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Bret Stephens

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

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........

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