Hypocrisy and the Real World

Dear Reader,

“F— that guy. … He’s with the blacks.” 

That’s what Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez said in a secretly recorded conversation with two other Latino councilmembers that is blowing up L.A. politics. Indeed, all three of them said all sorts of terrible, racist garbage in the context of a very contentious fight about redistricting in Los Angeles. The White House has already weighed in, saying that they should all resign. Martinez stepped down as president on Monday, but that was not enough for the critics.

And I kind of think it’s great.

Now, let me be clear: I don’t condone, endorse, or agree with any of it. If someone talked that way on a Dispatch conference call, they’d be fired. Also, I don’t think it’s great for some partisan reason. I don’t care that it’s a “Dems in disarray” moment. I don’t care that some Republicans will use it as a “see, they’re the real racists” talking point.

But here’s the thing: This is a great teaching moment. For instance, the “guy” who’s “with the blacks” is an Oaxacan. So here we have three Hispanics crapping on another Hispanic for not being sufficiently on their team. The conversation segues into outright bigotry—imported from Mexico—about Oaxacans being “short” and “ugly” peasants.

The strategizing as well as the sniping and griping is all very, very parochial. But if you look at it through a wide lens, it’s also normal. This kind of coalition policing is utterly recognizable as politics. The word politics is derived from “polis,” meaning the city. Cities—city states—are where politics come from in a very real sense. And competition for power among different tribes, clans, dynasties, houses, factions, etc,. is pretty close to the definition of politics for most of human history. From Ancient Rome and Greece to modern day Beirut, New York, and Los Angeles, various sectarian groups tend to say terrible things about each other when talking in private. Lord knows what the Irish bosses of a century ago in New York said about the Jews, Germans, and Italians—or blacks!—in their social clubs and private offices. And vice versa!

Again, I don’t approve of it. But it’s also oh-so-very normal.

I don’t know it, but I also don’t doubt that some of the things said among certain Jewish factional power brokers in Tel Aviv about other Jews—say, the ultra-Orthodox—would sound horribly antisemitic if uttered by non-Jews. Similarly, I suspect that much of what some ultra-Orthodox say about more secular Israeli Jews can be pretty ugly.

One of the things that makes this so difficult to talk about is the obvious—and good—taboo against racism and bigotry. But that taboo obscures the fact that in contests over power, us-vs.-them thinking is unavoidable. And once you start thinking in those terms, ad hominem labels and gross insults become very sticky.

One of the fascinating things about all this is that everybody knows this to be true. It’s an essential plot point in virtually every movie and TV show about urban politics or policing, or prisons, or the mafia. Watch Gangs of New York, Godfather of Harlem, Mayor of Kingstown, Night Falls on Manhattan, King of New York, Oz, American Gangster, Sons of Anarchy, The Warriors, Boardwalk Empire. Now, it’s no coincidence that I’m including movies and TV shows about criminals—in and out of prison—in the “politics and policing” category. Because when you strip away the (very important) pieties and artifices of civilization, you’re left with a lot of us-vs.-them, zero sum contests for power and the rough talk that goes with them. And that makes for good entertainment.

The coalition instinct maps onto race and ethnicity very easily, but it can attach itself to almost anything. Crips aren’t racist in their hatred of Bloods, just as North Koreans aren’t anti-Asian in their animosity for South Koreans. There’s a good deal of ethnic and religious bigotry in some arguments between supporters of teachers’ unions and school choicers, but the bigotry is an add-on to the underlying conflict.

What I like about this L.A. story is that it’s a very human story. The reigning ideology of zero tolerance for racism—which I entirely support with regard to any state action and in most other realms—has a downside. It tends to homogenize groups into artificial categories. The Latinx farce is just one extreme example of how disproportionately white and upscale progressive ideologues like to divide the world into people of color and white people. Not only do the vast majority of Hispanic people reject the term “Latinx” as condescending and inauthentic, even the term “Hispanic” erases so much of the diversity of people we lump under that rubric. Mexican-American immigrants aren’t just different from Spanish, Cuban, Argentinian, or Puerto Rican immigrants (who aren’t even immigrants strictly speaking since they’re already Americans). They’re also very different from Mexican Americans who’ve been here for generations. And even there, Mexican Americans in Texas are culturally different from Mexican Americans in California. Heck, apparently some Mexican Americans in Los Angeles don’t even like Oaxacan Mexican Americans in Los Angeles.

You can make the same point about pretty much every group in America. White people in the South are culturally different from white people in New England. And white Catholics are different from white Protestants who are different from white Jews. The Irish Catholics are different from the Italian Catholics. The Orthodox Jews are very different from the Reform Jews. You know what the most educated ethnic group in America is? Nigerian Americans. You get the point.

The simple fact is that we talk about race in this country at an incredibly abstract level. That abstraction not only denies the distinctiveness of groups, it sometimes erases the uniqueness of individuals.

This is a problem for countless reasons, starting with the fact that it is literally un-American in a deep and profound sense. However, one of the problems I find most fascinating is how it plays out at the elite level. The social rules enforced by college administrators and HR directors only make sense to those in the rarefied bubbles they inhabit, not people in the real world. The way people talk in New York Times Slack channels isn’t the way normal people talk.

(I get a kick out of it every time Al Sharpton rants about “latte liberals” on Morning Joe. Sharpton is a product of New York City politics. A one-time demagogue who infamously ranted about white and Jewish “interlopers” in Harlem, Sharpton has since mellowed. But he still gets exhausted by the prattle of “latte liberals” who live in a bubble and don’t understand basic politics. He’s always had a better grasp of Trump than most MSNBC liberals because Trump is a product of the same culture.)

None of this absolves those L.A. City Council members, but what I like about this scandal is how it illuminates that our abstractions about race and ethnicity—but also sexuality, religion, class, etc.—don’t conform to the real world. I doubt there’s a multiethnic community in America where some version of this kind of talk doesn’t occur. I’m sure there are politicians or activists representing gay neighborhoods in San Francisco who say terrible things in private conversations about other groups. Lord knows that NIMBY movements in rich liberal enclaves have sparked some saucy language behind closed doors.  

The bargain.

Okay, let’s change gears a bit. The phrase “behind closed doors” is key.

As a conservative, I’m compelled to champion a certain kind of double standard that is wholly unfashionable in a hypocrisy-obsessed America. Double standard may be the wrong term for what I’m getting at because I think there should be, in fact, different standards for public and private life. Manners in public are simply different from manners in private. We all tell jokes in private that would be inappropriate in public. When talking to your best friends or family members, you say things about other friends or family members that you’d never say to their faces—at least not in the same way. These statements aren’t necessarily mean or evil or cruel (though they can be!), because the person you’re talking to understands where you’re coming from. This is just a fact of life.

“In private,” Milan Kundera writes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “a person says all sorts of things, slurs friends, uses coarse language, acts silly, tells dirty jokes, repeats himself, makes a companion laugh by shocking him with outrageous talk, floats heretical ideas he’d never admit in public, and so forth.” Further on, he adds, “that we act different in private than in public is everyone’s most conspicuous experience, it is the very ground of the life of the individual.” But “curiously, this obvious fact remains unconscious, unacknowledged, forever obscured.”

It is this value, he continues, that is central to any understanding of real freedom and one that we “must defend beyond all others … that private and public are two essentially different worlds and that respect for that difference is the indispensable condition, the sine qua non, for a man to live free; that the curtain separating these two worlds is not to be tampered with, and that curtain-rippers are criminals.”

Now, Kundera was writing in the context of totalitarian communism. Totalitarianism is evil for all sorts of reasons, but it’s different from mere authoritarianism or despotism because it’s defined by the erasure of the barrier between public and private. To borrow a phrase from the literature of totalitarianism, there can be no “islands of separateness.” I do worry that the digital panopticon culture of smartphones and social media is tearing holes in the curtain between public and private in myriad unhealthy ways.

But I don’t need to go deeper into all of that to make my point. Every civilization needs to maintain the distinction between public and private. Again, as a conservative, I’m partial to pretty strict rules of public behavior. One of the things I’ve always liked about the Victorian era—which had many downsides to be sure—was how it held all of society to a fairly inconvenient public standard of decorum and decency, even if it made allowances for what people did or said in the privacy of their homes or clubs. I’m not a neo-Victorian, but I wouldn’t mind more dress codes in public places and less tolerance for cursing and crudeness.

Hypocrisy is not good. But it’s preferable to many alternatives. As I’ve long argued, a certain kind of hypocrisy is essential to being a good parent. I did all sorts of things when I was young that I don’t want my daughter to do. Heck, I do all sorts of things now that I don’t want my daughter to do. I don’t badger her to smoke cigars with me, for instance. If that makes me a hypocrite, that’s fine. “Do as I say, not as I do (or did)” is utterly defensible. I’d like to think there are some porn stars who do not want their kids to follow in their footsteps. If you’re going to be a porn star, better to be a hypocritical one.

Ideally, there would be no adulterers or sexual abusers in politics. But if they’re going to get elected, I would still want them to condemn adultery or sexual abuse and not brag about it. A glutton is not a better person if he celebrates gluttony out of a foolish consistency. A liar who truthfully celebrates lying is worse than a liar who lies when he says he disapproves of lying.

But part of the problem with our obsession with hypocrisy and “authenticity” is that it encourages people to make peace with their sins to avoid the charge of hypocrisy. There are worse things than being a hypocritical ass or racist, namely being a proud ass or racist. I’d rather live in a world where Dick Morris is pelted from the public stage for sucking on hooker toes than a society where we celebrate toe-sucking in order to rationalize keeping the guy around. As Ramesh Ponnuru once put it, “When Hugh Hefner moved out of the Playboy mansion the better to bring up his two young sons, nobody accused him of not living down to his principles.”

There is a bargain implicit in a free and decent society. We have a lot of freedom to be coarse, rude, or sinful in private, but we have a lot of responsibility not to celebrate or condone coarseness, rudeness, or sin in public. Barring any revelations about private misdeeds, we should judge people by their public behavior and public statements. But when your private misdeeds spill out into the public eye—depending on the seriousness of the misdeed—you’re supposed to admit your error and pay a price. We can argue about what that price should be, but there should be a price. What we shouldn’t do is wave it away—“everybody does it,” “judge not lest ye be judged,” “don’t be such a square”—as if standards don’t matter when they’re violated by our own.

That’s the double standard I cannot abide by. If you think a behavior is morally wrong, you can’t add “when a Democrat” or “when a Republican” does it.

Is it unfair in some way that a private conversation between these Los Angeles council members was leaked for the public to hear? Yes, I think it is. Does that mean they shouldn’t pay a price? Not at all. That’s the bargain. Deal with it.