There Is Virtue in Defining Deviancy

I n winter 1993, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) published a report titled “Defining Deviancy Down” in the American Scholar. His thesis was that American society since the 1960s had undergone a shift in what it understood as deviant behavior. As a result, society was beginning to excuse actions, attitudes, and lifestyles once understood to be bad for social cohesion. He cited the emptying of mental institutions in the 1960s and ’70s, the increase in single-parenthood rates, and an increased acceptance of crime rates as examples of this phenomenon.

Thirty years later, the refusal to define deviancy is as strong in progressive circles as it was in Moynihan’s time. But now, there are almost no Moynihans on the left willing to heed his obvious lessons. The results have been predictable. In Washington, D.C., the city council recently voted 12–1 to override Mayor Bowser’s veto of a new criminal code. In the wake of an attack on Representative Angie Craig (D., Minn.), the House of Representatives (including Craig herself) voted to overturn this new criminal code. The code would, among other things, reduce the penalty for carjacking at a time when D.C. averages one carjacking a day. In a statement defending the measure, councilwoman Brooke Pinto wrote that the new code is “more equitable and just” and would “promote public safety.”

In San Francisco, city officials are contemplating a measure that would allow nonprofits to open supervised injection sites for drug users. A statewide bill to open similar sites was so extreme that even far-left Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it in August. In a rare instance of Moynihanism on the modern left (and rare especially for him), Newsom justified his veto on the grounds that he was worried about the unintended consequences of the state’s endorsing drug use. New York City, which suffered from a dramatic increase in drug overdoses in the middle of the Covid pandemic, was the first city to implement these sites in 2022. Then-mayor Bill de Blasio declared that the new sites were the “right path forward to protect the most vulnerable people of our city.” His health commissioner, Dr. Dave Chokshi, arranged for the police to stay away from the centers so that they could operate as they are meant to. Chokshi has declared that these sites should be “clinical, safe, hygienic spaces where people can go to access care and seek treatment” — care that includes using drugs without fear of being arrested.

Deviancies defined down aren’t only in the realm of criminal behavior. In Senator Moynihan’s original report, he noted that the proportion of white children born to a single mother had increased from one in 40 in 1962 to one-fifth 30 years later. For black children, the increase was from one-fifth to two-thirds. Today, one-fourth of white children and two-thirds of black children are born to single parents. Yet outside of conservative circles, there is little push to reduce the number of single-parent households. Instead, the solution since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs has remained the same: more federal subsidies. In 2021, Representative Katie Porter (D., Calif.) published an op-ed imploring Congress to get rid of the “single-parent penalty,” a tax distinction in which single parents qualify for a smaller child tax credit than married couples. Why? Because:

The truth is that the single-parent penalty is rooted in outdated ideas about what kinds of families are valid. The discrepancy was a policy choice. Lawmakers decided more than two decades ago that kids in single-parent families were less deserving of help because of their parents’ decisions. To children, many things can feel unfair — but government help that’s allocated based on their parents’ marital status genuinely is unequal treatment.

There are some differences in the deviancies discussed here, but the root of each is that some cultural understanding is being changed. D.C.’s changing its criminal code, despite high levels of crime, shows a willingness to tolerate that crime and redefine it away. The same holds for opening supervised injection sites that cannot be policed. Cities, such as New York, that implement this policy are not merely tolerating drug use, but providing a space for consequence-free use thereof. In the case of single-parenthood, the story today is one of acceptance. The Left extols single parents as virtuous, or at least resents the two-parent norm. Thus, instead of promoting policies that reduce single-parenthood, their proposed solutions are to subsidize it and declare two-parent households “outdated.”

The refusal to define deviancy is deeper than simply trying to be nice. It attacks the roots of civilization. There is nothing virtuous about that. A society that willingly accepts one carjacking a day will soon accept other, worse behaviors. Cities that provide drug users safe places to break the law willingly tear at the social fabric that holds them together. An unwillingness to accept that single-parenthood is a serious problem, despite the plethora of data that show its ill effects on both the parents and the children, only hurts the efforts to solve that problem.

A line must be drawn. There is virtue in defining what is and isn’t deviant behavior. It allows us to highlight what is truly good. Preserving civilization requires us to be able to define what it is, and what it isn’t. It is not cruel to say that carjackers should be punished, or that drug users should not be tolerated; it is a statement of social understanding that those who do not carjack or abuse drugs are better than those that do. It is not wrong to say that single-parenthood is a social problem, or that government policy should favor two-parent households; it is just, because it recognizes that two-parent households are the best model for families, the core unit of all societies.

Without a shared set of social standards, civilization cannot continue. Whether it is being sympathetic to crime or ignoring the virtues of marriage, the Left is determined to undermine those social standards by refusing to define deviancy. Daniel Patrick Moynihan understood the problems of this approach in his time and argued against it. If the Left won’t listen today, then it’s up to conservatives to follow his lead.