Defining Snowden's Deviancy Down

"When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law,” says a New York Times editorial, recommending amnesty for Edward Snowden, “that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government.”

The Times’ Public Editor agrees, that Snowden “has done the United States, and in fact, the world, a great service.”

With all due respect, that plea comes tainted by the Newspaper of Record’s partnership with Snowden and his adviser, Glenn Greenwald, whose dedication to tearing down American government and media is legend.

What would the Senate’s last sociologist, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, have made of all this?

“We are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us,” the late New York legislator wrote in 1993 in his now-famous American Scholar article, “Defining Deviancy Down,” arguing that society keeps adjusting for the amount of unacceptable conduct it can tolerate.

He pointed out that, in 1929, the killing of seven gangsters in Chicago became the stuff of legend while half a century later “Los Angeles has the equivalent of a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre every weekend.”

By all means, let the Times advocate for Snowden, if it chooses, but before publishing that editorial, did anyone re-read former Rxecutive Editor Bill Keller’s exchange defending traditional journalism against Greenwald’s open desire to tear down American society with his agenda-driven attacks disguised as reporting? Do we need a Fox News of the left with even fewer scruples to balance Rupert Murdoch?

Snowden’s “patriotism” could have expressed itself in many ways open to whistle blowers, but he chose his outlaw status with Greenwald as business partner, mentor and legal advisor.

Whatever persuades the Times to plead his case, it concentrates on the harm to American society that NSA spying may have done but overlooks the collateral damage that its own partnership with Snowden and Greenwald may have done at the same time.

There is more than one way to define deviancy down in American society today, and the Times should reconsider its self-congratulation in pleading Snowden’s case for amnesty and encouraging those who consider endangering security heroism.

It is a step down from the newspaper that vetted and published the Pentagon Papers in the last century after carefully facing the legal and moral consequences of doing so.

Defining Deviancy Down, 2006

What would the Senate’s last sociologist, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, have made of this year’s election?

“We are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us,” the late New York legislator wrote in 1993 in his now-famous American Scholar article, “Defining Deviancy Down,” arguing that society keeps adjusting for the amount of unacceptable conduct it can tolerate.

He pointed out that, in 1929, the killing of seven gangsters in Chicago became the stuff of legend while half a century later “Los Angeles has the equivalent of a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre every weekend.”

Moynihan would have been fascinated by how Republicans embraced his thesis this year in their campaigning while railing against it to terrify voters in their “cultural wars” ideology.

In efforts to elect candidates who would criminalize gay couples and women seeking abortions, politicians doing “the Lord’s work” stooped to new lows.

They tried to pass off Mark Foley’s electronic mash notes to teen-aged boys as “inappropriate” while trashing Harold Ford with a racist “Call me” commercial in Tennessee and attacking a New York Democrat for taxpayer-paid phone sex, based on a $1.25 misdialing of a legitimate call. That used to be called "lying."

If cultural conservatives are going to oppose making what they consider deviant behavior acceptable, they will have to stop using what everybody considers deviant tactics to defeat those who disagree with them.

Leadership Failure? Try Decency

The time for euphemisms is running out. What we are seeing is more like a social meltdown.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning economic journalist writes about “The epic global leadership fail,” but the symptoms he cites, along with so many others, add up to a loss of the moral responsibility that used to be taken for granted as common decency:

“The global financial system teeters on the edge of collapse because European politicians refused to tell citizens of their crumbling economies that they could no longer guarantee them ‘la dolce vita’-- the sweet life--they had come to expect.

“Top executives at Olympus, one of Japan’s leading companies, resign in shame after acknowledging that for nearly 20 years they used a complex accounting scheme to hide billions of dollars in speculative trading losses.

“A revered coach and a respected president at Penn State are fired because they were more concerned about protecting their own reputations, and that of their school, than protecting young boys from an alleged sexual predator.

“And a former governor, senator and head of Goldman Sachs resigns as chief executive of MF Global after bankrupting the broker-dealer with overleveraged bets on European sovereign bonds.”

Yet this is only the tip of a moral iceberg as traditional values sink below what the late sociologist turned Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed two decades ago:

“We are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us,” he wrote in 1993 in his now-famous American Scholar article, “Defining Deviancy Down,” arguing that society keeps adjusting for the amount of unacceptable conduct it can tolerate.

He pointed out that, in 1929, the killing of seven gangsters in Chicago became the stuff of legend while half a century later “Los Angeles has the equivalent of a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre every weekend.”

This weekend, we see a new low in the Republican race to the bottom with contenders condoning torture, attacking Iran, waging economic warfare with China (which could crash our economy by dumping our debt), anything to appeal to a primitive Tea Party minority that hates Barack Obama with religious fervor.

In this moral mess, Newt Gingrich, who cheated on two wives, tried to impeach Bill Clinton for sexual misbehavior and was the only House Speaker ever censured for corruption, now takes the lead in the polls while Herman Cain parades his family for Fox News to prove his moral probity in the face of evidence that points otherwise.

If Gingrich and Cain are the answers to America’s problems, what are the questions?

We learn about “honest graft” in Congress’ insider trading as its debt reduction panel begins to duck out from a Thanksgiving deadline and invite more economic chaos in an election year.

Deviancy has been redefined out of sight, taking decency along with it. Leadership may be failing, but shouldn't we be taking a closer look at our followership as well?

The NY Times Defines Deviancy Down

The Gray Lady won't win its 96th Pulitzer Prize with today's "expose" of John McCain's history of ethical struggles and leering innuendo about his relationship with a young woman lobbyist.

In fact, the Times' takeout is bigger news than its contents. The long leadup to publication has been a source of journalistic gossip for months, and the timing is attributed to worries about being beaten on the story by another media behemoth, the New Republic.

The days of the Pentagon papers, The New York Times vs Sullivan case that changed libel law and the universal respect for columnists like James Reston and Tom Wicker are long gone. Today we have William Kristol and this--a long rehash of McCain's political lapses, coupled with a low-fact personal smear.

In defining deviancy downward, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan might say, the Times has done more than open the door for its rabid right-wing haters. The newspaper of record has put pressure on itself to do a similar job on Barack Obama and his Antoin Rezko connections or face an election-year barrage of continuing criticism.

A long mea culpa from its Public Editor next weekend won't be enough to undo the damage.

Rove Legacy: Defining Deviancy Down

Trying to find meaning in Karl Rove’s political career, as so many observers are now doing, is like, to borrow Gen. David Petraeus’ expression about Iraq, “putting lipstick on a pig.”

Today the Washington Post asks: “(A)s Karl Rove resigns from the administration, a question lingers over his legacy: What, exactly, did the architect build?”

The answer is nothing. There is no Rove philosophy, doctrine, strategy. The man is the sum of his ugly tactics, a college dropout who spent a working lifetime winning, buying or stealing votes by all possible means--a porcine rooter in the garbage of American politics. His sole accomplishment has been, in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s phrase, to “define deviancy down” in the White House.

Ask John Kerry, John McCain and Max Cleland about his legacy.

Rove’s departure, along with that of his creature, George W. Bush, has meaning only in the question of how much of their fake piety and total disdain for political morality will persist in American life.

The answer to that won’t be long in coming. On the Democrats’ part, the jury is still out. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards are still staying within the bounds of civilized contention and serious discourse.

The Republicans, who have to climb out of the Bush wreckage, seem confused. Rudy Giuliani is showing symptoms of Rove Disease, but the others are still in doubt. Much will depend of what Thompson and Romney do when push comes to bare knuckles. How far Mike Huckabee gets will be a clue.

For the moment, it would help if the MSM and blogosphere stopped arguing about the biggest bottom feeder of our time and looked ahead to putting back some semblance of decency into American politics.

Media Failure: False Balance

If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan started saying the world is flat, most conventional journalists would repeat the assertions and offset them with contrary opinions.

This kind of “false balance” is the subject of the New York Times’ promising new Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, who examines the proposition that it should be called “false equivalency”:

“Simply put, false balance is the journalistic practice of giving equal weight to both sides of a story, regardless of an established truth on one side. And many people are fed up with it. They don’t want to hear lies or half-truths given credence on one side, and shot down on the other. They want some real answers.”

On issues where answers are elusive but not impossible to pin down, such as voter fraud/suppression, getting beyond false balance is left to media fringes such as Bill Moyers and Jon Stewart, rather than mass media.

“There’s a lot of reasonable disagreement on both sides,” says the Times national editor. “One side says there’s not significant voter fraud; the other side says there’s not significant voter suppression.”

Yet the facts are otherwise (see Stewart and Moyers), but it would hard to learn that from Times “balanced” reporting.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Senate’s last sage, is invoked in the argument, recalling his dictum that opponents are entitled to their opinions but not their own facts.

Moynihan is best known for his sociological proposition, “Defining Deviancy Down,” in which he wrote of declining standards in public discourse, “We are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us.”

If he were with us today, he would surely be raising the same questions about journalists as well as politicians. The Times Public Editor puts it this way:

“Journalists need to make every effort to get beyond the spin and help readers know what to believe, to help them make their way through complicated and contentious subjects.

“The more news organizations can state established truths and stand by them, the better off the readership--and the democracy--will be.”

Sherrod Case: Defining Decency Down

There is no Atticus Finch or Joseph Welch in all this. On the 50th anniversary of "To Kill a Mockingbird," we are back in a time when McCarthyism played on fears to spread hatred and destroy lives of people in public life.

The President, who won an election by putting the Civil Rights era behind him, will have to revisit that time before his birth and make things right not only with Shirley Sherrod but generations of Americans who have struggled for decency not only in race relations but political discourse.

In his campaign speech after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright uproar, candidate Obama offered a vision beyond "politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism," but his first year and a half in office, to his evident dismay, have been dominated by that and much more.

“We are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us,” the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in 1993 in his now-famous American Scholar article, “Defining Deviancy Down,” arguing that society keeps adjusting for the amount of unacceptable conduct it can tolerate.

The Sherrod case defines not only deviancy but decency down. It takes us from Rev. Wright's inflammatory videos, which actually existed, to a distortingly edited version of the impassioned speech of a woman who has fought for social justice to make her appear prejudiced.

Such slime would have been unworthy of passing comment if it had not triggered, in this era of debate about Tea Party racism, instant overreaction not only by the NAACP but Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who ran briefly for President on a platform of bringing "good judgment" to government.

To their credit, Secretary Vilsack and the White House are trying to make amends to Ms. Sherrod, but who will remind all involved, in the words of Joe Welch, to recall our "sense of decency at long last" and to remember the lesson of Harper Lee's novel, that to destroy innocent life is a sin?

Tim Russert's Wake

"Meet the Press" is, by its nature, an hour of posturing, lies and evasions, but today it was filled with genuine feeling--tears, laughter and even a few home movies. (Who could resist Doris Kearns Goodwin in a blonde wig with a feather boa popping out of a cake to a do a Marilyn Monroe-JFK bit for Tim's 50th birthday?)

Tom Brokaw, presiding over the mourning, was in tears at one point, while political toughie Mary Matalin clenched a soggy Kleenex, but the prevailing mood was love and laughter, a hell of a good wake for a good life, even without alcohol.

By now, everything that could be said about Tim Russert has been said and oversaid, but it's hard to resist one final observation about the sources of his success, beyond Buffalo, Big Russ and his old-pol Irish genes.

He had the good sense or good fortune or perhaps both to get a start in politics before switching to journalism with two of the twentieth century's best people in public life--Pat Moynihan and Mario Cuomo.

From the Senator-scholar who deplored the trend of "Defining Deviancy Down" and the best president we never had who redefined Reagan's "shining city on a hill" at the 1984 Democratic convention, a young Russert learned that politics was a serious business for serious people.

For all his fascination with the down and dirty of it all, Tim Russert never forgot those lessons. When all the eulogies are over, his successors would do well to remember them for the future.

A Defective Decade

If there were factory recalls for ages, the first product of the 21st century would be sent back for retooling. Politically, socially, morally, esthetically, the decade has been a disaster.

Economically, Paul Krugman grades it as "The Big Zero," but that may be too generous for a time when almost everything in American life has slid below previous standards in an orgy of what Pat Moynihan called defining deviancy down.

The decade gave us our first needlessly preemptive war, the degradation of individual privacy, the most painful depression in almost a century, and perhaps worst of all, a coarsening of sensibilities toward everything from torture to political discourse.

In the late 1990s, a time of budget surpluses and no foreign wars, Hillary Clinton called the impeachment of her husband "a vast right-wing conspiracy." It was neither vast nor a conspiracy, but it was the opening wedge in the politics of personal destruction that is now bedeviling one of the few accomplishments of the decade, the election of America's first African-American president, who is trying to govern despite a mindlessly monolithic opposition party.

Bill Clinton invited such chaos with incredible self-indulgence in the White House, but his behavior was no worse than JFK's, which did not lead to an impeachment that, among other things, may have inhibited attacks on Osama bin Laden for fear of having them called "Wag the Dog" diversions.

Al Gore started the new decade by distancing himself from Clinton, leading to Clarence Thomas' awarding of the presidency to George W. Bush and his self-selected vice president Dick Cheney.

The rest, unfortunately, is history, which offers no do-overs or replacement decades but from which it may be possible to learn and avoid repeating.

Obama and the Bad Boys

Can’t the President get mad at anybody? At his press conference, Barack Obama observes that Vladimir Putin has “that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid at the back of the classroom” and Republicans are in the grip of an “ideological fixation...The idea that you would shut down the government unless you prevent 30 million people from getting health care is a bad idea.”

Nonetheless, he continues to present himself as a reasonable antagonist for the Russians and the Tea Party, a position that may reflect reality but is not getting him much traction in foreign relations or domestic policy.

Even his admirers are left to wonder whether Obama’s even disposition and professorial bent are handicapping him in the White House. Would being more devious and willing to get down into the mud with antagonists work better?

Politics has never been rational but is now less so than ever. To be effective in this atmosphere, you have to be more than right on the issues. A bit of the low cunning of LBJ and even Nixon, without their failure to understand boundaries, might not be amiss.

Take the Snowden flap, for example. Why did the White House from the start inflate his importance rather than dismiss him as a low-level criminal and concentrate on the issue rather than the man? Wasn’t it foreseeable that Putin might use him as a pawn?

Take the Tea Party for another. Against all odds in 1948, Harry Truman lambasted the “do nothing, good for nothing” GOP Congress and won an unlikely election. Can’t Obama see that, in politics, you can blast your opposition but keep smiling for photographs while trying to make deals with them off camera?

When Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed 20 years ago that we were in an era of “Defining Deviancy Down,” he was understating where politics was going.

“We are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us,” the late New York Senator wrote in his now-famous American Scholar article, arguing that society keeps adjusting for the amount of unacceptable conduct it can tolerate.

He pointed out that, in 1929, the killing of seven gangsters in Chicago became the stuff of legend while half a century later “Los Angeles has the equivalent of a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre every weekend.”

What Barack Obama might concentrate on now is the difference between being deviant and devious.

He may pride himself on being neither, but as JFK said, life is unfair and you have to make some hard choices to survive politically.  

Update: Maureen Dowd sums up Obama’sapproach: “There is no moral high ground that he does not seek to occupy. As with drones and gay marriage, he seems peeved that we were insufficiently patient with his own private study of the matter. Why won’t the country agree to entrust itself to his fine mind?”

Not until he shows more heart and anger.