Today’s conservatives never stop complaining that leftist politicos are hypocrites.
Hypocrisy implies a standard that the Left accepts but flaunts. The Capitol Hill invasion marks a genuine threat to the republic, while months of Black Lives Matter riots in our great cities garnered hardly a peep. “Hypocrisy!” shout the critics on the Right. I could go on, and many, many, many others have.
This lullaby about hypocrisy also promotes hopes of reconciliation among conservatives. If people on the Left are just being hypocritical, then they might, when they see reason or become less distorted from Trump Derangement Syndrome or Bush Derangement Syndrome or whatever, return to their sacred ideals. Pointing out hypocrisy is a way of bringing them, slowly, back to comity and mutual citizenship, the thinking goes. It might prompt them to better action.
Something much deeper is going on here. Hypocrisy, according to the old chestnut, is the tribute vice pays to virtue. People are ashamed of hypocrisies. People secretly practice hypocrisy. Such shame and secrecy reinforce common standards. People feel bad when they violate sacred principles, so they do it in secret or are ashamed when exposed.
There is no such a thing as a shameless hypocrite or an open hypocrite. “Hypocrites” without shame or who practice “hypocrisy” openly actually reject the standard critics would suppose they adhere to. A Christian dealing in sex and drugs and openly worshiping Baal is no hypocrite. He has rejected that creed.
Today’s Left is much the same. Calling today’s Leftists hypocrites requires endless contortions. It is simpler and scarier to see that the Left has rejected the standards of common citizenship. The Left is rejecting equal protection, equal treatment of the laws, and the rule of equal laws and opportunities for all. Its principle of justice is to help friends and relatives while harming enemies.
Double standards sown into law enforcement and culture, with the rulers defining the boundaries between the two standards, is the hallmark of oligarchy. Oligarchy is not just the rule of the rich, though that is part of it. Oligarchy is the rule of the few for their own interest. Oligarchic justice demands that unequals be treated unequally, as Aristotle writes, and it extends the idea of human inequality way beyond its legitimate scope. Friends of the oligarchy are treated one way because they are presumed better. Enemies or non-friends of the oligarchy are treated another way because they are presumed worse.
The Left is not hypocritical to its standards: help friends, harm enemies, unequal justice. So, the Left can practice what was hypocrisy openly and without shame. What, from the standpoint of common citizenship, amounts to hypocrisy is, for today’s Left, an edge of their attempt to transform the regime from a republic of equal citizenship to a woke oligarchy.
Even as more and more people sense this transformation, it is not easy to know what to do about it. The goal has to be to restore the ideas of equal protection of the law, a framework that provides more or less equal opportunity.
It is well past time to stop exposing the hypocrisy of the Left. It is not hypocrisy. It’s a revolution. Resisting it requires seeing it for what it is and convincing our fellow citizens of that fact.
Scott Yenor is professor of political science at Boise State University and a Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. His book Recovery of Family Life: Exposing the Limits of Modern Ideologies is out from Baylor University Press.
