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.
It's so funny to me that the Democrats seem to want safe streets to be coded as a Republican issue. No one is forcing them to side with criminals! pic.twitter.com/gOmSsKJZz4
— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) August 14, 2025
