[Disclaimer: I don’t know if any of this is true, but it’s something I’ve been meaning to write about for a long time. You may disagree with my conclusions. That’s fine, in a couple weeks I might disagree with them as well. I’m just interested in the conversation.]
I saw a few days ago that another “family values” anti-gay Republican is in trouble for sex related reasons. I’m not going to bother naming him, because this happens so often that I can leave the name off and this essay will remain relevant in the future. Whenever one of these conservative Christian types gets caught, liberals are quick to call it “hypocrisy.” I think Bill Press once said that “conservatives will support someone who practices vice as long as they preach virtue.” That line stuck with me, because I wanted to understand why it was true. Why would someone consider it more important to talk about morality than practice it? And is it possible that they’re right?
There are a few things that bother me about the “hypocrisy” charge. One is that a lot of us have too much fun with it. Liberals (and I include myself in this) will often joke about how anti-gay politicians are clearly in the closet. Bill Maher was all over this, though I’m not sure if he can truly be called a liberal. There are times when this is offensive, like when we’re talking about predatory behavior. There’s absolutely nothing funny about Dennis Hastert raping boys in his care, so laughing about it feels like I’m not respecting the victims. On the other end of the spectrum is a case like Mark Sanford. I have some sympathy for a man being caught in a loveless marriage who falls in love with someone else. The fact that he abandoned his state and told no one where he was is a serious offense, but the personal details of the relationship are none of my interest.
My bigger concern is that I’m not sure “hypocrisy” is the real offense here, and I worry we misunderstand the psychology. The starkest cases of hypocrisy are when a politician demagogues on an issue in which they have no real interest. George Wallace was probably like that. He had a relatively liberal stance on civil rights as a judge, and was endorsed by the NAACP in his first failed run for governor. After that, he became the fire-breathing symbol of segregation, and it’s hard to imagine there was any reason other than to get votes. These days, most political hypocrisy is about sex, not race. The quintessential modern example is Newt Gingrich voting to impeach Bill Clinton while having an affair. Maybe Gingrich was laughing about how stupid his voters were to believe he cared about infidelity, or maybe he was privately fighting to control his libido and was unable to resist (though even if that were true, forcing his cancer-stricken wife to sign divorce papers is unconscionably cruel). I don’t have any way to tell which it is, and frankly I don’t care. What I do know is that conservatives who support Gingrich and other philandering Christian conservatives must believe it’s the latter. So I’m curious as to why they would trust politicians who lie to their faces. How can politicians betray their marriage vows while talking about the sanctity of marriage and not lose votes?
To understand this, we must look at it from a religious perspective. The most famous denunciations of hypocrisy came from Jesus, who condemned the Pharisees for holding to the letter of the law while ignoring the spirit of it. The Pharisees, though, were from a strictly Jewish tradition, where upholding the law was often seen as of paramount importance. I’m not Jewish, and I don’t mean to stereotype here. There are many different understandings within Judaism, but “follow the law above all else” is at least one valid view. Yet most conservative politicians today come from a Christian perspective, where grace and forgiveness are supposed to be more important than legalism. The central pillar of Christian morality is that everyone is a sinner who fails to uphold the law, and so grace is extended to all who ask for forgiveness. So, a politician who sins can be forgiven if they ask for it. This is taken to extremes when you consider Calvin and Hobbes. John Calvin had a particularly negative view of humans without grace, and Thomas Hobbes said that a strong government was necessary to protect people from themselves. This view of government as the guardian of morality is key to modern conservatism. Many would respond that conservatives believe in small government, but that mostly involves social programs to fight poverty. If you see poverty as a moral failing, then keeping the poor from getting “free stuff” is how you protect them from their sins. To bring this back to sex, we can imagine a conservative thinking that Gingrich or Sanford may be adulterers, but they are trying to pass laws that will force sex back into its correct place. They aren’t hypocrites because the laws they pass would apply to them as well. I know the cynical view is that they’d find a way around those laws, but that’s not the point. They need laws to keep themselves and others in line, because they’re too sinful to do it on their own. The government is like your AA sponsor who checks in on you to make sure you haven’t fallen off the wagon. To the voters, making the country more moral is the most important thing, while politicians’ personal failings are understandable and can be forgiven so long as they’re trying their best.
Maybe this is all wrong. Maybe I’m over-psychologizing a simple case of dumb rubes who want to vote for anyone who’ll stick it to the queers. I’m trying to practice empathy, though. I want to understand conservatives, because like it or not, we share a country. I heard recently (I think it was in Ana Marie Cox’s “With Friends Like These”) about a way to try to understand people. Instead of saying “why would anyone do that?” ask “what would it take for me to do that?” So, let’s do it. Is it possible that I would vote for someone who talks about issues but doesn’t live up to them? Could I imagine saying “sure, they’re not doing what they say, but once they get in power they’ll make laws to rein themselves in?” Well, sure; in fact, I already do. A good example is campaign finance. Political money is an arms race- neither side can disarm without being destroyed, so political donations get larger and larger each year. Lots of politicians in our party will say they want to get money out of politics while taking massive donations. The theory is that they will place restrictions that will ensure a level playing field, but in practice there’s not a lot to show for it. Bernie Sanders made a good showing of running without corporate donations, and then he lost anyway. Of course, if he had won the nomination, he would have had the support of the DNC and thus corporate money through them. We’d all like to win clean, but often the choice is between losing clean or winning dirty. It’s easy to make the latter choice, and I’m not even sure it’s wrong. When you’re working in the real world, you make compromises and you try not to get corrupted, but it’s hard to know where to draw the line. And that’s my biggest reason why I’m reluctant to use hypocrisy as a weapon- it’s just too easy. Everyone is a hypocrite sometimes. No one lives up to their principles all the time. I disagree with most of the views held by the right wing in America and I will fight them on the substance, but I try to extend some grace to them for supporting imperfect politicians. After all, who doesn’t?
Final thought: What about Trump? He only barely talks about morality and doesn’t ask for forgiveness. This is the one thing that doesn’t fit in with my thesis, and it may be a fatal flaw. It may just be partisanship at this point. Trump did talk about getting rid of the Johnson Amendment, to give churches more political power. My best guess, though, is that conservative voters have become so conditioned to thinking of Republicans as being the party of “traditional values” that they can hold onto their framework even with such an ill-fitting standard-bearer. I started thinking about this subject years ago, and Trump’s election has admittedly thrown a wrench into my thinking.