Culture

Stephens: Trump is defining deviancy down. And down. And down.


It’s been a little more than three decades since Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his famous essay on “Defining Deviancy Down.” Every society, the senator-scholar from New York argued, could afford to penalize only a certain amount of behavior it deemed “deviant.” As the stock of such behavior increased — whether in the form of out-of-wedlock births, or mentally ill people living outdoors, or violence in urban streets — society would most easily adapt not by cracking down, but instead by normalizing what used to be considered unacceptable, immoral or outrageous.

Perspectives would shift. Standards would fall. And people would get used to it.

Moynihan’s great example was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago, in which “four gangsters killed seven gangsters.” In 1929, the crime so shocked the nation that it helped spell the end of Prohibition. By the early 1990s, that sort of episode would barely rate a story in the inside pages of a newspaper.

If Moynihan were writing his essay today, he might have added a section about politics. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the presidency, it was still considered something of a political liability that he had been divorced 32 years earlier. In 1987, one of Reagan’s nominees for the Supreme Court, Douglas Ginsburg, had to withdraw his name after NPR’s Nina Totenberg revealed that, years earlier, the judge had smoked pot. A few years later, two of Bill Clinton’s early candidates for attorney general, Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood, were felled by revelations of hiring illegal immigrants as nannies (and, in Baird’s case, of not paying Social Security taxes).

How quaint.

Doubling down

On Monday, a lawyer for two women told several news outlets that former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., used Venmo to pay for sex with multiple women, one of whom says she saw him having sex with a 17-year-old girl at a drug-fueled house party in 2017. Donald Trump is doubling down on Gaetz’s nomination as attorney general, even as the president-elect privately acknowledges that the chances of confirmation are not great.

It’s important to note that Gaetz was the target of a separate federal inquiry into sex trafficking allegations that fell apart last year because of questions about witnesses. That isn’t the only high-profile Justice Department investigation that went nowhere. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, was politically ruined by a conviction that was overturned because of prosecutorial misconduct. Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia turned out to be a liberal pipe dream.

Liberals especially should always want to guard the presumption of innocence, not least for unpopular defendants. But if that is — or used to be — true of liberals, didn’t it also used to be true of conservatives that they at least pretended to care about moral standards?

Whatever turns out to be true about Gaetz’s behavior, nothing so indicts today’s Republican Party as the refusal by the House speaker, Mike Johnson, to release the Ethics Committee report about Gaetz, on the patently disingenuous pretext that he has resigned his House seat. If there’s nothing to hide in the report, …read more

Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment

      

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