On Hypocrisy

Since the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg last month, the question of whether the government will proceed in replacing her before Election Day, or in between Election Day and Inauguration Day, has brought up the question of hypocrisy. Republican senators, including majority leader Mitch McConnell are pushing hard to quickly fill Ginsberg's reliably progressive vote with a conservative one, flying in the face of what many of them said just a few short years ago when Justice Antonin Scalia died in February of 2016. Then, Republican leadership was adamant that filling an open Court seat in an election year was against our democratic principles and that the next president should fill the vacancy despite such a thing happening more than a dozen times before. Scalia died with seven months before people went to the polls. When Ginsberg died just six weeks before the election, the tune has changed. "Use my words against me," one senator said then when vowing not to give a hearing before an election in 2016. Since then, that senator, so committed is he to confirming a replacement quickly, has refused to take a COVID test despite being exposed to the disease because quarantining would disrupt his responsibilities as the chairman of the senate judiciary committee. Of course, the president has the right and the authority to nominate a justice whenever there is a vacancy—and already has—and the Senate has the right to hold a vote on that person regardless of how close it comes to Election Day—and hearings began yesterday—but by being forcefully clear that the Senate was closed for business four years ago and is now working around the clock to slip in a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land without good explanation about what changed has left some heads scratching.

This is hypocrisy. Of course this is hypocrisy. This is about as bald as hypocrisy gets. This isn't a nebulous idea like a party that once stood for fiscal restraint slowly abandoning that tenet (although, that's happening too), these are individuals who went on record a short time ago saying "I would never do something like this because of my principals" reversing course and saying "I cannot wait to do something like this." Many of them are hardly denying it. The excuses, that there was a divided government in 2016, that Democratic treatment of then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was so fierce that all bets are off, are emptier than the cheap seats at the president's recent rallies. It is the opposition's right to be outraged and certain that these senators, many of which face stout re-election challenges, will pay for this hypocrisy with their jobs but that denies the obvious fact that most voters are hypocrites too.

Perhaps this is natural. We have a two-party system, which is by and large a good thing. Voters have to choose one and partisanship almost always inevitably leads to duplicity. It's how voters for the "national security party" can justify a leader who asks foreign chiefs to investigate his political opponents or how voters for the "law and justice" party can dismiss their nation's own intelligence officers as political subversives or how voters who claim to hate socialism can cheer a president who restricts free trade, tips the market towards advantageous commodities and covers these maneuvers with bailouts to the industries most effected. It's how voters can say proudly that they support the party of science unless it comes to biological sexes or how a contagious disease only spreads in large groups that don't support meaningful causes. And God help any party that wants to be the family values party because it had better have a firm handle on what its representatives are up to behind closed doors. This is what rooting for a team is about, you want the team to win by any means necessary, even if that means sacrificing your values or twisting them into a logical pretzel. When the Houston Astros stole a World Series and another pennant through a systematic culture of cheating using garbage cans and wearable vibrators it was a shock to my very soul as a baseball fan but when my Cardinals were caught hacking into the scouting data of those very same Astros, it was an isolated incident by one rogue employee and besides, if you aren't cheating you aren't trying. That type of hypocrisy is forgivable in sports, where the stakes are low, but in things that matter, blind bias is corrosive. As the Peruvian dictator Óscar R. Benavides said, in a sentiment that has been more and more prevalent in Washington lately, "For my friends everything, for my enemies, the law."

I have long had a keen loathing of hypocrisy. In Mass at school I could hardly be called a rapt listener but I always straightened up and took heed when the homily centered around sixth chapter of Matthew in which Jesus warns of the phoniness of performative grandstanding. "Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them," He says, going on to say "So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others." He goes on to make similar recommendations for prayer and fasting. The message was clear to me; genuine virtue was done for others, hypocrites are good only because they think it makes them look good.

Of course, I am a hypocrite. I fail my own standards, I bend rules for myself that I hold others to, I give myself passes for things I criticize in others. How can I call myself, as I have many times in this newsletter, a devotee of the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, who herself called hypocrites rotten to the core, when Ms. Arendt would rightly point out that I live the type of Platonic contemplative life she spent her career deriding. Arendt warned that thinking is just a part of a meaningful life and, without putting those thoughts into action, will never produce an answer to even basic questions like "Who am I?" Do I not spend too much of my time in thought, creating scenarios in which moral scales are balanced in a hermetic mind laboratory, avoiding the public arena where ideas get messy, compromised and tainted with hypocrisy? Aren't I afraid to emerge into that arena?

This is part of the reason I admire Malcolm X as much as I do. Certainly no one could accuse Malcolm of not being a man of action and his hatred of hypocrisy was a fierce as anyone's. He talked the talk, living a morally unimpeachable personal life after his conversion to Islam, never drinking or eating pork. His thoughts on women and their role in domestic life are regressive but he held up his end of the bargain, never looking at another woman after he and Betty Shabazz where married. His convictions were strong enough that he broke with his mentor Elijah Muhammad at great professional cost over Muhammad's personal hypocrisy. "If I'm wrong, put me in jail," Malcolm said, meaning it. "But if you can't prove that [American] democracy isn't hypocrisy then don't put your hands on me." That uncompromising Herculean character is what makes Malcolm X such a righteous force.

It's also what made him an ineffectual agent of change compared to Martin Luther King, Jr., who was no less radical but much more willing to take meetings with people Malcolm would dismiss for being compromised (King was also a personal hypocrite who held standards for his wife he was not willing to meet). King may have chided white moderates as part of the problem but he courted their support nonetheless whereas Malcolm famously rebuffed a white woman who asked him what she could do to help the cause. "Nothing," he told her (he later regretted both the incident and the thinking that led to it). King's compromises and willingness to gather support wherever he could led to real change, the type that improved the lives for actual Americans. Malcolm's ferocity shines brightly as an ideal of righteousness but it was King's ability to maneuver the necessary world of accommodation and concession that make him one of the greatest Americans who ever lived. Despite Arendt's distaste for hypocrisy, she warns against an uncompromising war against it, arguing that an effort to root out all lies has the unintended consequence of destroying all truth. Everyone wears a mask in public, too much unmasking leaves us with a naked.

Does this justify our current leaders? Not to me. I find the type of flip-flopping engaged by the senators to be the worst kind of duplicity that weakens faith in government and the most naked type of moral relativism that conservatives allegedly abhor. Voters should enact consequences against such skullduggery, just as they should hold Democrats to account who vow to expand the Supreme Court and adopt states simply for electoral votes, as some have, for retribution for a speedy court appointment. That is hypocrisy as revenge against hypocrisy. "All concerns of men go wrong when they wish to cure evil with evil," said Sophocles. If the Court is to be changed as a result to this political gamesmanship, let it have term limits imposed on its justices. Amy Coney Barrett, the president's nominee and the inevitable next justice of the Supreme Court, is 48, a number that makes Republicans giddy because of how long she could serve, and would have been 10 years older than the average life expectancy of an American when the Supreme Court was established. Straddled 18-year terms are a sensible way to de-politicize the Court while retaining its long-lasting power.

So while there is some hypocrisy that should not be given a pass, I was reminded of Arendt and her pitting of the contemplative world versus the world of action a few months ago. Driving down a street in a wealthy neighborhood in Des Moines, I noticed that every one of the large, well-appointed houses sported a Black Lives Matter sign in its yard. I couldn't help but think that at least a few of these people, all of whom are almost certainly white, were virtue signalling, engaging in the exact behavior my Bible verse warned against. Even as I was sneering in superiority, a friend of mine posted a story to her Instagram not a day later that really stopped me. She was walking around her neighborhood and spoke earnestly to her phone about how welcomed she felt by seeing those same Black Lives Matter signs in the yards around her house, how, even as a small gesture, it meant a lot to her to know that her neighbors were publicly on her side. My cynicism blinded me to the fact that I've never lived somewhere where my presence was potentially controversial. I take for granted that my life matters. In the face of that, who cares what the homeowner's motives are as long as they show their support. What good are their thoughts compared to their actions? In my fealty to one Bible verse, I routinely forgo another, forgotten by hypocrites everywhere–love thy neighbor.