Hypocrisy All the Way Down

For the last seven years or so, I’ve often said that I’ve never felt more ideologically grounded but more politically homeless. What I mean by that is I don’t have an obvious political team anymore. A lot of people often ask whether this makes me feel lonely. I’d be lying if I didn’t say it did, a bit, in the early days. It’s more fun to be part of a team, never mind a valued member of one.  But I count myself rich in terms of the real teams that matter—friends, family, colleagues, and, of course, the quadrupeds.

Besides, I’ve long believed and, more recently, fully taken to heart, that this is a flawed way of thinking about such things. If your political convictions lead you to feeling lonely, you are probably invested in politics for the wrong reasons. To put it crudely, if you take the position that taxes should be low or defense spending robust so you can fit in with a group of people, you don’t really hold that position. If you were pro-life or pro-choice out of loyalty to a team, you weren’t really pro-life or pro-choice in the first place. When the desire to maintain your good standing in a group determines what you profess to believe, you don’t really believe it—or at least you can’t be counted upon to believe it when it might come at a cost.

That’s what I mean by being ideologically grounded but politically homeless. In recent years, huge numbers of people zigged because zigging was the order of the day. And since the crowd determines its bearings by the position of the ship, not the fixity of the sun or the North Star, those who stay put look like they’re zagging when in reality everyone else is zigging. This is partly what I have in mind when I talk about the “Remnant”—those people who hold to their views even when they are out of fashion.

I bring all of this up because I’m about to vent my disgust with the ziggers and zaggers of both parties. And I want to be clear about where I am coming from.

So let me set the stage. I’ve been writing for 20 years about my problems with populism. I don’t like crowds. I don’t like the politics of crowds. Perhaps the central theme of Liberal Fascism is that politics based on the aesthetics and transcendence of crowds—and the cult of unity that drives them—are an enemy of the good and an omnipresent danger to liberal democracy in part because the rhetoric of democracy often conjures the passion of the mob. “Here the people rule” is an essential component of democracy, but absent the limiting principles of the rule of law, constitutionalism, and reasoned deliberation and debate it is a dangerous concept. I closed my second book by arguing that the cult of unity and the exaltation of the mob are not consistent with the “American political tradition or creed. In America the hero is not the mob. It is the man—or woman—who stands up to the mob and says: You will not lynch this man today.”

For most of those 20 years, my views were considered perhaps a bit too elitist for some but for the most part fairly mainstream on the right. Now, with the MAGAification of the right, lots of former ideological comrades-in-arms think I’m nuts, or a sellout, or a coward, or some kind of “lib.” At least that’s what some folks tell me every day on Twitter or via email or say behind my back in jabs that eventually reach me. But my positions haven’t moved one iota; they’ve only become more concrete.

Hypocrites as far as the eye can see.

With all that said, I think the mobs protesting outside Supreme Court justices’ homes are grotesque. I largely agree with Sen. Josh Hawley when he says:

“The hypocrisy from the left is really unbelievable. Here we have the White House encouraging people to go out to do engage in what amounts to harassment, which, by the way, is illegal. Federal law says that you cannot picket or protest or harass justices with the… purpose of trying to change their vote in a case, and that’s exactly what they are doing … it’s just really an assault on the American family and on the institution of the Supreme Court.”

I say “largely” because I have no idea what he means by “an assault on the American family.” But he’s entirely right that what the left is doing in celebrating or failing to condemn this organized harassment is outrageous.

Here’s the problem: Josh Hawley is like a hooker calling someone a whore. He has no problem with mobs harassing public officials to intimidate them. When a mob gathered around the Capitol on January 6, he extended his fist into the air in solidarity. He worked as the mob’s agent.

Now, I’ve always taken the position that even if no one broke into the Capitol, smashing doors and windows, smearing feces on the halls of Congress, and beating up cops, the march on the Capitol would still be an indefensible, anti-constitutional outrage. I don’t mean the rally several blocks away. As ugly and insipid as that was, it still fell under the rubric of constitutionally permissible speech. But the moment Trump told the crowd to become a mob and march on the Capitol, it became something different. Trump told them:  

“If you don’t fight like Hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He told them to go to the Capitol to give Republicans “the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country” and “you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”  “We’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don’t need any of our help. We’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”

 Donald Trump Jr. told the crowd:

“To those Republicans, many of which may be voting on things in the coming hours: You have an opportunity today. You can be a hero, or you can be a zero. And the choice is yours. But we are all watching. The whole world is watching, folks. Choose wisely. … These guys better fight for Trump. Because if they’re not, guess what? I’m going to be in your backyard in a couple of months! … [This] should be a message to all the Republicans who have not been willing to actually fight. The people who did nothing to stop the steal. This gathering should send a message to them: This isn’t their Republican Party anymore! This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party!”

Grifter dufus Ali Alexander boasted:

“I was the person who came up with the January 6th idea, with Congressman Gosar, Congressman Mo Brooks and then Congressman Andy Biggs. … We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress, while they were voting, so that who we couldn’t lobby, we could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside.”

Days before January 6, Jason Sullivan, onetime aid to Roger Stone, urged Trump supporters on a conference call to “descend on the Capitol” and to make legislators “understand that people are breathing down their necks.” He continued: “Biden will never be in that White House. That’s my promise to each and every one of you. … If we make the people inside that building sweat and they understand that they may not be able to walk in the streets any longer if they do the wrong thing, then maybe they’ll do the right thing. We have to put that pressure there.”

Obviously, there are differences between organized mobs trying to intimidate legislators into stealing an election and organized mobs trying to intimidate Supreme Court justices out of a ruling. And the violence of the January 6 mob is categorically different.

But save for that obvious exception, from where I’m sitting, none of those differences matter very much. Reasonable people can say one is worse than the other, but I’m incapable of seeing how a reasonable person can argue one effort is good and the other is bad. Both are terrible. The shared intent of both is to frighten public officials into violating their oaths.

What galls me isn’t merely the hypocrisy, it’s the way people use the charge of hypocrisy hypocritically. Ted Cruz, who called the January 6 vandals “terrorists” until Tucker Carlson told him to take it back and apologize, is outraged by these protests. “Today’s Democrat Party believes in violence, they believe in mob rule, they believe in intimidation,” he said on Monday. “The ends justify the means and it’s complete hypocrisy.”

He’s right. But he’s also an astonishing hypocrite. Mob rule for me, not for thee, is not a defensible position for anyone, but especially not for someone who drapes himself in platitudinous reverence for the Constitution. He’s also a liar. He continued, “On January 6 of 2021, you had tens of thousands of people peacefully protesting, and yet the corporate media and Democrats slander them with the made-up term ‘insurrectionist.’ And yet in this instance, they are not willing to call off their goons even now, even now, as this has the potential to escalate and escalate further.”

I mean, it’s true that on January 6, you did have tens of thousands of people peacefully protesting. You also had people—again, people Cruz once called “terrorists”—attacking police and chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!”

I’m a broken record on how Congress has gelded itself, but I’m still capable of shock that Republicans can get outraged about attempts to intimidate the court but are utterly blasé or even supportive of attempts to intimidate them.

The liberals are little better. For years, they’ve waxed righteous about “democratic norms” and the “rule of law.” Last year, they insisted that angry protests of school boards were literally acts of terrorism. By refusing to condemn illegal protests—and they are illegal—intended to intimidate justices from upholding their oaths, they are just as hypocritical. Again, you can argue  the intent behind January 6 was worse if you believe safeguarding elections is more important than safeguarding the rule of law, but just because A is worse than B, that doesn’t mean B is good. Murder is worse than assault and battery, but that’s not a defense of assault and battery.

Part of the indictment against Trump and his enablers is that they could have—and should have—foreseen that their rhetoric could lead to violence. Well, vowing, “If you take away our choices, we will riot” seems like a pretty good indication of what might happen next. Jen Psaki says “we certainly encourage” protests outside justices’ homes since they’ve been non-violent “to date.” Well, as Psaki would be the first to concede, Donald Trump’s admonition to the crowd to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” doesn’t let him off the hook for what came next. You see, the problem with saying anything goes short of violence is that you make violence all the more likely by shrinking the space between protest and violence. (And let’s not pretend in the wake of the George Floyd riots that liberal opposition to violence is adamantine, universal, and unequivocal.)

Meanwhile, Psaki insists that the real story here is that there “are voices on the right who have called out these protests while remaining silent for years on protests that have happened outside of the homes of school board members, the Michigan Secretary of State … or even an insurrection against our Capitol.” And she’s right! But you can be sure that if pro-life protesters were using bullhorns outside the homes of liberal justices in a similar situation, she’d condemn it.

I’m politically homeless because I’m disgusted by all of it. I’m disgusted by the hypocrisy and I’m disgusted by the hypocritical bleating about hypocrisy.

Our system works only if the rules count even when they’re inconvenient to your own side. And just because “they” are hypocritical or inconsistent in applying their proclaimed principles, that doesn’t give you license to be equally hypocritical or inconsistent. If your commitment to your principles stands only when they stymie your enemies, they aren’t principles—they’re weapons and nothing more. 

Oscar R. Benavides, the largely forgotten Peruvian dictator, once said, “For my friends everything, for my enemies the law.” That gets about as close to a working definition of Trumpism as anything else I can come up with. Unfortunately, it’s also pretty spot-on for what counts as progressivism these days.

And my rejection of that is why I’m now politically homeless. It doesn’t feel all that lonely because I know there’s a remnant that sees things the same way. Moreover, I’m reminded of the difference between solitude and loneliness. “Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone,” Paul Tillich observed. “It has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.” While that may sound more smug than I intend, my only point is that if you believe in the rule of law and the majesty of the constitutional order, there’s a certain glory that comes with refusing to surrender to the crowds and their passions. As the sainted Calvin Coolidge said, “One with the law is a majority.”

Update

Since I brought up the Remnant, you might be interested to know that the 500th episode of The Remnant podcast is coming up and we’re going to do a live event. AEI has graciously offered to host it on May 24. Seating will be very limited and we’re going to go with first-come, first-serve on sign-ups. So if you’re in town and want to see us record a special Remnant-palooza with many fan favorites, you can sign up here.