MANY THINGS CONSIDERED: Hypocrisy – the New Politics

By Marc C. Johnson

There are so many examples of this. So, so many.

JD Vance during the 2024 presidential campaign:

“ If you’re worried about the world spinning out of control, if you’re worried about a military draft, if you’re worried about, God forbid, a world war, the best way to prevent it is to vote for Donald Trump.”

Check today’s headlines.

Vance once termed Trump “America’s Hitler” and said some other things, as well:

And in an op-ed in the New York Times, Vance said “Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.” In a now-deleted tweet from 2016, Vance said he was voting for a third party candidate over Trump. “I can’t stomach Trump,” Vance said in an NPR interview.

But at the [2024 vice presidential] debate, Vance swept that history under the rug, emphasizing that he has been “extremely open about the fact that I was wrong about Donald Trump.”

At least Vance came up with an excuse for his hypocrisy, a lame one to be sure, but an excuse. Such hypocrisy requires some, even flimsy, justification.

The biggest toady

Lindsey Graham, I think, can still claim the traveling trophy for his constant, unrelenting hypocrisy. Graham seems not to care a wit now that he is Donald Trump’s golfing pal and chief Senate enabler. He said of Trump in 2016:

“You’ve never worn the uniform, you’ve never been on a forward operating base, you’ve never been at a PRT as a member of the Department of Justice or the Department of State, you’ve never been a USAID worker going into some poor devastated area in Iraq and Afghanistan trying to help our country by helping others. So knock it off, you’re putting people at risk.”

“He Is Empowering Radical Islam And If He Knew Anything About The World At All, [He] Would Know That Most Muslims Reject This Ideology, And They’ve Died By The Thousands Trying To Reject This Radical Ideology.”

“You’re Undercutting Their Efforts, You’re Slandering Their Sacrifice, You’re Marginalizing What They’re Trying To Do To Make The World A Better Place.”

Graham also said Trump is a “race-baiting, xenophobic bigot.”

Trump still is all that. It’s Graham who has changed.

Apparently with many on the political right such history making hypocrisy just doesn’t matter. Such shape shifting rank hypocrisy would embarrass most of us to the point of – we hope – making it impossible to do what Lindsey Graham has done with such obvious ease and such obvious glee.

Will Saletan’s book length assessment of Graham remains a political reporting gold standard when it comes to explaining someone like Lindsey Graham and his complete about face, his hypocrisy:

So why focus on Graham

First, because he was a central player in the Republican party’s capitulation to Trump. And second, because he talked constantly. He produced an enormous trove of interviews, speeches, press briefings, and social media posts. Through these records, we can see how he changed, week to week and month to month. We can watch the poison work.

It’s a slow death. The surrender to despotism doesn’t happen all at once. It advances in stages, a step, a rationalization. Another step, another rationalization. The deeper you go, the more you need to justify.

You say what you need to say. You believe what you need to believe.

You believe what you need to believe …

It is no accident that Saletan’s reporting on Graham is entitled “The Corruption of Lindsey Graham.”

If you haven’t read his piece you should. It explains so much about our present moment.

Hypocrisy in public life

In a recent Politico profile Graham, once the harshest Trump critic under the sun, gushed praise for Trump’s decision to attack Iran:

“If you had told me in 2016, I’d wind up being one of his better friends, closest adviser and admire him as commander-in-chief, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Graham said, adding that “what the president sees in me is somebody that can deliver.”

One person close to the White House, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said that if anyone had an outsize influence on Trump’s decision to attack Iran it was Graham. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who favors a hands-off foreign policy approach, made a similar observation about Graham’s impact on Trump’s Venezuela strategy, telling reporters that his GOP colleague should be “banned from going to the White House.”

“That’s sarcasm,” Paul clarified.

You may have your own favorite political hypocrite. There are so many to chose from. Let me know in the comments who you nominate.

So how to square this circle? Is this just about politics? A personal failure? A lust for something like power? Or something more?

Finally …

I recommend an article – Hypocrisy and Public Life – By Christopher Tollefsen, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina as a guide to understanding what we’re seeing with such widespread political hypocrisy.

Here is a portion of what Tollefsen wrote back in 2009, before the present wave of hypocrisy in public life completely washed over us:

The form of hypocrisy that seems most especially egregious is that in which the “tribute” paid to virtue is entirely specious. The agent simulates virtue in this case not because of a recognition that the appearance of vice can corrupt or harm others, or because he is still somehow allied with virtue, but because the appearance of virtue brings with it certain rewards. These might be merely the maintenance of personal reputation, and the goods that go with that; in a worse case, it might be the ability to obtain or wield power, goods, or influence; and in the very worst case scenario, it might be for the sake of corrupting others and eventually undermining the very values to which the hypocrite pays lip service. This last end is especially important in considering the wrong that hypocrisy does, for, as so much recent history suggests, a side effect of hypocrisy can be to bring the values trumpeted by the hypocrite into disrepute.

That recent Politico piece on Graham ended with this:

And [Graham] is coordinating closely with Trump. The two spoke Tuesday morning, and the president has indicated he’s closely watching Graham’s TV sales pitch for the war, including declarations that the “mothership of terrorism is sinking” and the “captain is dead.”

“He called me and said … ‘I like that — stay on TV,’” he said. “Something tells me I will.”

Hard to believe what the “ability to obtain or wield power, goods, or influence” does to some people, the hypocrites in our public life, people like JD Vance and Lindsey Graham.