The reaction of Democratic politicians and the mainstream media to Trump’s announcement exemplifies the defining deviance down reflex.
The era of defining crime deviancy down is over. That is the most important message to come out of President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Washington, D.C.
The late Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” in 1993 to describe the normalizing of antisocial behavior in contemporary America. Levels of deviancy once regarded as unacceptable become the new norm, hardly worthy of attention.
Trump rejects that reflex. “I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,” he said on Monday. “This is liberation day in D.C., and we’re going to take our capital back.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Boston Globe (paywall)
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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal. Her latest book is When Race Trumps Merit.
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