as acceptable.”
I think it’s time to start a movement in the opposite direction by defining deviancy up and restoring rectitude’s rise.
I will confine myself here mainly to examples from today’s crazy bipolar political world, where each major political party sells itself as inherently good and the other as inherently evil. In what follows, I am not suggesting moral equivalence but simple recognition of the downward spiral that occurs when members of each party make inadequate effort to police their own. As in much of my other writing, I’m simply trying to figure out some level at which both parties can agree to move forward.
Consider the distrust that grows as deviancy expands. In today’s political world, we have reached a point where we often can’t talk, compromise, and work to find solutions to our common problems, even though most of them, from health to sharing public space to basic issues of survival are indeed common. When I worked in the Treasury Department for about 15 years, there was little factual denial of the problems themselves. The disease, road to nowhere, poverty, or complicated tax code was what it was. Certainly, there were disagreements over what might work best in or outside of government to address these problems, but they were only occasionally driven by one political party’s need to attack whatever the other party favored.
Each party’s defense for not cleaning up its own mess similarly centers on attacking the behavior of someone in the other party. This seems to appeal to some true believers in the righteousness of everything done by a political party largely organized around multiple special interest groups. But that’s like arguing that you don’t need to go to confession because you think Johnny’s sins and those of all his relatives were equally bad or worse.
Take the new fight over whether President Trump extensively violated the law in keeping and hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. He, of course, is not the first to have taken documents or emails inappropriately. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Joseph Biden are among the others. Yes, the Justice Department will argue that there’s a legal difference: only he deliberately obstructed justice by lying and failing to comply with the government’s attempts to reclaim these public documents. But my point here again is that what others have done is no excuse. At the same time, if the deviant behavior of Democrats had also received greater or more universal reprimand by other Democrats, then the argument of a double standard by Republicans loses some of its weight. Remember that in all these document cases, lives are at stake—one of the reasons that some documents are classified in the first place.
Similarly, I have long wondered how history would had evolved if Bill Clinton had resigned from the presidency after his affair with his intern, Monica Lewinsky. I would have been fired, had I performed such an action when I worked at Treasury regardless of whether I, unlike Clinton, later lied about it (in his case, to a grand jury). Why should standards be lower for elected officials than civil servants? You might easily argue that this was not an impeachable offense on the same order of magnitude as encouraging an attack on the Capitol. Regardless, Democratic party leaders could and should have stood up and asked him to resign. If then Vice-President Al Gore had succeeded to the presidency, my guess is that both political parties would have come out stronger and better servants to the nation than they did subsequently.
How about the issues surrounding receipts of gifts and disclosure, such as those received by Justice Thomas. Whether or not legal, it’s deviant. Yes, again, these types of relationships are rampant among officials, elected or otherwise, so I’m sure he feels unfairly singled out. But how much should we look away because someone on “the other side”—assuming you even identify with some side—engages in similar behavior.
Some Republicans may object to my examples of Republican officials who defined deviancy down, Democrats to my resorting to earlier examples of when they defined the deviancies of their own as unimportant or inconsequential. I simply don’t think we’re going to stop the downward decline unless people on both sides can at least agree to stop defending the deviancies.
When I was a high school student, my mother objected to the language in Catcher in the Rye. Being the modern and self-important teenager that was, I defended the book as representing reality. Now I understand her. I don’t want my grandchildren, even those of teenage years, to imbibe all the cursing on TV, nastiness on social media, and much else. The deviancy descends not so much from its occasional presentation as to our acceptance of its increasing prevalence.
In the public sphere, in turn, many of the young have watched so many deviant acts that they have turned from a healthy skepticism to unhealthy cynicism about all that surrounds politics. A few have concluded that they, too, can make deviancy pay. Neither response is good for them or for us.
I repeat. Isn’t it time to define deviancy up?