By Bret Stephens / The New York Times

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.

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, full transparency could only help Gaetz’s case. Smoke may not always amount to fire, but darkness inevitably means dirt.

Still, all this misses the meaning of the Gaetz nomination, the point of which has nothing to do with his suitability for the job. 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. If someone accused of statutory rape can be attorney general, anything else is possible; not just Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health and human services secretary, but anything. Alex Jones as press secretary? Donald Trump Jr. already floated the idea.

There’s a guiding logic here; and it isn’t to “own the libs,” in the sense of driving Trump’s opponents to fits of moralistic rage (even if, from the president-elect’s perspective, that’s an ancillary benefit). It’s to perpetuate the spirit of cynicism, which is the core of Trumpism. If truth has no currency, you cannot use it. If power is the only coin of the realm, you’d better be on the side of it. If the government is run by cads and lackeys, you’ll need to make your peace with them.

“Man gets used to everything, the beast!” Fyodor Dostoyevsky has Raskolnikov observe in “Crime and Punishment.” That’s Trump’s insight, too; the method by which he seems intent to govern.

There’s a hopeful coda to Moynihan’s warning. In the years after he published his essay, Americans collectively decided that there were forms of deviancy — particularly violent crime — that they were not, in fact, prepared to accept as an unalterable fact of life. A powerful crime bill was passed in Congress, police adopted innovative methods to deter violence, urban leaders enforced rules against low-level lawbreakers, bad guys were locked away, and cities became civilized and livable again.

Part of that achievement has been undone in recent years, but it’s a reminder that it’s also possible to define deviancy up. In politics, we can’t start soon enough.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.