National Review: 'Hypocrisy!' He cried: an examination of a favorite charge

[I]t is galling to Democrats-48 percent of us who did not support the president-it is galling to be lectured to about moral values by folks who have their own problems. Hypocrisy is a value that I think has been embraced by the Republican party. We get lectured by people all day long about moral values by people who have their own moral shortcomings. I don't think we ought to give a whole lot of lectures to people-I think the Bible says something to the effect that, Be careful when you talk about the shortcomings of somebody else when you haven't removed the mote from your own eye. And I don't think we ought to be lectured to by Republicans who have got all these problems themselves.... Everybody has ethical shortcomings. We ought not to lecture each other about our ethical shortcomings.... I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy.

--Howard Dean, Meet the Press, May 22

DEAN, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, made so many provocative comments during his recent interview with Tim Russert that his comments about Republican hypocrisy attracted relatively little notice. Republicans were keen to point out that Dean had confused Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. (Isn't that what Democrats accuse President Bush of doing?) Newspapers, to the extent they mentioned the above exchange at all, noted only that Dean, having been questioned by Russert about the propriety of mimicking a drug-snorting Rush Limbaugh," had defended himself. That was the context in which Dean delivered the above soliloquy.

Now it would be easy to criticize these comments--and it would not be wrong. Immediately following his denunciation of Republicans for "lecturing" about "moral values," Dean explained that Democrats had moral values, too: "Our moral values, in contradiction to the Republicans', is we don't think kids ought to go to bed hungry at night. Our moral values say that people who work hard all their lives ought be able to retire with dignity." And on it went: There was Dean, lecturing about moral values, and in extravagant terms.

You could call that hypocritical, since Dean was failing to live up to a moral norm that he had (one minute before) made a big point of supporting, the norm that we should not lecture one another. But this temptation we should resist: The word hypocrisy" is thrown around too easily in American political life. The search for hypocrisy in politics is generally misconceived, and in ways that tend to hurt conservatives more than liberals.

Real hypocrisy is a thing to be avoided. We should all, public figures included, strive for an alignment of our moral beliefs, actions, and words, at least to the extent those beliefs are sound. The hypocrite has traditionally drawn opprobrium because of his unfairness and his deceitfulness. He is unfair because he condemns others for behaving the same way he does. He is deceitful because he professes beliefs that he does not truly hold. The fact that his actions do not match his words provides evidence that he does not believe what he has said.

This view of hypocrisy closes off two modern uses of the word. The first describes as "hypocrisy" what is merely inconsistency. The online magazine Slate recently called President Bush a hypocrite for opposing embryonic-stem-cell research while supporting the death penalty: Bush says that researchers should not take life to save life, but says that the legal system should. Now even if Slate's argument were valid, all it would have identified is a failure on Bush's part to think his principles through and to apply them consistently. If we are going to allow for the possibility that people can sincerely hold multiple views that are logically incompatible with each other--if, that is, we are going to apply our moral judgments to actually existing, which is to say imperfectly logical, people--then we have to refrain from calling every such instance hypocritical. Otherwise we will gratuitously turn disagreements into accusations. (Those of us who are journalists will also produce a lot of trivial commentary, since the identification of an inconsistency does not tell us how to resolve it.)

So we should refrain from calling Dean's performance on Meet the Press hypocritical. His stated views on moral lecturing are, as far as we can tell, sincere. He really does believe that he is against it. He just hasn't thought very hard about what this principle entails.

FLATTENING THE MORAL LANDSCAPE

The inflation of inconsistency into hypocrisy is both less troubling and less partisan in its implications than a second misuse of the hypocrisy accusation. The traditional view of hypocrisy made allowance for the garden-variety sinner: His words and his beliefs may line up, but his actions fall short of them. The current view of hypocrisy makes no such allowance in practice. Any gap between words and actions is taken not to be merely evidence toward the verdict of hypocrisy, but to be the thing itself; and the words are judged at least as harshly as the actions. A subtle shift from integrity to authenticity has been made.

What makes this change more consequential is that journalists have adopted this view of hypocrisy and made it a standard for their coverage. The result is to tilt the political field against those who speak up for moral standards in public. A surefire way for a public figure not to be judged a hypocrite, and thus a good way for him to keep his moral lapses out of the papers, is not to uphold moral standards in public. (Betraying your vices does not run the same risk. When Hugh Hefner briefly decamped from the Playboy Mansion because it was not a good environment for his children, nobody called him a hypocrite.)

Liberals can sometimes run afoul of these standards. The columnist who promotes gun control but then shoots a trespasser; the actor who talks a good game about conservation but flies on a private jet; the editor who supports affirmative action in theory but has yet to meet a black job applicant he considers sufficiently qualified: Such people become figures of fun for conservatives. But inevitably it is conservatives who will get the most hostile coverage for their hypocrisy.

Two years ago, William Bennett, the author of the Book of Virtues, was revealed to be a high-stakes gambler. It was his supposed hypocrisy that reporter Joshua Green invoked in the Washington Monthly to portray his story as legitimate news rather than the tabloid gossip it might otherwise have appeared to be. Salon justified its revelations of Henry Hyde's past adulteries the same way in 1998. Right after the last presidential election, some liberals made a blanket indictment of red-state voters: They may have told exit pollsters they care about "moral values," but they had high divorce rates and enjoyed watching Desperate Housewives.

The charge of hypocrisy figured, too, in the strange saga of James Guckert. Under the name Jeff Gannon, Guckert reported for a conservative website and asked pro-Bush questions at White House press conferences; on other websites, he had advertised his services as a gay prostitute. Some bloggers who pursued the story attempted to justify their work on the theory that Guckert had written "anti-gay" stories--and was thus a hypocrite. The mayor of Spokane, Washington, was tagged as a hypocrite for being "anti-gay" while also being secretly gay. A handful of "anti-gay" congressmen have been "outed" on the same basis.

In some of these cases, it is the superfluity of the hypocrisy standard that demonstrates its hold on the modern, and especially the modern journalistic, mind. The mayor of Spokane allegedly offered an internship to someone he believed to be an 18-year-old male in exchange for sex, and allegedly sexually abused a sixth-grade boy years ago. Violations of the social order that extreme deserve coverage regardless of the official's views on public policy. Gannon/Guckert's employment history might also have been considered newsworthy in itself, given that it involved routine lawbreaking.

These episodes also show how the search for hypocrisy tends to flatten the moral landscape. Take those red-state voters' viewing habits. What's hypocritical about them? Is there a straight line from opposing abortion and same-sex marriage to opposing trashy entertainments? Or take the cases in which "anti-gay" figures have been outed. The example of the Spokane mayor was pretty flagrant: He didn't think that public schools should hire gay schoolteachers. (Maybe he thought they were all like him.) But activists have outed congressmen for much lesser offenses: Their votes against hate-crimes laws and anti-discrimination laws have been cited to justify making their private lives public. Yet a gay libertarian could adopt both stances with a clear conscience. The assumption is that on all issues touching on homosexuality, there is an easily identifiable "pro-gay" and "anti-gay" side. (Gannon's sin was merely to have supported an "anti-gay" president.) This assumption is kindred in spirit to the assumption that red-state voters are remiss if they fail to be caricatures of their type.

A HYPOCRITE UNDER EVERY BED?

When we think about hypocritical politicians, probably what comes to mind is a "family values" conservative who turns out to be an adulterer. But even this ideal case for hypocrisy deserves some scrutiny. All politicians, whether they are socially liberal or conservative, claim to support marriage and "family values." No politician says that he favors adultery. Nor is there any public-policy distinction between the parties on adultery. So what is the justification for judging an adulterous conservative more harshly than an adulterous liberal?

In the Bennett gambling case, liberals showed they were willing to go quite far in contriving arguments for weighing conservatives' sins more heavily. This was not a case where a man had denounced gambling and then participated in it. The critics allowed that Bennett had not criticized gambling; they treated his failure to criticize it as an additional example of his hypocrisy. He had condemned many vices and, supposedly, had deliberately kept his own off the list. But as Jonah Goldberg pointed out at the time, Bennett's behavior--his gambling and his silence regarding gambling--was consistent with the theory that he sincerely regarded gambling as a morally neutral act (at least until the scandal forced him to reconsider the issue).

Other critics took more sophisticated tacks. They argued that Bennett had condemned casual drug users for setting a bad example for people prone to drug addiction. Yet here he was setting a bad example for people prone to gambling away their life's savings. Hypocrisy! Or: Bennett had extolled the virtue of moderation, but gambled immoderately. Or: Bennett had opposed treating other people's moral choices as private, yet was guilty of private immorality himself.

All of these attempted proofs of hypocrisy were pitched at so high a level of abstraction that they could really be considered only arguments for inconsistency with a dollop of spurious moralizing thrown on top: No one established bad faith on Bennett's part. The privacy argument was especially problematic, since it attempted to prove "hypocrisy" only by means of an equal counter-hypocrisy: Bennett's critics were saying that people deserved privacy only so long as they supported a liberal view of the right to privacy. What kind of principle is that? It's as though the NRA were to support the right to bear arms only for people who took an oath to support its interpretation of the Second Amendment. And every one of these indictments was delivered with the kind of glee that liberals, were they to see it in a conservative, would associate with the small-town scolds and gossips of yesteryear.

Joshua Green may have come closest to what bothered liberals about Bennett in his Washington Monthly article on the gambling. He wrote, "Democrats in particular object to his partisan sermonizing, which portrays liberals as inherently less moral than conservatives." Green did not cite any examples of Bennett's having actually portrayed liberals this way. No doubt social conservatives can often come across like this, even though they have many excellent reasons to avoid doing so. But there is also no doubt that many social liberals read such sentiments into social conservatism even when they are not present. For that matter, Hillary Rodham Clinton sometimes implies that conservatives are bad people. Yet while Senator Clinton's privacy has often been violated, nobody has taken her sometimes-Manichaean rhetoric as a warrant to forage through her private life looking for evidence that she falls short of moral perfection.

These days, much liberal argument seems to lead up to rulings that certain people don't have standing to make arguments on various issues at all. These rulings are never ideologically neutral. People who have not served in the military are, for example, held to be disqualified from arguing for military intervention. They are "chickenhawks" (a specific kind of hypocrite). Anyone can take a pacifist line. Feminists sometimes suggest that men have no right to oppose abortion, although their opinions are welcome when they are supportive. People whose policy views derive from religious beliefs-or are similar to the beliefs of such people-are told that those views are inadmissible. The hunt for hypocrisy is of a piece with these censoring impulses.

Hypocrisy is now not so much a vice with a determinate meaning, in other words, as it is a political weapon to use against conservatives. Because conservatives do not appreciate this truth, they have rendered themselves largely powerless against this rhetorical trope. They should listen more closely to Howard Dean, whose tirade against hypocrisy, right after he explained why Democrats' morals were superior to Republicans', ended thus: "Frankly, my moral values are offended by some of the things I hear on programs like Rush Limbaugh, and we don't have to put up with that. Our problem in this party is we didn't stand up early enough and fight back against folks like that who thought they were going to push us around and bully us, and we're not going to do it anymore."

Dean, remember, began by saying it was okay to belittle Limbaugh's weaknesses because of the radio host's "hypocrisy." He ended by saying that it was okay to go after Limbaugh personally because Limbaugh offends liberals and liberals "don't have to put up with" him. If Dean didn't notice the movement of his argument, maybe it's because he didn't have to travel very far.