The first thing I saw on my social media feed this morning was the following phrase: “Good grief. Someone please stop the hypocrisy.” This statement is so patently absurd that it made me laugh. Are there secret hypocrisy police in America who can stop people from saying one thing and doing another? Please! If stopping hypocrisy were possible, moms everywhere would have kept their offspring from pulling that crap long ago. Nonetheless, I get it. I have wanted to call out hypocrisy too. So have most of my friends and a majority of the media. For example, this is a brief sampling of the railings against hypocrisy in my news feed:
See? Everyone seems to be mad about hypocrisy. Although every picture I have posted above happens to come from a Conservative, the Liberals are at it too. Everytime I turn on the news, one of the journalists reminds me that Trump praised Comey for his handling of the Hillary email debacle back when he was campaigning but he is now trying to convince us that he is firing Comey because of the very thing he praised. OH this is burning their beans! And the golf…oh the golf! Conservatives were irate about Obama’s golfing trips but Liberals like to point out that Conservatives think even more golfing is totally okay now! The hypocrisy!
OK. Wait a minute. I don’t think that word means what people think it means. Hypocrisy is not holding two views which, though both true, exist in tension with one another. For instance, with respect to James Comey, it is not particularly hypocritical for Liberals to be vocal critics of Comey and to simultaneously believe that Trump should not have fired him just as he was asking for more resources to investigate Trump’s campaign. These two ideas can both be true despite the fact that they create a tension surrounding the question of whether Comey should’ve been let go. Likewise, it is not necessarily hypocritical for Trump to think it was great that Comey reopened the investigation of Hillary during the campaign (he was trying to win, after all) and later come to a more sober judgment, as President, that Comey isn’t good for the FBI or America based on his email-related missteps. That is just changing one’s mind based on a shift in perspective, which should be allowed. (Sidenote: As it turns out, Trump himself later owned that he was, in part, thinking about Comey’s investigation of his campaign when he decided to fire the FBI director. Nonetheless, we are on board the “benefit of the doubt train” here so let’s just follow it all the way to the station. Humor me. He’s our President and I respect the office. I am doing my best to give credit where it can be given).
Hypocrisy, as defined by Merriam Webster, is “behavior that contradicts what one claims to believe or feel.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hypocrisy In other words, it is living in violation of one’s own principles. It isn’t saying one thing and then changing one’s mind or juggling competing priorities. It is saying one thing and doing something that violates the values you’ve articulated. Jesus described it as being like a “whitewashed tomb,” clean on the outside and full of death on the inside. When a person is being truly hypocritical, they are vocal about how much they believe in a given principle but their lives violate the underlying spirit of the rule. They may be technically abiding by the letter of the law while not adhering to stated values like justice, mercy or faithfulness. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+23
Herein lies the problem with talking about politics and hypocrisy in the same sentence. Politics has to do with the art and science of winning control of the government and wielding that control in such a way as to keep it. The chief end of political parties is holding power. Power isn’t a principle one can live by. It’s just something you have or you don’t. Admittedly, the major political parties in America today espouse certain principles they believe in and purportedly exist to influence pubic policy. For Republicans, these major principles might be smaller government, fiscal responsibility, and an emphasis on the sanctity of human life. For Democrats, the principles might be defined as advocacy for the middle and lower classes in opposition to the interests of the wealthy and special interests, environmental responsibility, and guaranteed access to healthcare benefits. However, if you look at the track record of either party, you can see that sometimes they use power in ways that actually adversely affect their stated values.
For instance, though Republicans value fiscal conservatism, here is a graphic that charts increases in federal spending according to who was President at the time. https://mises.org/blog/if-you-want-bigger-government-vote-republican
Ironically, Bush and Reagan were the biggest spenders in recent history. In addition, even if you analyze spending according to when the Republicans held a majority in Congress, the same holds true. Spending has increased under Republicans. Likewise, limiting access to abortions is an extremely important goal for many Republicans, because they see the life of the fetus in the womb as sacred. However, when Colorado initiated a program that gave long-term birth control to young women and it greatly reduced both teen pregnancies (by 40%) and abortions (by 42%) the Republicans in the Colorado legislature refused to authorize funding to keep the program going when private grants expired. This was so even though Colorado’s Medicaid program was a saving a bundle of money due to the major decrease in unwanted pregnancies among the poor. What about these actions are pro-life or fiscally responsible?(http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/09/03/437268213/colorados-long-lasting-birth-control-program-for-teens-may-not-last-long ; https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/06/science/colorados-push-against-teenage-pregnancies-is-a-startling-success.html)
Please don’t think the Democrats are always sticking to their principles either. Despite being billed as the party of the middle class and poor, income inequality has increased under both Clinton and Obama. Clinton passed sweeping welfare reform during his tenure that instituted work requirements without providing any accompanying way for poor working mothers to afford childcare. From 1995 to 2005, the years just before and after the bill was passed, the number of children living below half of the poverty line increased. Since the bill was passed, there has been a continued uptick in the amount of extreme poverty reported across the country. In addition, Democratic candidates take lots of money from Wall Street and special interests. In these circumstances, why should we expect poor folks to be loyal to Democrats?http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/moneybox/2016/06/how_welfare_reform_failed.html
In the end, we would all do well to acknowledge that while political parties do have platforms, their primary goal is to get power and hold it. In recent decades, they have approached the task of governing as if it is a game to be won. The rules of the game are: They put on a red jersey or a blue one and then do what they can to stay in power election after election. If we follow suit, making partisan victory our primary goal as citizens, then we are agreeing to be part of the game they’ve been playing. You don’t join a game and then get mad at the other team for playing against you. That’s the point of the game! In addition, you expect anyone playing this game to fight hard for their team by all legal means possible. You don’t expect objectivity. Those are the rules of game-playing.
So where is the hope and patriotism in politics? Well, instead of expecting political parties to be bastions of principle and crying hypocrisy every time they do what they were designed to do — gain power by promoting their own — we ought to try being principled ourselves. We can stop playing the game! We ought to hold politicians accountable for mistakes no matter what party they come from. We ought not to protect politicians in our party when they do things we would normally condemn. We ought to volunteer our time and dollars towards causes that matter to us. This is principled and has the benefit of involving actions rather than words. Finally, we ought to quit calling each other hypocrites as, together, we try and navigate the complex challenges of being the most powerful nation in the world. What do you gain if you call someone of the opposite party a hypocrite and then are proven right? The answer is nothing except self-satisfaction. However, I’ll tell you what you’ve lost every single time — any chance you had to team up with people who see things differently to solve problems and move the country forward.
Charlotte Barnes says
Brilliant, correct, but hard! Charlotte
Chuck Barnes says
I’ve read every single one of Amy’s blogs from day one. They have made me laugh. They have made me cry. They have made me wince. But this one …. well it just makes me incredibly proud that her mind is so incisive, her prose so spare but trenchant. This is unvarnished truth … a rare commodity anywhere these days. In her ability to tell it like it really is, she has no equal. Best thing I’ve read in years. Should be required reading for every American, regardless of political persuasion.
Any even casual study of organizational theory will tell the researcher that the major function of any organization, whether sacred or secular, whether a tiny enterprise or a giant corporation and certainly any political organization is first to gain power, and still more power … and hold onto it by almost any means. There are some notable exceptions, but it is rare for organizations to think first of others, much less to tend to the needs of the lost, the poor and the least.
Bravo Amy! I’m incredibly proud of you ….