President
Joe Biden is a tough man to vilify. Maybe it’s the
grandfatherly vibe or the down-to-earth speaking style or all that talk of
compassion and healing. Whatever the reason, Republicans have had little
success thus far convincing Americans — beyond the alternative-reality
MAGAverse, of course — that good old uncle Joe is radical, corrupt, or even a
little bit scary.
اضافة اعلان
In desperation, more and more Republicans are clambering
onto their high horses to charge the president with that most elemental of
political sins: hypocrisy. As the criticism goes, Biden’s talk of unity and
healing is bunk — “empty platitudes,” as Senator Tim Scott, a republican,
charged in his response to the president’s address to Congress last week.
Time and again, Biden has “promised to unite a nation, to
lower the temperature, to govern for all Americans, no matter how we voted,”
said Scott. “But three months in, the actions of the president and his party
are pulling us further and further apart.”
Having failed to paint Biden as a possibly senile monster,
Republicans are now aiming to smear him as a holier-than-thou hypocrite.
To which the White House’s response should be: Bring it.
If
Biden wants to pursue bipartisan deals because he
believes they make for better, more durable policy, then more power to him. And
his efforts to lower the temperature of political discourse — by, for instance,
not doling out insulting nicknames, peddling racist tropes, attacking members
of his own government or pitching Twitter hissy fits — are a welcome step
toward soothing America’s Trump-tortured soul.
But when it comes to accusations of hypocrisy regarding
matters of cross-aisle comity, Biden should waste exactly as much time fretting
as the Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell did vetting Merrick Garland for
the Supreme Court in 2016. Which is to say, not one hot second.
It’s not simply that Republicans have zero room to gripe
about hypocrisy. (Or
hyperpartisanship, for that matter.) It’s also that
hypocrisy is a cheap, tiresome line of political attack — an empty way for
critics to broadcast pious indignation without having to seriously engage with
the specifics of the underlying behavior.
No doubt, voters love to rage against officials deemed
hypocritical: the deceit, the arrogance, the self-righteousness! (Researchers
at Yale found that it is a hypocrite’s implied assertion of moral superiority
that really ticks people off.) No one likes to feel lectured and judged —
especially by performatively pious politicians.
Hypocrisy also tends to fire up the media. After all, it is
a kind of dishonesty, and there’s almost nothing journalists hate more than
being deceived.
But even beyond that, hypocrisy provides a neat, clean, easy
to grasp, nonpartisan rubric by which to pass judgment on public officials.
With hypocrisy, you don’t need to get into the policy weeds or take a stand
that could be considered ideologically slanted. It’s not the misbehavior being
denounced; it’s the discrepancy between what someone professes to believe and
his behavior. The existence of the gap is what offends.
By these rules, the safest political course would seem to be
to avoid championing any kind of standards and admit you’re an amoral shark
driven solely by personal ambition. Some would argue that this is what
McConnell has done with a fair degree of success.
In practice, politics runs on hypocrisy. Witness the
Republican deficit hawks who learned to love the budget-busting tax cuts of
2017. Or all those “family values” voters who, confronted with the personal
degeneracy of Trump, suddenly stopped fretting about the character or morality
of elected officials.
This inconstancy works in part because, for all their
professed loathing of hypocrisy, most voters will forgive a boatload of it if
they like what their elected officials are getting done. Republicans may not
relish being called hypocrites, but they recognize that there are more pressing
issues. Just ask Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Making rationalization easier, hypocrisy is often in the eye
of the beholder. People engaged in hypocritical behavior will indulge in
elaborate mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they aren’t in fact
guilty of such.
A similar dynamic holds true for the electorate. It is an
enduring political truism that voters tend to overlook, excuse or even embrace serious
sins committed by members of their own political tribe, even as minor
infractions by the opposition provoke a supernova of self-righteous outrage.
Plenty of Democrats who were furious with McConnell for blowing up the
filibuster for Supreme Court nominees were considerably more tolerant when
Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, did away with it for lower court and
executive branch nominees in 2013.
So it is that hypocrisy risks making hypocrites of those who
denounce hypocrisy.
As for Biden, he should absolutely continue his outreach to
Republican officials — phoning them, inviting them over for White House chats,
sending them home with chocolate chip cookies. But he should also keep moving
forward with his agenda, with or without their support.
If Republicans want to whine about their sense of
disappointment and betrayal and accuse the president of being a hypocritical
meanie, that’s their prerogative. Much as it is Biden’s prerogative to ignore
those complaints as the disingenuous partisan blather that they are.
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