The Senate defines deviancy down
by Charlie Sykes
January 16, 2025
In 1993, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his essay, “Defining Deviancy Down” in which he described how society was lowering the standards of acceptable behavior as a response to the increase of deviant behavior in society. Things that were once considered abnormal or immoral, he wrote, were being redefined as “normal” or “acceptable” as society began to adjust its standards so that it could tolerate the previously intolerable.
Moynihan was largely concerned with social breakdowns — the rise of out-of -wedlock births, and criminal and other anti-social behaviors. But if Moynihan were amongst us now, I suspect he would be gobsmacked at the degree we have also normalized deviancy in our politics, including in the august body in which he once served.
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You will have to take my word for it, but at one time, the U.S. Senate was a serious place.
In March 1989, the U.S. Senate voted 53 to 47 to reject the nomination of John Tower, President George H.W. Bush’s pick for Secretary of Defense.
Tower’s rejection was remarkable on a number of levels: He was former senior member of the Senate — the first Republican senator from Texas since Reconstruction — and a former chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee. No presidential cabinet pick had been voted down in 30 years.
But there were problems. “Concerns about Tower’s personal life played a major role. He was accused of being a drunk and a womanizer.”
“Have I ever drunk to excess? Yes,” he said. “Am I alcohol-dependent? No. Have I always been a good boy? Of course not. But I’ve never done anything disqualifying. That’s the point.”
His former colleagues disagreed. (Bush’s next nominee— Dick Cheney — was confirmed easily.)
**
Fast forward to this week’s absurd hearings for absurd nominees.
After hours of denials, evasions, fumbles, and cliches, we are told that the deeply absurd Pete Hegseth — a man who makes John Tower’s transgressions seem quaint by comparison —emerged “largely unscathed”from his Senate confirmation hearing. His confirmation as the nation’s Secretary of Defense — which just weeks ago seemed improbable — now seems likely.
Hegseth’s hearing was followed by the hearing for AG-designate Pam Bondi, who alone would define the unseriousness of this moment, except in comparison with the egregious Matt Gaetz.
Thus, the world’s greatest deliberative body defined deviancy down with barely a whimper.
“What America and the world saw today,” wrote Tom Nichols in the Atlantic, “was not a serious examination of a serious man. Instead, Republicans on the committee showed that they would rather elevate an unqualified and unfitnominee to a position of immense responsibility than cross Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or the most ardent Republican voters in their home states. America’s allies should be deeply concerned; America’s enemies, meanwhile, are almost certainly laughing in amazement at their unexpected good fortune….”
How dumbed down was the senate’s charade?
“The words ‘Russia’ and ‘Ukraine’ barely came up today,” notes Lawfare’s Ben Wittes. “The words ‘China’ and ‘Taiwan’ made only marginally more conspicuous an appearance. The defense of Europe? One would hardly know such a place as Europe even existed.
“By contrast, the words ‘lethality,’ ‘woke,’ and ‘DEI’ came up repeatedly.…”
Hegseth was neither an outlier nor an aberration. One of the central tenets of Trumpism, writes Wittes, is “the contempt for expertise and traditional qualifications; the insistence that the only real qualification is authenticity—and that authenticity is somehow wrapped up in performative masculinity; the belief that sounding tough and being tough are the same thing; and the conviction that complexity necessarily reduces to weakness.”
It’s all right there in the nomination of a proudly unqualified individual who frames his lack of qualifications as qualification of a different, more authentic, variety that reflects what he calls a “warrior ethos” America has somehow lost in its infatuation with equity. And this idea has the apparently silent assent of all of the Republican members of the committee and a few, at least, enthusiastic takers.
…This is the philosophical core of the Trump era. And it is interesting to watch it migrating from Trump himself down to his cabinet. In the first term, after all, Trump’s defense secretaries and cabinet officers were, generally speaking, well qualified in the traditional sense of qualifications. The cult of unqualified authenticity was then mostly confined to Trump himself. But in the Hegseth hearing, you can see it trickling downward.
Meanwhile, it’s not immediately self-evident that Trump’s picks for sensitive positions are wildly popular amongst the electorate. “Few think Trump's FBI and Justice Department will act fairly: AP-NORC poll.”
The poll finds that only about 2 in 10 Americans approve of Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense… A similarly small share say they “somewhat” or “strongly” approve of Tulsi Gabbard being tapped to serve as intelligence chief and Patel being selected as FBI director. About one-third of Americans disapprove of each of the picks, while the rest either don’t have an opinion or don’t know enough to say.
**
And yet the redefining of deviancy continues apace — by both the GOP and what used to be the mainstream media. Consider the contribution of Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, which issued a mass endorsement of nearly every Trump cabinet-level nominee all of whom, according to the Post, are free of “disqualifying deficiencies in competence, temperament or philosophy.”
Jamison Foser offers a list of the worst of the Washington Post’s endorsements — starting with its thumbs up for Pam Bondi (FFS).
On November 22, 2024 the Washington Post editorial board wrote of the relationship between Donald Trump and Pam Bondi:
Mr. Trump’s charity contributed $25,000 to a political group backing Ms. Bondi in 2013, around the time she decided not to pursue fraud complaints against Mr. Trump’s for-profit seminar business, Trump University. Both Mr. Trump and Ms. Bondi denied wrongdoing. […]
More important than any of that, however, is her view about the proper role of the Justice Department. Mr. Trump has been explicit that he doesn’t value or respect the traditional independence of the federal government’s law enforcement function. He soured on both his attorneys general during his first term when they showed independence […]
In contrast, Ms. Bondi led chants of “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton in 2016 and parroted false claims about fraud on television in 2020. She was one of his impeachment defense attorneys and has led the legal arm of the Trump-tied America First Policy Institute.”
Seems bad!
Last month, the news side of The Washington Post published a lengthy report about Bondi’s “baseless claims about election fraud” in 2020, noting “Pennsylvania officials from both parties say there were consequences to her actions, arguing that Bondi spread misinformation that helped wreak long-lasting damage to the electoral system.”
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