Is it realpolitik? Or just shortsightedness? America is not even serving its own interests by Trump’s violence abroad. What profitith a nation to gain a controlling share of Venezuela’s oil extraction and a Middle East quagmire, while losing the most powerful alliance system the world has ever known?
I do agree that it is much better when nations (or people) believe in principles that they don’t always live up to than when they abandon them altogether. And I do not in any way support what Trump is doing.
However, I think this argument, which I have seen made a few times recently (though not as well illustrated as in this essay) misses a key point. Principles can be guides to imperfect behavior, and even occasional abuse, _when people actually believe in them_.
People recognize that moral principles are a guide, something to reach for, but that it is not always possible to maintain them. To say that no “hypocrisy” of any kind can ever be tolerated is to tie everyone into total inaction. But when a principle is believed and held dear, you try to follow it, and when you don’t, you ask forgiveness. This at least re-affirms the principle as an ideal even as you transgress it in action.
But this doesn’t make sense if you, or the community who you ostensibly share it with, don’t actually believe in the principle itself anymore. I’m thinking here of the empty rituals of aristocracy that they used to perform on Downton Abbey. Maggie Smith was the only one who believed in them! The rest of the family was just doing it to do it, and they felt silly.
After World War II, most of the world _believed_ that democracy and self-determination were good, achievable things. The U.S. believed this sincerely, I think, too. And so institutions were set up to support this transformation — especially the U.N. and related — to facilitate these ends through participatory, cooperative action. And for a while, these efforts were imperfect but I think successful.
However, over the last 25 years, the idea that these institutions support these goals is not, in my view, still plausible. In my mind the big break came when Bush invaded Iraq. The showdown between the U.S. and the U.N. revealed that _neither_ were really committed to the principles from the post- WWII peace. The U.N. lacked the nerve to hold countries, like Iraq, to account. This was apparent when the inspectors left. And the U.S. lacked any sense of accountability to the U.N. or the world. They would simply “go it alone” whenever it felt like it.
Or, in other words, it was obvious that there were “two hypocrites” playing the game, leaving anyone to wonder if there were _any_ non-hypocrites out there? When that happens, it’s time to find a new set of principles.
Yes, I think about this problem a lot with housing and racial segregation. If you tell people “hey you say you don’t like racial segregation but you won’t build apartment buildings in your single-family-home-only neighborhood” then they may resolve that contradiction by deciding they don’t care about racial segregation at all.
Exactly. I would argue we see this same pattern in racial discourse more broadly in the U.S. The left said "this speech is racist" or "white supremacist," on the expectation this would compel people to back away from it. And this worked on liberals. But many conservatives reacted by saying "you're right, I guess I _am_ a racist/white supremacist, and so I should be okay with it. No need to be a hypocrite."
(sorry, can't edit comments from my phone so an addendum)
The missing variable (as I've detailed on my Substack) is the _moral authority_ of the critic's voice. You can only pull someone towards your moral aims by accusing them of hypocrisy when they respect your moral judgement. ("I would feel bad if those people thought I was a bad person, because I respect their assessment that I am not adhering to a principle we share").
But if the moral judgement of that voice is not "valid" or compelling, one can just throw off the principle. "I don't care if you think I'm [a dictator, a hegemon, a racist etc], so I'll just take the to label and maintain my moral consistency. Your principles simply do not matter to me, because I don't think you are a credible moral authority."
This is the core logic of Trump -- his "innovation." That you can just not care if people think you are bad because you can just they're the bad ones . This is his congenital trait, and it fit the moment (polarization).
A cool reporting project someone should do is to investigate the state of fake accounts on Substack. Big publications like the NYT and the Atlantic, I think it's safe to say, don't use shenanigans like bot accounts or fake accounts to inflate their numbers. Claude tells me this DOES occur on Substack, however, like every other social media type platform. But there just isn't a lot of research out there on it. Someone should investigate!
I think your last sentence is probably the most important. Trump's superpower is his shamelessness. And I think the same can be said of any sociopath.
So I think when society tolerates hypocricy because we like that it at least pressures people to pretend that they are acting "morally", it actually creates an environment where sociopaths are more likely to thrive than other people.
Whereas if we remove the expectation of signaling "moral virtue", we allow people who are more susceptible to shame to better compete with sociopaths. We allow people to talk plainly and not be shamed for it - which is a good thing, if it prevents real sociopaths from rising to the top all the time - which is exactly the problem we've had for most of recent American history at least.
You mentioned that shame sometimes caused the U.S. to make more ethical decisions. But I want to question that. I suspect that what really happened in those situation is just that U.S. leaders realized that if they continued on a certain course, they would lose support that they needed.
So it wasn't a "feeling of shame" that changed their behavior. It was just the real threat of losing allies.
Which again, points me to the conclusion that we should do away with all the moral posturing, and accept that, even when people do say all the right things, the "moral" reason isn't the real reason why people in politics ever do anything.
Political decisions are always pragmatic in the end. And if we didn't punish people for pretending otherwise, we'd be more likely to allow empathetic, non-sociopaths to succeed in politics.
I'm not inherently opposed to this argument. I used to think rainbow capitalism and general corporate pandering was bad, until it went away last year. So I do agree that sometimes it's at least better to have the virtue than it is to not have anything.
But where I but up against the argument is that I'm not sure how much shame helps. We could do counterfactuals all day with lots of different events, and I think we would probably find that it would help in some cases and not help in others. There's also the fact that people are excellent at compartmentalizing and creating weird exceptions to get around their hypocrisy.
One of the critiques of liberalism is that its founders professed to believe in equality for all humans, but then sidestepped the issue of slavery and colonialism by simply regarding these subjects subhuman. There were calls of hypocrisy then as well (Samuel Johnson said "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"), and obviously slavery was eventually phased out. But it's unclear how much of this was because of the shame.
I think shame, like any other tactic, is best used in moderation. It can be a very powerful—and necessary—way of maintaining social cohesion, but it can backfire if overused. I think we on the left have a habit of doing just that. A lot of the time this is annoying but harmless, but sometimes we can veer into purity testing, shooting down the free expression of ideas in the process.
(Not saying you were doing that here. Just an addition I thought was worth noting. Moreover, all of this is subjective. There are some ideas that deserve to be shamed out of existence, like support for slavery. We just need to be mindful about where we draw that line.)
The problem is that the right has seemingly responded to this by conflating ALL shaming as the shutting-down-speech kind. Furthermore, they seem to have responded to that conflation by electing shameless people and/or those who take such shaming as a badge of honor. “If the other side is shaming me,” they think, “I must be doing something right.” This has had trickle-down effects on the everyday members of the right, increasing affective polarization on that side—to which those on the left, somewhat understandably in my view, have responded by increasing affective polarization of their own.
Thanks for the info about Ethiopia and Eritrea. I didn't know any of that.
Nailed it. Also this was an excellent history lesson. I too didn't know any of this.
Is it realpolitik? Or just shortsightedness? America is not even serving its own interests by Trump’s violence abroad. What profitith a nation to gain a controlling share of Venezuela’s oil extraction and a Middle East quagmire, while losing the most powerful alliance system the world has ever known?
I do agree that it is much better when nations (or people) believe in principles that they don’t always live up to than when they abandon them altogether. And I do not in any way support what Trump is doing.
However, I think this argument, which I have seen made a few times recently (though not as well illustrated as in this essay) misses a key point. Principles can be guides to imperfect behavior, and even occasional abuse, _when people actually believe in them_.
People recognize that moral principles are a guide, something to reach for, but that it is not always possible to maintain them. To say that no “hypocrisy” of any kind can ever be tolerated is to tie everyone into total inaction. But when a principle is believed and held dear, you try to follow it, and when you don’t, you ask forgiveness. This at least re-affirms the principle as an ideal even as you transgress it in action.
But this doesn’t make sense if you, or the community who you ostensibly share it with, don’t actually believe in the principle itself anymore. I’m thinking here of the empty rituals of aristocracy that they used to perform on Downton Abbey. Maggie Smith was the only one who believed in them! The rest of the family was just doing it to do it, and they felt silly.
After World War II, most of the world _believed_ that democracy and self-determination were good, achievable things. The U.S. believed this sincerely, I think, too. And so institutions were set up to support this transformation — especially the U.N. and related — to facilitate these ends through participatory, cooperative action. And for a while, these efforts were imperfect but I think successful.
However, over the last 25 years, the idea that these institutions support these goals is not, in my view, still plausible. In my mind the big break came when Bush invaded Iraq. The showdown between the U.S. and the U.N. revealed that _neither_ were really committed to the principles from the post- WWII peace. The U.N. lacked the nerve to hold countries, like Iraq, to account. This was apparent when the inspectors left. And the U.S. lacked any sense of accountability to the U.N. or the world. They would simply “go it alone” whenever it felt like it.
Or, in other words, it was obvious that there were “two hypocrites” playing the game, leaving anyone to wonder if there were _any_ non-hypocrites out there? When that happens, it’s time to find a new set of principles.
Yes, I think about this problem a lot with housing and racial segregation. If you tell people “hey you say you don’t like racial segregation but you won’t build apartment buildings in your single-family-home-only neighborhood” then they may resolve that contradiction by deciding they don’t care about racial segregation at all.
Exactly. I would argue we see this same pattern in racial discourse more broadly in the U.S. The left said "this speech is racist" or "white supremacist," on the expectation this would compel people to back away from it. And this worked on liberals. But many conservatives reacted by saying "you're right, I guess I _am_ a racist/white supremacist, and so I should be okay with it. No need to be a hypocrite."
(sorry, can't edit comments from my phone so an addendum)
The missing variable (as I've detailed on my Substack) is the _moral authority_ of the critic's voice. You can only pull someone towards your moral aims by accusing them of hypocrisy when they respect your moral judgement. ("I would feel bad if those people thought I was a bad person, because I respect their assessment that I am not adhering to a principle we share").
But if the moral judgement of that voice is not "valid" or compelling, one can just throw off the principle. "I don't care if you think I'm [a dictator, a hegemon, a racist etc], so I'll just take the to label and maintain my moral consistency. Your principles simply do not matter to me, because I don't think you are a credible moral authority."
This is the core logic of Trump -- his "innovation." That you can just not care if people think you are bad because you can just they're the bad ones . This is his congenital trait, and it fit the moment (polarization).
That Hush Sound song is a blast from the past! Really quirky band back from when Millennial quirk was cool. Saw them live once.
“Hilariously,2 Ethiopia switched sides in the Cold War anyways and imposed communism on both its own people and Eritrea as well.”
From what I have heard it was a famously nasty version of a Communist dictatorship as Communist dictatorships go.
It’s interesting how little interaction these articles get.
A cool reporting project someone should do is to investigate the state of fake accounts on Substack. Big publications like the NYT and the Atlantic, I think it's safe to say, don't use shenanigans like bot accounts or fake accounts to inflate their numbers. Claude tells me this DOES occur on Substack, however, like every other social media type platform. But there just isn't a lot of research out there on it. Someone should investigate!
I think your last sentence is probably the most important. Trump's superpower is his shamelessness. And I think the same can be said of any sociopath.
So I think when society tolerates hypocricy because we like that it at least pressures people to pretend that they are acting "morally", it actually creates an environment where sociopaths are more likely to thrive than other people.
Whereas if we remove the expectation of signaling "moral virtue", we allow people who are more susceptible to shame to better compete with sociopaths. We allow people to talk plainly and not be shamed for it - which is a good thing, if it prevents real sociopaths from rising to the top all the time - which is exactly the problem we've had for most of recent American history at least.
You mentioned that shame sometimes caused the U.S. to make more ethical decisions. But I want to question that. I suspect that what really happened in those situation is just that U.S. leaders realized that if they continued on a certain course, they would lose support that they needed.
So it wasn't a "feeling of shame" that changed their behavior. It was just the real threat of losing allies.
Which again, points me to the conclusion that we should do away with all the moral posturing, and accept that, even when people do say all the right things, the "moral" reason isn't the real reason why people in politics ever do anything.
Political decisions are always pragmatic in the end. And if we didn't punish people for pretending otherwise, we'd be more likely to allow empathetic, non-sociopaths to succeed in politics.
I'm not inherently opposed to this argument. I used to think rainbow capitalism and general corporate pandering was bad, until it went away last year. So I do agree that sometimes it's at least better to have the virtue than it is to not have anything.
But where I but up against the argument is that I'm not sure how much shame helps. We could do counterfactuals all day with lots of different events, and I think we would probably find that it would help in some cases and not help in others. There's also the fact that people are excellent at compartmentalizing and creating weird exceptions to get around their hypocrisy.
One of the critiques of liberalism is that its founders professed to believe in equality for all humans, but then sidestepped the issue of slavery and colonialism by simply regarding these subjects subhuman. There were calls of hypocrisy then as well (Samuel Johnson said "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"), and obviously slavery was eventually phased out. But it's unclear how much of this was because of the shame.
I think shame, like any other tactic, is best used in moderation. It can be a very powerful—and necessary—way of maintaining social cohesion, but it can backfire if overused. I think we on the left have a habit of doing just that. A lot of the time this is annoying but harmless, but sometimes we can veer into purity testing, shooting down the free expression of ideas in the process.
(Not saying you were doing that here. Just an addition I thought was worth noting. Moreover, all of this is subjective. There are some ideas that deserve to be shamed out of existence, like support for slavery. We just need to be mindful about where we draw that line.)
The problem is that the right has seemingly responded to this by conflating ALL shaming as the shutting-down-speech kind. Furthermore, they seem to have responded to that conflation by electing shameless people and/or those who take such shaming as a badge of honor. “If the other side is shaming me,” they think, “I must be doing something right.” This has had trickle-down effects on the everyday members of the right, increasing affective polarization on that side—to which those on the left, somewhat understandably in my view, have responded by increasing affective polarization of their own.