Daniel Patrick Moynihan, real liberal of the Senate

2003 MEMORIES: Daniel Patrick Moynihan died March 26. He was 76.

He was a former U.S. senator from New York, but principally he was a thinker who wove liberalism and empirical facts into good policy.

Moynihan, a Democrat, was first to call attention to the damage done to American children and society by the decline of two-parent families. In 1965, he was worried especially about black families, in which 25 percent of children were born out of wedlock.

Unfortunately, his warnings were resisted or ignored. By the time he died, the out-out-wedlock birth rate in black American families was 70 percent. White Americans, whose out-of-wedlock births amounted to just 4 percent in 1965, had almost reached the 25 percent mark in 2003. And as Moynihan predicted, American children were paying a price.

He also was just about the only human to suggest, in 1980, that Soviet totalitarianism would be in its death throes by 1990.

"The defining event of the decade," he said in 1980, "might well be the breakup of the Soviet Union." To every other political thinker that year, a free Eastern Europe was so unthinkable you couldn’t wager a bet on it happening before 2020, and even that seemed optimistic.

Moynihan was an intellectual trailblazer. In 1993, he introduced the concept of "Defining deviancy down." In a widely quoted article, he wrote that each generation adjusts to growth in antisocial behavior by regularly redefining deviancy and, in effect, pretending nothing got worse.

As he summarized it in the language of political science: "I proffer the thesis that, over the past generation … the amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can ‘afford to recognize’ and that, accordingly, we have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard."

Moynihan loved statistics. But he was well aware that, as helpful as they are, numbers can be misleading. Reviewing data on education in the United States, he joked that, considering the geographical patterns of academic performance, it would be best for American students if they all were moved closer to the Canadian border.

Of course, he knew the answer to most big questions was much more complicated than one big move. With each vote and every proposal, Moynihan weighed hard evidence, human nature, and his basic liberal instinct to look out for the little guy.

No American leader has had the brains, the heart or the political courage to pick up where Moynihan left off.

Frank Warner

Comments

[Tedd McHenry]

I think Moynahan ranks as one of the all-time great liberals. But, considering what has happened to liberalism during his lifetime, and taking into consideration the examples you cited above, in contemporary terms he's probably more accurately described as a conservative.

[Frank Warner]

Don't let the pseudo-liberals confuse you.