Donald Trump’s baseless questioning of the legitimacy of the 2020 election has spawned a lot of handwringing regarding our democracy. As warranted as these concerns are, though, the reality is that American democracy has been dying a slow death for quite some time thanks to the nationalization of American politics — due to the simple fact that in a multiethnic, continental nation, more and more decisions are being made at the most central level of government, and by unelected judges and bureaucrats at that. Instead of actually reckoning with our democratic weakness — our dearth of veritable self-government — we have been evading the problem by defining democracy down.
In a 1993 American Scholar essay, “Defining Deviancy Down,” the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that societies can only tolerate a certain level of deviancy from accepted norms and modes of social behavior. When the conduct of a sufficiently large swath of the citizenry falls beneath these standards, we respond by revising our standards downward so as to legitimize said conduct. In sum, the conduct is no longer regarded as sub-standard; it becomes standard.
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