I remember the day they died. It was a cold day, partly cloudy. The engines roared as we rolled out of the scrub pine forests of Fort Benning, Georgia, and pulled into an assembly area to clean and turn in our armored tracks. Everything caked red, mud and sand. Our final two-week field exercise was over and spirits were high, however, only to be dashed. In the age before cell phones and the internet, rumors circulated in the assembly area that the space shuttle Challenger exploded on takeoff. No survivors apparently. It was January 28, 1986.
The destruction of the Challenger and death of her crew dominated the news. It was a period of collective national mourning. American’s demanded answers. A commission was established. The weather and then the O-rings were fingered as the cause of the accident along with flawed decisions on launch day, poor communication between NASA and the maker of the O-rings, and a failure in NASA’s “safety culture.”
Ten years later the sociologist Diane Vaughn wrote The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA. Vaughn saw the disaster as a failure of a workplace culture; where ‘acceptable risk’ was incrementally expanded slowly over time, exacerbated by a ‘culture of production,’ and a senior leadership at NASA unaware of many problems plaguing programs they led. This culture, Vaughn posited, resulted in the “normalizing of deviance.” Vaugh didn’t believe that project managers and decision makers up the NASA hierarchy were amoral or made “amoral calculations” per se, it was that NASA’s cultural ethos had changed over time to where unacceptable risk had become normal, and therefore non-deviant. A disaster resulted.
This theory of ‘normalizing deviance’ captured my attention, and continues to do so to this day. Many disasters are rooted in the normalization of deviance in many organizations. Boeing’s MAX 737 air disasters which resulted in the deaths of over 300 souls comes to mind immediately. Although there, I think there were amoral decisions based on greed.
Vaughn saw the development of a culture where deviance is normalized over times as organic, a product of layered decisions by different folks over an expanse of years, driven by internal demands and too few resources, and unrealistic expectations by senior leaders. These eventually result in delayed disaster: The loss of life on both small and large scales.
Today I argue, the state of our union is in question, subjected to the unrelenting head winds of the deliberate normalization of deviance within our government. It is part of the disorder playbook Project 2025, a deliberate strategy by the Trump administration to affect those disruptions. Where amoral decisions are the point. Where disaster is the goal. We seem now to be in a continuous vortex, spiraling toward a national disaster, Captain Chaos at the helm.
Like most folks coping with a disaster in real time, I am trying to figure out just what the hell is going on, orient myself to understand where the danger lies, protect myself and my family and my community from harm. I ask myself what is animating the Trump movement’s wanton destruction of our constitutional system, a system fundamentally embedded in the Enlightenment.
It is clear, I think, that part of the process is to disassemble the constitutional order, to undermine the state, to break the system, induce chaos and disruption simultaneously, to make folks want to walk away from democratic norms. Democracy then becomes the agent of chaos, an ungovernable mess, with Trump and his minions as the cavalry coming to the rescue. But it is more like the pyromaniac volunteer fireman who sets your house a blaze and then arrives on the fire truck. That is part of the autocratic, dictator-in-waiting playbook.
The evidence is strong, and suggests it is very much at the heart of gutting the federal system, both within and without the executive branch of government. Below are four examples of this normalization of deviance:
- Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s and President Trump’s speeches to an assemblage of admiral and general officers at Quantico, Virginia, this past year was a call to disregard centuries of our military’s ethos of remaining apolitical and not treating Americans, or certain Americans, as enemies. Calling American citizens enemies or suggesting that certain American cities be used for conducting war maneuvers is not normal and should never be normal. Hegseth and Trump are trying to change that ethos. It may be working. The extrajudicial killings of alleged drug smugglers — a criminal offense not an act of war – by American service members are one of those incremental changes that may lead to larger changes. We have seen this in Department of Homeland Security.
- DHS operations are another example of this deliberate normalization of deviance. Homeland Security has become a paramilitary force designed to discipline and punish migrants, regardless of status, harass non-whites, criminalize foreign accents, and kill transgressors, such as Good and Pettri and others. The Recruitment and hiring of unqualified applicants, many of whom could not pass basic physical fitness standards, and more importantly, pass a required constitutional law test during training, does not bode well for law enforcement ethos within ICE of CBP. Hiring law enforcement officers whose primary qualifications are being a Trump loyalist, white supremacist, neo-Nazi, or ignorant brute, is not normal. Noem and Miller and Trump have already changed the ethos of DHS, for the worse.
- Department of Justice attempts to indict political foes is another example of normalizing deviant behavior. The latest attempt to use a grand jury to indict six members of Congress for reminding uniformed members of the military that they can refuse to obey illegal orders (see 1 above) is astounding. The incompetence of the DOJ’s attorney that presented the case to the grand jury would be great fodder of late-night comedy shows – it was – but for the fact that DOJ was trying to indict Trump’s political foes. That is scary shit. Ever since Trump appointed the least qualified Attorney General in American history, along with his chilling speech at the Justice Department, he has worked hard to impart a culture of deviance at DOJ. That deviance led to attempts to indict political foes with specious probable cause and suspect interpretations of criminal laws.
- Even childhood vaccines have become the object of Trumpian deviance. Childhood vaccines save lives. What once was an unacceptable risk to children’s lives – remaining unvaccinated — is now acceptable to too many parents on the mistaken and misguided belief that autism is caused by vaccinations. How many children must die or be scarred before sanity returns? The science does not support that claim of cause and effect. But that’s the point, I think. The attacks on reason and science and learned authorities — vice religious authority — are a clue as to a wider agenda against expertise. But more on that below.
Just as pernicious is the normalization of deviance in Congress. The Constitution specifically empowers Congress with the power to declare war, to levy taxes, to spend the people’s monies. When Trump claimed those powers from Congress, Speaker of the House Johnson and Senate leader Thune looked the other way. Johnson, like Sergeant Shultz in the old TV series Hogan’s Heroes, keeps repeating “I see nothing, I see nothing.”
It is not if, but when, we will have a national rupture if we continue to ignore the deviance creeping into our government. A normal President would accept a mid-term loss, Trump on the other hand, is already seeding deviance by claiming rigged elections if he loses, calling for Republicans to ‘nationalize’ elections in selected states or localities. If he tries to nullify the elections and seize ballots it will be a national disaster, with broad and serious consequences. If he succeeds, it may be the end of our great experiment, disunion, perhaps even war.
It is not just the normalization of deviance within government that is of concern. We must look at the larger context in which to understand where we are going as a nation. This Age of Normalizing Deviance is part of a wider movement to counter and undermine the Enlightenment not only in America, but globally.
The late 17th century to the start of the 19th century was a period that was marked by the innovation of new sciences and philosophies that questioned old assumptions and traditions and beliefs about the human condition. These new thinkers sought to better understanding the world through reason and science. What would come from these innovations were the intellectual foundations for representative government – democracy – and concepts inalienable rights of man. Starting with the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688/89 it was a period of intellectual and physical revolutions. Europe and North America were convulsed. Without this Enlightenment, our country would not, could not, exist.
The Enlightenment brought forth American style democracy: our written constitution; our enduring social compact; our concept of individual freedom. Adherents to radical enlightenment paved the way for the American Revolution, the concept of equality, the separation of church and state. The French Revolution gave birth to the modern notion of human rights. The Haitian revolution put a dagger in the heart of slavery, although it died a slow death. Betterment of the human condition through science not superstition, through democracy not monarchy.
Nevertheless, contrary to the belief that reason and science vanquished faith, there has in fact been a long détente between reason and religion, for well over a century. Moderate enlightenment adherents sought a middle ground between reason and religious traditions to answer the great questions about the meaning of life, the human condition. It is why our deist founders like Madison and Washington and Hamilton didn’t include God in the Constitution. It is why Jefferson and Madison introduced a bill in Virginia’s General Assembly to keep religion and state separate.
Harvard, Yale, and Columbia came out of this Enlightenment drama in North America. It is no coincidence then, why these and other historical institutions are targets of Trump and his Departments of Education and Justice. Unlike many newer land-grant universities and colleges, they are a direct bridge to the Enlightenment.
This dual secular public square and private religious space is precisely why America is one of the top countries in the world when measuring for religiosity. It was a bequeath from our founders to future generations of Americans. It’s our strength, not our weakness. Nonetheless, we do suck when it comes to maternal mortality rates.
I think degrading and undermining these enlightenment ideals and traditions is the goal of Project 2025. The Trump movement is a convenient vessel through which to achieve these goals. We are in a period of counter-revolution; abolishing the existing enlightenment order to replace it with one that fits more with their world view of a patriarchal society; divine rule through Christian religious hegemony and authority. Theocracy not democracy.
We must fight and resist. For those who adhere more to faith than reason, you have the most to lose in this battle, I argue.
Take the Lord’s Prayer, for example. It has two versions, one in Matthew the other in Luke. Additionally, some folks say ‘debt’ verse ‘trespasses’ or in another example of word choices, some say ‘lead us not into temptation’ while others say, ‘do not let us fall into temptation.’ Words matter. These variations permit congregations and churches to diverge in the meaning of prayers, their cosmology of the world, however slight, yet meaningful to them.
Without the separation of church and state, eventually government will corrupt religion and ultimately pick a particular sect as a winner. Do you want Trump, or any president for that matter, appointing your church’s minister or priest? Or telling you which version of the Lord’s Prayer to repeat? Or shutting down your Temple, Mosque, or Church? Or what religious text to read? Prayer in school takes on a different meaning when your version of a prayer is subordinated to another sect’s version. If nothing matters more to you than your faith, this is what is at stake.
If past is prelude, we must expect another disruptive and divisive State of the Union message by Trump. I refuse to participate by watching. We must as a nation come to together to derail the normalizing of deviance within our government. With so much in the balance, to sit back and let the dominoes fall where they may is reckless and a betrayal to all who died defending our country, and a betrayal of generations of Americans yet to be born. Autocrats have a way of eventually devouring their own young. If you wait too long, you, or your unborn descendants, will be on the dinner plate.
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