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Notes -
The limits of political hypocrisy
Read it here for proper image embedding
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, there have been a wave of conservatives going after anyone they see as “celebrating” the assassination. There have been several scalps, including MSNBC pundit Matthew Dowd, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, political streamer Destiny, and, most prominently, Jimmy Kimmel.
To many, it seems like the Right now has its own version of woke.
I’ve seen some people pushing back against this idea, but their arguments are pretty weak. I’ve seen some people claim Kimmel was really cancelled for other reasons behind the scenes (low ratings, high costs) and that the Charlie Kirk stuff was just an excuse, but there were always plenty of claims that left-wokeness was really about corporate politics as well. I’ve also seen claims that there are voices on the Right saying “hey guys, maybe we shouldn’t do this”, but such warnings are mostly hesitant and directed at specific phrases rather than full-throated condemnations. There seems to be a specific allergy to the words “hate speech” as that was a phrase the Left liked to use which makes the hypocrisy a little too on-the-nose for some, but otherwise people like Ted Cruz are more than fine with “naming and shaming”.
It’s clear there’s a fairly broad appetite for this type of behavior on the Right. And not just against the big targets, but against small-timers too. There was much hubbub about a MAGA doxxing database with over 20,000 entries of random people that were perceived as worthy targets. The website has since been taken down or moved (it had been served at this URL), but not before I took a few screenshots like this one and this one of some of the entries.
As you can see in the second image, they believe something as simple as saying “and the world kept turning” in regards to Kirk’s death is worthy of being terminated from their jobs -- and are apparently willing to go through with their threats too, with the words “CONFIRMED FIRED!” proudly emblazoned on the page.
Matthew Yglesias has written about how the Right is doing a motte-and-bailey here, presenting anyone who speaks ill about Kirk as “celebrating” or even “inciting” violence, when in reality there’s a large continuum:
Threats and incitement to violence may actually be illegal.
Violent ideation and celebration of murder are seriously wrong and worthy of condemnation, but not illegal.
Saying mean stuff about a person in the immediate wake of his death is generally in poor taste, but you’d expect it if the person was really bad.
Sharp criticism of a major public figure is just participation in a free society.
I explained my own take on Kirk here, how I was horrified that anyone is dying in political violence, but that Kirk was hardly some “martyr for truth”. He was just a mundane political operative -- a commentator/e-celeb that wasn’t particularly noteworthy prior to his death. The idea he was “promoting dialogue” was completely hollow when what he was really doing was farming infantile leftists for dunk opportunities that he could then post on TikTok and elsewhere for money and clout. I certainly don’t think that’s evil, but it’s also not some great public service. Is my opinion sufficiently insensitive that people on the Right think I should be fired? Based on the types of people that are being targeted in the screenshots above, I’d say it’s plausible to think so.
MAGA’s turn towards cancel culture is pretty blatantly hypocritical, and its hypocrisy on one of the things that many on the Right felt most fiercely, and which won them many allies (including myself, for a time). While most people are cynical on most political topics, I genuinely care about free speech as an end in and of itself. Seeing this type of behavior for the Right was thus annoying for the same reason it was annoying when it was coming from the Left.
It’s not like I’m completely shocked about this turn of events or anything. There had long been a more authoritarian-leaning Right subfaction that was pushing for cancellations in the other direction. But several years ago, it was hardly certain that they would prevail. I had hoped the Right would just collectively decide to do the right thing, or at the very least that they would be compelled to do so by lacking the institutional soft power required to pull off what the Left had done. It turns out that direct, top-down government action can do pretty much the same thing, while still being ambiguous enough to not get instantly shredded by the courts for violating the Constitution.
It’s great. Fantastic. I love it.
As I’ve discussed this topic with people, I’ve frequently run into the issue of hypocrisy as it applies to politics. The word “hypocrisy” has a negative connotation -- with good reason, I’d add! That said, I don’t think there are no arguments for political hypocrisy. In fact, there are several I’ve seen that can explain it in neutral terms, or even promote it as a straightforwardly good thing.
Why political hypocrisy is good, or at least understandable
Argument 1: Political coalitions aren’t a single person. This should be obvious to everyone but it bears repeating here. It can be tempting to think of political parties as a single gestalt organism, especially when it comes to the outgroup. It would certainly make it easier to debate their ideas at least. But of course it isn’t true -- these coalitions are big amorphous blobs that include millions of Americans, and as is increasingly the case, they include hundreds of millions or even billions of non-Americans as well. Every person has their own beliefs and agendas, and it’s entirely plausible that the people loudly decrying Woke cancel culture on the basis of free speech are a different set than the ones who are gleefully celebrating the MAGA cancel culture sequel.
Argument 2: Catharsis. I don’t think it’s good that people want to see harm done to those they perceive have wronged them, but it’s certainly understandable. Seeing a petty tyrant get their just desserts can feel great. There can be object-level glee in seeing someone fuck around and find out, even if you don’t really agree with what’s being done at a meta-level. I’ve seen plenty of people echo sentiments that were essentially “no, I’m not going to feel sorry for these people after they’ve spent years doing it to us”. We’re several years removed from peak woke so it can feel a bit distant now, but many on the Left completely lost their minds when the mobs were in full swing. Some of my favorite examples include when Bari Weiss was cancelled for saying “immigrants, they get the job done”, as well as Firefox cancelling its CEO in 2014 for a donation made against gay marriage in 2008 -- a time when even Obama was officially against full legalization.
Argument 3: Re-establishing deterrence. If one side discovers a new trick that proves very successful, they can be reluctant to part ways with it for obvious reasons. The only convincing way to promote mutual disarmament in this case is to use the trick right back on them, deliberately inflicting enough pain to get them to feel how awful it is. This gets them to realize what they’ve discovered isn’t some new superweapon that only their side can use, but rather an awful strategy that sucks just as much when used against them. Simply knowing that pain is being caused will always be less persuasive than feeling the pain directly.
Argument 4: Sometimes refusing to engage in hypocrisy is self-defeating. The classic example is violence. We can all agree life would be better if everyone swore off violence categorically. The only problem with doing so is that refusing to engage in violence of any kind leaves you vulnerable to those with less scruples. You can call them evil all you want, but it won’t stop them from beating you with a club and taking all your stuff. The only way to stop them is to engage in the violence of self-defense. And yes, this would make you a hypocrite if you had categorically sworn off violence, but being a bit hypocritical is better than being dead. In terms of politics, if the other is continuously engaging in a tactic that gives them a decisive edge by short-circuiting some of the previously established rules, then staying principled risks a chronically unfair playing field or even permanent marginalization if the issue is big enough. The problem lies in clarifying what tactics are giving the other side an unfair advantage -- this ends up being surprisingly difficult, and I’ll discuss it later in the article.
Argument 5: Accelerationism. The idea we have to fight fire with fire. This is a more extreme version of argument #4, which claims that we’re in an “existential” conflict with a uniquely evil outgroup, so we have to use every tool at our disposal to prevail. People who make this argument have completely given up on having principles and are only worried about winning at all costs. To them, accusations of hypocrisy go in one ear and out the other, as all they’re concerned with is creating a larger inferno than the other side.
These arguments are mostly bad
In practice, though, I’m mostly unconvinced by everything except for argument #4. Having principles is a good thing, actually.
Argument #2 (catharsis) can be dismissed out-of-hand as an explanation more than an excuse. Sure it feels good to dunk on your outgroup in the short term, just like it feels good to have the US federal government spend recklessly on elder care. The devil is in the long term consequences.
Argument #1 (political coalitions aren’t a single person) is good to keep in mind, but it shouldn’t be treated as an everything-proof shield. It’s not particularly difficult to find specific individuals (many of them high-profile) that broadly condemned cancel culture when the Left was doing it, only to do an about-face now that the shoe is on the other foot.
Brendan Carr, Chairman of the FCC https://x.com/Thiss_Youu/status/1968469274244075614
Greg Abbott, Governor of Texas: https://x.com/Thiss_Youu/status/1968049619495162204
Laura Loomer, a top Trump advisor: https://x.com/Thiss_Youu/status/1967702598166909309
Matt Wallace: https://x.com/Thiss_Youu/status/1966851592994554300
Congresswoman Luna: https://x.com/Thiss_Youu/status/1966544648966386026
And of course, there’s plenty of smaller commentary accounts engaging in such behavior as well (example 1, example 2, example 3). Some have tried to claim that the Right’s version of cancel culture is different in some vague way that makes these statements not hypocritical, e.g. it’s OK to cancel someone if they’re “celebrating the death” of someone, but I generally find these arguments unpersuasive.
Besides individual examples, there has to be some level of group accountability. This is a messy issue, and of course there are bad incentives for partisans to handwave all their side’s wrongdoings while focusing on and amplifying their outgroup’s. The best compromise I’ve seen people use is to look to both sides’ leaders, and see what they’re condoning and possibly whether they’re getting lots of pushback. Each public figure gets an invisible score that’s higher the more prominent they are, e.g. sitting Presidents are worth the most, then senior administration officials and elected officeholders, then less prominent politicians and major public intellectuals, then local leaders and more obscure influencers, and finally any random accounts at the bottom. The more examples of high-level leaders that you can give that are condoning some action, then the more accepted said action can be seen as at the group level. Under this system, the Right can broadly be seen as accepting of their new cancel culture since many high profile figures endorsed it, while the Left should not be seen as accepting assassinations as a general tactic since no major leaders endorsed the specific act of killing Charlie Kirk, and most went on to specifically disavow it (example 1, example 2). This is a messy, imperfect system, but the alternatives are worse. Being under-stringent means you’ll unfairly tar entire swathes of people based on the statements of a few irrelevant anons on Bluesky or /pol/, while being overly-stringent leaves open opportunities for nonsensical buck-passing where people do the rigamarole of “I don’t condone their actions… but you should probably do what they say anyways”:
Argument #3 (re-establishing deterrence) seems useful on the surface, but practical considerations make it unworkable.
First, there needs to be some discipline in using the tactic just enough to get the other side to feel pain without going totally overboard. The problem is that it’s practically impossible to impose discipline on a large amorphous group. There will always be people pushing to go further, either claiming that there hasn’t been enough pain inflicted yet, or that seeing their outgroup suffer is so funny that it should continue for its own sake, or the accelerationist argument that views escalation as a virtue in and of itself. Just because you might be willing to banish a trick after demonstrating it once or twice doesn’t mean the rest of the coalition is, or that you’d be able to stop them in any meaningful way.
Second, pain will almost always be uneven. Different issues matter at different levels for different people. Moreover, it’s basically impossible to calibrate the level of suffering inflicted to the correct extent, and for it to affect the correct people. Cancel culture in particular can only really hit targets of opportunity, and getting fired for political statements is a far bigger punishment than most of the victims deserve. In contrast, many of the people who had been most ardently pushing cancel culture from the other direction won’t receive any punishment at all, at least directly. They’ll get some minor indirect punishment from seeing their side “lose” in a vague sense, but that doesn’t strike me as especially productive.
Third, equivalent reciprocation will almost always be seen as escalation by the other side no matter what. As an example, tons of people on the Right saw the BLM riots as the perfect excuse for storming the Capitol on January 6th, despite the two being very different. Sectarian grievance talliers don’t typically bother with precision, and this event would be no exception. They simply squinted, saw the BLM riots as vague “political violence”, and used that to justify or excuse the violence of J6. Most reasonable commentators could agree that both events were bad but for different reasons: the BLM riots for the scale of the destruction, and J6 for trying to overthrow the American political process. But for the people on the Right, the BLM riots were obviously far worse, as they’d just redirect the conversation to the issue of scale as that was more favorable ground for them.
As I’ve debated people on both sides, it’s never ceased to amaze me how unaware people are of the sins their own side commits when they can instantly regurgitate ludicrously detailed lists of every transgression their outgroup has committed on a given topic for the past 20 years. I’m guessing this mostly comes down to media diets, as conservatives will receive news endlessly relitigating liberal faults while minimizing their own side’s issues, and vice-versa for liberals. In terms of how this will shake out for the Right’s cancel culture, the Left is going to interpret this through their own biased lens where it will look highly escalatory. An example leftist probably thinks conservative hysteria over cancel culture back in 2017-2020 was severely overblown, that it barely affected anyone, that those it did touch definitely deserved it, and that it wasn’t really censorship since the government wasn’t the main instigator. I would disagree to some extent with all of those assertions, but everyone’s in their own little bubble so it will look convincing to them regardless. Then they’ll get a maximally uncharitable view of what conservative cancel culture is like: the Right wants to cancel basically everyone, it’s a case of racists targeting reasonable people, the government IS heavily involved this time, etc. Obviously that’s going to look escalatory, and so the Left will feel justified going even harder on cancel culture next time, or in using other dirty tricks.
Argument #4 (that refusing to engage in some hypocrisy is self-defeating) and argument #5 (accelerationism) go together. I find 4 convincing while 5 goes too far. Most political discussion spaces are echo chambers through natural sorting, and statements like “we have to fight against the outgroup HARDER!!!” is something that will only rarely encounter pushback. Using the enemies’ weapons against them is an idea that follows naturally, but… where does that end? Should the Allies have set up Jew-operated gas chambers for ethnic Germans as revenge for the Holocaust? I don’t think so.
A lot of the accelerationists are chomping at the bit for a day when they can freely inflict violence on the people they disagree with. There’s a good deal of “predictions” (more like wishcasting) of an imminent civil war in the US. I personally doubt we’ll see a redux of 1861 anytime soon, but I find scenarios like The Troubles or the Years of Lead much more plausible, and I’d like to avoid those if at all possible. Part of it is simply that civil strife is bad in almost every dimension, and part of it is my idealistic view that I don’t find bullets to be a more legitimate way to solve differences of opinion than words.
But it’s also an issue of efficacy. Using the most nasty tricks you can think of alienates people from your coalition. You lose allies who genuinely value principles over dunking on the outgroup. Everyone will draw this line in a different spot, and the further you go the more people who will think you’ve crossed it.
Drawing the line
Basically, if you’re going to be hypocritical, then I think you should be pretty dang certain that it’s going to substantially help your side rather than be neutral or detrimental. To illustrate that point, I have six examples, three of which are for cases where hypocrisy is justified, and three where it’s not.
Situations where hypocrisy is justified:
Gerrymandering: California will soon vote on whether to redistrict itself for the express purpose of counteracting a Republican gerrymandering plan in Texas. The rewards from gerrymandering are extra House seats which could tip the balance of House control -- a tasty prize. Democrats had unilaterally disarmed themselves with bipartisan commissions in many states, but that did little to convince Republicans to ease up. Democrats could probably go even if they play hardball, which is a lot better than the status quo where they’re down somewhere between 8-20 seats depending on the fairness metric used.
Super PACs: Citizens United allowed for vastly increased spending in elections. This used to be an issue the Democrats were strongly against, although with the recent realignment of affluent individuals and corporations towards the Dems I’m not sure that’s so strongly the case any more. But no matter what, both sides would be justified in accepting large donations even if they thought it was bad that Citizens United was decided as it was. Cash is important for amplifying the candidates’ messages to persuade voters. It probably doesn’t mean much in Presidential elections any more -- the marginal impact of either Trump or Harris having an extra billion dollars was probably near-zero in 2024 -- but the impact in smaller elections is still present.
Politicizing SCOTUS nominations: The Left arguably did this with Bork’s nomination, and McConnell’s subsequent revenge-push for conservative justices at almost all costs has borne great dividends. The Supreme Court would look very different if Trump 45 didn’t get the chance to nominate 3 whole justices. Some of that was due to luck (and RBG’s pride), but McConnell’s stalling of Merrick Garland’s nomination indefinitely certainly didn’t hurt.
Situations where hypocrisy is NOT justified:
Pardons: Biden pardoned his son Hunter after saying he wouldn’t as one of the last acts of his presidency, and then Trump came in and pardoned the J6 rioters as one of the first acts of his presidency. Biden’s case was just straightforwardly bad, but I also don’t really think Trump gained much by doing what he did either. Basically every president for my entire life has been abusing the power of the pardon in one way or the other. Either side could stop at any time.
Corruption: Trump has been engaged in an unprecedented number of corrupt-looking enterprises. There is the Trump meme coin scam. There was the Qatari luxury jet nonsense. Recently there was the story about the Trump admin shutting down a corruption probe on Tom Homan. Does MAGA really gain anything by Trump having a scam coin? I doubt it, and that’s why I’d say the next Democratic administration could simply not be openly corrupt, and they’d be just fine.
Cancel culture: Wokes thought they had a new superweapon for a little while, as the short-term gains were readily apparent both in terms of those who were cancelled outright, and from the broader effects on culture. But the long-term impact was horribly, disastrously negative for them. Early wokeness helped pave the way for Trump’s first term, and the hysteria during peak woke caused Harris to say things in 2019 that severely (perhaps even fatally) damaged her prospects in 2024. Additionally, even though we’re in an era where it seems like the extreme fringes only ever get more power within their coaltions, the woke left managed to lose clout in the Democratic lineup, with left-leaning centrists like Nate Silver and Noah Smith recently pissing on their graves to raucus applause.
That’s why I’m confident in this prediction: If MAGA goes as hard on cancel culture as the woke left did, it WILL blow up in their face eventually.
Accelerationists might dispute my examples where I claim hypocrisy isn’t justified. They might say that Trump pardoning the J6 rioters was actually very popular with swing voters, or that it wasn’t but it still “fired up the base” which somehow did small-tent things to win the election. Or perhaps they might say cancel culture was worthwhile for the Left despite some backlash because it changed American culture in ways that justified the cost. I’d disagree with all of those assertions, but in any case I think those discussions would be more productive than vague motioning at how hypocrisy is always acceptable due to how evil the outgroup is.
I will maintain my position that the Right has always had its version of woke (meaning in this context, an impulse towards moralistic censorship*) and has always been fairly weak on free speech. Notably, basically every free speech advocacy group is staffed and supported overwhelmingly by liberals. Conservative groups will support conservative causes on 1A issues, but as far as I can tell there's no right-wing equivalent to the ACLU representing the Nazis and there's long been right-wing groups eager to wield social pressure (and state power) to suppress viewpoints and ideas they don't like.
Cancel culture was always a thing, but it became a Thing with the emergence of a faction of illiberal progressives that had the clout to actually apply pressure and a desire to do so. This inversion of the 'proper' order of things was deeply upsetting to the many conservatives who saw themselves as rightful hegemons of American culture.
Helpfully for RW culture warriors, they have something of an advantage in wielding social opprobrium and would probably be even more effective if they hadn't unilaterally retreated into a bubble. They tend to be appealing to a moral lowest common denominator against marginal targets, whereas progressives tend to be morally capricious and avant-garde (which makes them hard to support and leads to frequent circular firing squads).
Aside: Bork is a great example of how differences in perspective lead to mutual perceptions of 'defection'. The Republican view of Bork is that a perfectly qualified candidate was rejected for political reasons. The Democratic view of Bork is that he was utterly disqualified for his role in the Watergate scandal and the GOP was defecting by nominating him in the first place.
Which is why the cooperate/defect paradigm of political analysis is often heavily deficient. There's this tendency to treat political factions as unitary actors who might have different values and goals but at least have the same basic understanding of reality and the 'rules', but that is obviously nonsense. What one side sees as justified retaliation for some infraction, the other sees as unprovoked escalation that demands retaliation in turn.
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*censorship is being used somewhat carelessly here - this phenomenon is driven primarily by social pressure rather than actual censorship, though the state does occasionally weigh in
Losing hegemony was being mocked on every late night show as the party of schoolmarms and people who hated the poor. Utterly losing swathes of the academy and other important cultural institutions. Decisively losing a cultural issue like gay marriage and so on. It wasn't fun and people did complain.
When you declare such and such is beyond the pale and is not even to be seen let alone heard you're not denying them hegemony. You are denying that they should even have the same stake in the country and where its discourse goes.
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