Disturbing behavior.

• Author: Cox, Ana Marie
• Position: Book Review

THE POLITICS OF DEVIANCE: by Anne Hendershott Encounter, $26.95

LOOK CLOSELY AT THE REemerging debate over welfare reform this fall, and you'll notice that something is missing. Almost nobody outside The Nation bothers to argue, as many liberals once did, that federally mandated work requirements don't promote salutary civic and personal virtues. While government has always encouraged certain types of behavior and discouraged others--say, expanding mortgage-tax deductions for home-buyers--the experience of welfare reform has forced a reappraisal of what might be called legislative morality. Once limited to conservatives, the notion that government can and should promote specific moral behaviors now lies behind conversations on both the left and right, from the movement to federally fund faith-based social services to the campaign by gay activists to open the institution of marriage to same-sex couples.

This new consensus, however, only reopens another debate: Which values do we choose to promote. A thoughtful investigation into the limits of what our society should accept--and expect--from its members could help us navigate these choices. And such an analysis is what University of San Diego sociology professor Anne Hendershott advertises in the introduction to The Politics of Deviance. Calling for a "willingness to discuss behavior such as homosexuality, teenage promiscuity, adultery and addiction," Hendershott writes that we should "adopt standards of conduct that derive from reason and common sense."

Alas, this is pretty much the last evidence of either. The rest of The Politics of Deviance merely apes the blundering, shoddy polemics that dominate the bestseller lists today, from the paranoid rants of Ann Coulter and Bernard Goldberg on the right, to the lame hyperbole of Michael Moore on the left. Between them, these straw-man-battering tomes prove that the culture war has been fought to an odd stalemate: Both sides, eager be the underdog, pretend to have lost. That this style of argument has come to encompass even nominally academic participants like Hendershott--who has previously written a well-received book on caring for Alzheimer's patients--is distressing in its own right. That Hendershott does not notice how her own claim of victimhood undermines her advocacy of individual responsibility is doubly so.

Hendershott's belief in the power of "elites" to distort the accepted categories of normal behavior is unshakeable. Throughout her...