The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Over 30 years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his famous essay, “Defining Deviancy Down.” Bret Stephens summarizes his thesis:  “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.”

Consider these examples from the 1980s and 1990s:

• 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 ruined by revelations of hiring illegal immigrants as nannies (and, in Baird’s case, of not paying Social Security taxes).

Now consider developments in 2024 that rather poignantly prove Moynihan’s thesis:

• Future president Donald Trump nominated former Representative Matt Gaetz as Attorney General of the US.  Gaetz was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for ethical violations and sexual misconduct.  Furthermore, a lawyer for two women told several news outlets that former Representative Matt Gaetz 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.  With the clarity that he would not be confirmed by the Senate, Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration. But that he was even nominated says something about the state of morality and leadership at the presidential level.
• Trump has further nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services, Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense, Kash Patel to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to name of few.  Each one of these nominees has serious moral and ethical baggage; only a generation ago they would never have even been considered for such important positions.

How has this “dumbing deviancy down” developed in the American government of 2024?  David Brooks has several important insights of the deviancy now being celebrated as normal in American civilization:  “. . . it’s not sufficient to say that Trump is leading a band of morally challenged people to power. It’s that Trumpism represents an alternative value system. The people I regard as upright and admirable MAGA regards as morally disgraceful, and the people I regard as corrupt and selfish MAGA regards as heroic.  The crucial distinction is that some of us have an institutional mind-set while the MAGA mind-set is anti-institutional.”  He goes son:

• “What does heroism look like according to the MAGA morality? It looks like the sort of people whom Trump has picked to be in his cabinet. The virtuous man in this morality is self-assertive, combative, transgressive and vengeful. He’s not afraid to break the rules and come to his own conclusions. He has contempt for institutions and is happy to be a battering force to bring them down. He is unbothered by elite scorn but, in fact, revels in it and goes out of his way to generate it.  In this mind-set, if the establishment regards you as a sleazeball, you must be doing something right. If the legal system indicts you, you must be a virtuous man.”
• “In this morality, the fact that a presidential nominee is accused of sexual assault is a feature, not a bug. It’s a sign that this nominee is a manly man. Manly men go after what they want. “
• “In this worldview, a nominee enshrouded in scandal is more trustworthy than a person who has lived an honest life. The scandal-shrouded nominee is cast out from polite society . . . The corrupt person owes total fealty to Donald Trump. There is no other realm in which he can achieve power and success except within the MAGA universe. Autocrats have often preferred to surround themselves with corrupt people because such people are easier to control and, if necessary, destroy.”
• “In other words, MAGA represents a fundamental challenge not only to conventional politics but also to conventional morality. In his own Substack essay, Damon Linker gets to the point: ‘Trumpism is seeking to advance a revolutionary transvaluation of values by inverting the morality that undergirds both traditional conservatism and liberal institutionalism. In this inversion, norms and rules that counsel and enforce propriety, restraint and deference to institutional authority become vices, while flouting them become virtues.’”

This “defining deviancy down” is bipartisan.  President Biden had promised frequently and explicitly that he would not pardon his son. As Hunter Biden’s firearms and tax cases wound through the courts, the president and his aides repeatedly pledged he would not intervene and would not issue a pardon, even after Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges in September. “This was consistent with his broader pledge, central to his campaign and electoral mandate, to protect the independence and integrity of the justice system.”  But, he lied and did indeed pardon his son.

Peggy Noonan summarizes the tragedy of Hunter Biden:  “The nature of Hunter Biden’s bad actions is famous in the public mind because it involves videotaped depictions of decadent behavior—guns, drugs and sex, all memorialized by him and stored on his famous laptop. It became an emblem of the assumption that the elites of our nation, the people pulling the strings, are wholly decadent—dope-smoking lowlifes, abusers of others. It’s looking very Late Rome among our leadership class. Anyway, by pardoning his son the president makes himself look part of all that.”

Editorially, the New York Times argued that “Presidents have the unlimited right to issue pardons for crimes that could be charged by federal prosecutors. But when they use that power on behalf of their loved ones, or their political allies or their financial supporters, they erode confidence in ideals that justice is blind, that all are equal before the law.”    Furthermore, “At the most basic level, it reinforces the sense that Mr. Trump’s systematic abuse of the pardon system in his first term was not an aberration, that presidents of every party exploit their constitutional privilege to benefit their relatives and cronies, that justice is only for those with the right connections. It is easy to imagine the ‘they did it too’ defenses being offered should Mr. Trump pardon the perpetrators of the violent Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, as he has suggested he will. Hunter Biden’s crimes are not nearly equivalent to the destruction caused by the rioters, but his father’s action muddles the defenses against future abuses.”

But that doesn’t change the fact that Hunter Biden, whose long history of exploiting his family’s name and influence consistently crossed all lines of propriety, did indeed break the law. He pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges after being convicted by a jury of his peers for the firearms-related crimes. It’s not sufficient justification for such a self-interested use of a presidential pardon, particularly one as sweeping as this one, which exonerates Hunter Biden for any crime he might possibly have committed over the past 10 years. (It’s probably the broadest pardon since the one Nixon received.)   President Biden has now “normalized” the abnormal. In doing so, he has made further abuses more likely.

In 2023, Gerard Baker of the Wall Street Journal made this astute observation:  “At the heart of America’s political and cultural turmoil is a crisis of trust. In the space of a generation, the people’s confidence in their leaders and their most important institutions to do the right thing has collapsed. The federal government, big business, the media, education, science and medicine, technology, religious institutions, law enforcement and others have seen a precipitous decline.  As public faith in the performance, credibility and integrity of these institutions has collapsed, so too has mutual trust—the social glue that holds the country together. Americans have become suspicious of one another, distrusting their fellow citizens as much as they distrust foreign adversaries.”  If trust cannot be restored, our democratic institutions and basic way of life cannot survive.

In many ways this absence of trust is an existential crisis for American civilization.  So, what do we do?  How can trust in institutions and trust in one another be restored?  As with all things in life, the fundamental solution is a spiritual one.  Because of the nature of sin, discord, dysfunction and disorder are the norm in human relationships.  For that reason, God always calls leaders to a higher standard.  Leaders are not to be concerned about their welfare, their wealth, their repetition.  Leaders are to be servants.

To serve as a leader is to serve with honesty, integrity and decisiveness.  Leaders earn trust.  Character in our leaders is absolutely essential.  In 1998, in the midst of President Clinton’s impeachment for moral failure as president, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution which declared that “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”  As columnist David French contends, “Corruption is contagious.”  French goes on, “if a leader exhibits moral courage and values integrity, then the flawed people in his or her orbit will strive to be the best version of themselves.  But if a leader exhibits cruelty and dishonesty, then the same flawed people will be more apt to yield to their worst temptations.  They mimic the values of the people who lead them.”

But character is destiny. What kind of person do we want our children to become — reformers who honor their commitments to serve and change the institutions they love or performative arsonists who vow to burn it all down?  I believe very strongly that Christians should model servanthood, humility and dependence on God.  If we exhibit the same vices as the larger culture, we no longer serve as Christ’s salt and light—and we should be ashamed of ourselves.  To affirm, exult and admire narcissists in leaders or former leaders in our culture is an affront to God.  A contrite and repentant spirit is what should characterize Christ’s disciples—and leaders.

See Bret Stephens in the New York Times (20 November 2024); David Brooks in the New York Times (29 November 2024); Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal (7-8 December 2024); an editorial in the New York Times (8 December 2024); Gerard Baker, “How American Institutions Went From Trust to Bust” in the Wall Street Journal (8 September 2023) and David French in the New York Times (7 September 2023).