DEFINING DEVIANCY DOWN

Control of Congress Matters!

If you doubt we’ve grown too accustomed to aberrant behavior in the political class, consider this anecdote from the recently published “Insurgency: How the Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted” by Jeremy W. Peters of The New York Times.

When Steve Bannon watched Donald Trump descend on the Trump Tower escalator to announce his presidential candidacy, Bannon thought “That’s Hitler,”as the opening scene of Leni Riefenstahl’s seminal work of Nazi propaganda, Triumph of the Will, flashed through his mind.

He meant it as a compliment.

Peters’s publication of this incident drew not a peep of public protest from Bannon nor a single mention in any American newspaper, not even the Times until a reviewer flagged them on February 22. And even that reviewer concluded the book wouldn’t likely interest many readers. The Times Book Review apparently agreed, since the review didn’t appear until April 4.

That Trump’s future campaign manager and chief strategist admired Trump because Trump reminded him of Adolf Hitler, and that he shared this with a reporter, and that neither the press nor the public was especially shocked when this became public, is all an example of what the late sociologist and Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called, in an influential 1993 essay, “Defining Deviancy Down.”

We used to call people like Bannon sociopaths. Now we just call them Republicans.

And because the media doesn’t apparently think this fact is important, they treat these people as though they are normal, traditional Republicans, with the result that the majority of Americans still think of the Republican Party as they did when it was led by Ronald Reagan - who was bad enough, starting his campaign in the Mississippi town where civil rights workers Goodman, Schwerner and Cheney were murdered by the KKK in 1964 and proclaiming his support for “states’ rights” there, an event thought to be the most obvious “dog whistle” in American politics to that date.

Moynihan’s argument was that when actual deviants are in short supply, normal behaviors are reclassified as deviant and the result is intolerance, which liberals deplore. When actual deviants are in surplus, the overflow gets reclassified as perfectly normal. The result is excessive tolerance, which conservatives deplore. He called the legitimization of deviant behavior “defining deviancy down.”

Today’s screaming culture-war fights are more likely to be about LGBTQ rights, Covid-19 vaccinations, and (thanks to Republicans pandering to the vile conspiracy-mongering by QAnon) pedophilia. None of these were on Moynihan’s 1993 list.

Yes, society is being asked to revise previous beliefs about gender, which conservatives hate. But vaccinations aren’t new, they’re just newly controversial in the growing anti-science tide of public opinion. Pedophilia is neither more accepted nor any more common than it ever was.

The culture wars over these issues are being fought because the deviancy that’s being defined down is that of the cultural warriors themselves. Sociopaths are no longer out on the “kook

fringe. They are proudly found in the halls of power. Especially in the House of Representatives.

Monday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted: “Murkowski, Collins, and Romney are pro-pedophile. They just voted for #KBJ.” That was when they announced their support for now Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who had been hatefully smeared during her confirmation hearings as being soft on child pornography. The “usual suspects” among the Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee who leveled this accusation did so because they’re crudely partisan (in the case of Cotton, Cruz, Hawley and blackburn) or a sublime opportunist like Senator Graham, not because they believe it.

But Moscow Marge took them at their word and applied the same reasoning to fellow Republicans who voted to advance Jackson’s nomination to the Senate floor. That’s something only a sociopath would do.

Greene can be considered chair of the House Sociopath Caucus. Vice chair goes to Madison Cawthorn, the second-most-deranged Republican in Congress after Greene.

We can include Representative Paul Gosar, who posted an animated video of himself killing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, resulting in his receiving the first House censure since 2010.

Representative Lauren Boebert. Boebert, best known for heckling President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address

Most recently, Boebert pledged to vote against any copyright extension for Mickey Mouse because Disney is a “woke” company because it opposes the state’s homophobic new “Don’t Say Gay” law, which bars classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in public schools. (Not that allowing Disney’s copyright to expire in 2024, 96 years after Mickey’s debut, will get any complaint from me; I’d be very happy to see the entire Mickey Mouse Copyright Act, aka the Digitial Milennium Copyright Act, be overturned in favor of the original copyright act.)

We also have to include Matt Gaetz, who has actually been accused of engaging in sex with underage women, and taking them across state lines to offer them to friends.

These people make previous Padishah Emperor of the Crazy People Louie Gohmert look quasi-sane. Fortunately, Gohmert is giving up his congressional seat; unfortunately he is doing so in an attempt to elevate the crazy to a new political office he can denigrate by occupying.

We’ll get more in 2023 Ron Watkins wins Arizona’s second congressional district or Noah Malgeri - who’s called for the execution of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley on live TV - wins Nevada’s third congressional district.

And these are only the most obvious ones. This ignores Josh Mandel, campaigning as a Trump-sycophant KAPO for the Senate in Ohio, or his opponent J.D. Vance. Or Herschel Walker campaigning for Senator in Georgia. Or the crazies running for state offices in too many places.

And in the face of all this....

According to a Pew Research poll released last weekend:

The midterm congressional elections are seven months away, and registered voters are evenly divided between the two parties in their preferences. However, Republican voters are more likely than Democratic voters to say it “really matters” which party gains control of Congress this fall.

At this early stage of the campaign, President Joe Biden is much more of a motivating factor for Republican than Democratic voters: 71% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters say they think of their vote as being “against” Biden; far fewer Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters (46%) view their vote as a vote “for” the president.

The new Pew Research Center survey of 10,441 U.S. adults, including 9,021 registered voters, conducted March 7-13, 2022, finds that most voters (63%) say which party wins control of Congress in this year’s elections “really matters,” similar to the share who said this in early 2018 (65%).

In contrast with 2018, Republican registered voters (70%) are more likely than Democratic voters (60%) to say which party wins control of Congress this year really matters. Four years ago, there were only slight partisan differences on this measure (67% of Democrats and 65% of Republicans said it really mattered which party controlled Congress following the elections) and that remained the case throughout the 2018 campaign.

As in previous midterms, voters are more likely to view their vote as an expression of opposition than support for the president. That is the case today: 36% say their midterm vote is against Biden, while 24% think of it as a vote for Biden; 38% say Biden is not much of a factor in their voting decision.

The survey finds that equal shares of registered voters say, if the elections were held today, they would support the Republican candidate or the Democratic candidate (43% each) in their district. Another 10% say they are not sure who they would support, while 4% would vote for other candidates.

And just in case you were thinking it isn’t time to push the panic button...

Today’s Morning Consult/POLITICO poll has this gem:

While this survey also finds voters tied at 43% on the generic congressional ballot, among parents or guardians with at least one child under 18 in the household who received the expanded child tax credit payments, 46% said they are most likely to vote for a Republican congressional candidate this year while 43% said they’re inclined to back the Democratic candidate.

And further...

The expanded child tax credit payments, enacted through December 31, 2021 as part of President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 relief package, were credited with slashing child poverty. But they were temporary, and their extension failed as part of the demise of Biden’s sweeping domestic policy agenda, the Build Back Better Act.

Many voters who received the payments a group that is just under 20% of the electorate that has historically leaned Democratic, say they’re feeling economic strain. 72% said the expiration of the extended payments had at least a “minor” impact on their financial security,

It’s safe to say this won’t be solved so long as Senator Joe Manchin (D-Money Wrench) remains opposed for the rest of 2022 at the very least. The only solution to this - as to every other major problem facing the country - is three more Democratic Senators as a result of the elections in November, to change the filibuster.

Early in the 2018 midterm cycle, Democratic candidates had a double-digit edge over Republicans on the generic congressional ballot. Democrats went on to gain the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives that year.

Nearly three times as many Republican voters think of their vote as being against Biden as say the president is not much of a factor in their vote (71% vs. 26%); by contrast, Democratic voters are about equally likely to say Biden is not much of a factor (47%) as to say their midterm vote will be “for” him (46%).

Those who hope to see deviancy defeated this fall had best get out and get three others to come vote against it with you.

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