Trump's appointments: Driving deviancy and decency down – and out?

Ben Shapiro in 2019 (Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons); Bret Stephens (publicity image); Daniel Moynihan in 1976 (Dan Hadani collection, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Thirty-odd years ago, the scholar and conversative politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned of the decline in the cohesiveness of American society when tolerating deviance encourages even greater deviant behaviour, which society comes to accept. “Driving deviancy down” normalises increasingly deviant behaviour (Moynihan, 1993). What’s happens then? “Decline and fall”, another conservative wordsmith said of an earlier period in the 20^th century when another Western society looked increasingly deviant and about to collapse.

Now, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, Bret Stephens, recalled Moynihan’s essay and wondered whether, were he still alive, Moynihan might wish to add a section about politics. Stephens was thinking about Donald Trump’s controversial decision to pick the controversial Matt Gaetz to be US attorney-general. Not even his lack of experience practising law was the real issue. Nominating Gaetz “has nothing to do with his suitability for the job,” Stephens wrote.

His virtue, in Trump’s eyes, is his unsuitability. He is the proverbial tip of the spear in a larger effort to define deviancy down (Stephens, 2024).

Trump might have been happy – even trying – to lose Gaetz, because Trump would thus have pushed the deviancy bar low enough – normalised the outrageous – that the Senate would accept some other, but only somewhat less deviant person instead. But the bar would be lowered.

Stephens wrote his piece a few days before Gaetz bowed out of the race after multiple allegations, which he denied, of sexual misconduct. But neither those nor the ethics investigation underway in the House of Representatives about them was Stephens’ main concern.

Trump then named a better qualified former Florida attorney general, Pam Bondi, to take the federal post. She’s a loyalist who acted on Trump’s behalf in his first impeachment proceedings as president and attended court in New York when Trump was on trial and later convicted for making hush money payments to a porn star. Bondi criticised the prosecutors for bringing that case and the judge for how he handled it. Since he left office in 2021, Trump has continuously upbraided the Biden Justice Department for its alleged partisanship. How is this appointment a signal that Trump’s department will work independently of the White House?

(And this: Trump has also nominated several of his personal attorneys to senior Justice Department posts.)

At about the same time as the Stephens column appeared, the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro celebrated Trump’s re-election victory with a speech at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. Shapiro bemoaned the decline of decency in American society and laid the blame on the long decline in social norms on the political left, and over decades. Think: Judeo-Christian religion, marriage, childbearing and -rearing. Shapiro said he disliked a lot of things about the former-and-future president, but he still basked in the glow of the election results. Shapiro said he could accept Trump’s failings because it would give America back …

… the three things that make a golden age for a country or a civilization or even an individual in their life: liberty, strength, virtue.

When challenged by a couple of young women in the audience, Shapiro – a clever and forceful speaker, used that cleverness and force to put them down. The audience applauded, whooped and hollered.

I’ve already discussed Trump’s promise of a golden age. So much has been written and said about Gaetz and Bondi already that saying more might contribute to normalisation of the breed of deviancy that Moynihan decried.

Let’s think instead about this concept of driving deviancy down, because governing – a country, a corporation, or any social system – involves not just setting and controlling standards. It also requires accommodating change, evolving social structures.

For example, Stephens talks about crime in this way. The famous Chicago Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, when four gangsters killed seven gangsters. 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.

We cease to be shocked, and gang crime is now embedded in our social structure. True.

Moynihan and Shapiro both alluded to the relationship between family breakdown and rising crime. True. Moynihan’s critics through the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s seized on such comments, seeing them as disguised racism. More black than white marriages seemed to fail or never occurred. Not quite true. Subsequent decades have seen family breakdown become normalised across society. But it’s less than clear 1) that crime has continued to rise, 2) that race had anything to do with it (and Moynihan did not claim it did), or 3) even that marital breakdown was or is the central cause. The decline of religious observance? Maybe fiction – on television, in novels, on video games? The root cause just might be Shapiro’s “liberty”, with its insistence on the primacy of the individual and tribe over the communitarian. The insistence of exercising freedom may erode the ties that bind.

But merely hankering for the past is also a mistake. Society is organic. It morphs and adapts to the shifting relationship between twin and contradictory imperatives of liberty and justice. Those two terms are the substance of the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag, which ends in the affirmation that America comes “with liberty and justice for all”. As kids, we recited that – hand on heart, almost religiously – each day at the schools I attended in Chicago all those decades ago. Only recently have I reflected on the paradox it entails.

My school years were a time when a certain kind of crime (political) and a certain kind of politics (dirty) dominated the social structure of the city. Chicago felt like a great place then, some of the time. Until it didn’t. When it didn’t was at the whim of the politicians. Liberty can still feel like justice. Until it doesn’t.

Our understanding of deviancy morphs and adapts over time. Occasionally, when someone deliberately drives down our expectations about the appropriate level of deviation from social norms, and life becomes more fraught. Occasionally, though, the social norms can stage a comeback or a beneficial reorientation. Politeness returns, and people listen to each other, nudge the deviancy dial up a bit, and society quietly adjusts to change. When it does, we can reflect on the bad times as …

Moynihan, D. P. (1993). Defining Deviancy Down. The American Scholar, 62(1), 17-30.

Stephens, B. (2024, November 19). Defining Deviancy Down. And Down. And Down. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/19/opinion/trump-gaetz-investigation-report.html