We've sacrificed our principles on the altar of tribal loyalty

Note: I consider this is the most important essay I’ve ever written. Read it. Be pissed off. I don’t care. Someone had to say it.

Call it the “H” word: Hypocrisy.

Some days, it seems like every other post on social media condemns the opposition for this cardinal sin. It’s little wonder in an age principle has taken a back seat to tribal identity and the quest to win at any cost.

Republicans, those free-trading, anti-Russian patrons of the Moral Majority, are foursquare behind a protectionist president who adores tariffs, loves the Russians even more and breaks the commandments like they’re going out of style. Oh, and about the so-called 11th commandment, voiced by none other than GOP patron saint Ronald Wilson Reagan – “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican”? They’ve brushed that under the rug, as well, to placate a president who routinely does just that.

But it isn’t just Republicans. Democrats do it, too. Only white people can be racists, and only men can be sexists – or so they say – as though bad (and good) behavior somehow morphs into something else depending on who’s doing it.

This hypocrisy transcends party or ideology. It goes to something more fundamental: We’ve exchanged broad principles for narrow judgments that benefit us ... and to hell with everyone else. These days, we view identity, not the nature of an action, as crucial in determining whether that action is right or wrong.

Violence is wrong, but it’s OK to “punch a Nazi” – without due process (another principle we enforce selectively). A hate-crime murder is worse than another murder? Maybe it is worse to hate someone than to simply have no regard for that person’s life, but tell that to the guy who just lost his daughter to the robber who shot her in the head because he wanted her purse.

Oh, and by the way, it’s just fine to condemn things like assaulting women and defaming your enemies, as long as their guy is doing it. When it’s your guy, you try to ignore it, make excuses and, if none of that works, flip the script by blaming the victim.

Whither the Golden Rule?

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”* Remember that one? It’s part of Jesus’ Greatest Hits, probably the lead track on Side 1. Confucius, Seneca the Younger of Rome and Hillel the Elder in the Talmud (among others) all said something similar, so you can’t beg off by dismissing it as Christian dogma. A whole lot of non-Christian folks have said the same thing.

Under this principle, if someone treats a white person unfairly, it’s just as bad as if someone treats a black person cruelly – because it isn’t the victim’s identity that matters. The behavior is cruel no matter who the victim is. Bringing the victim’s identity into it takes the focus off of the behavior, which is where it should be.

This is what apologists for sexual assault try to do, too. These sleazeballs say the victim was “asking for it” by dressing “too provocatively.” They flip the script, attempting to make victims responsible for an act of violence committed against them, because of the victim’s identity. As a woman. As someone who has the audacity to express some degree of individuality and expect not to be assaulted for it. Imagine that.

When we condemn people based on identity rather than action, we strike at the heart of principles – like the pursuit of happiness and freedom of expression – that this country was founded on. When we abandon principle for the sake of identity, those principles get discarded, too. What’s left is a dictatorship, or the building blocks of one.

But people are scared to death of invoking principles because they know it can come back to bite them. What if they have skeletons in their own closet? It’s much safer to demonize (or canonize) someone else based on his or her identity than it is to invoke a broad principle that can – perish the thought – be applied to little old you.

Political precedent

Politicians get away with this all the time. Case in point: Republicans who refused to vote on a Supreme Court candidate nominated by a Democratic president for nearly a year, saw nothing wrong with trying to force a hasty vote on an unpopular Republican nominee facing serious questions about his character.

But when principles are thrown out the window, character goes right along with them. Identity is what’s important. This guy is a Republican nominee. He’s golden, regardless of what he might have done. That Democratic guy? We had to block him because he was a Democrat. Republicans are doing the same thing in defending the current president against ethical charges after impeaching a Democratic president facing ethical charges of his own – a president whom, naturally, Democrats defended because he was a Democrat.

Loyalty is valued over conscience, and winning is esteemed more highly than playing by the rules. So much for what we used to teach our children: “It’s how you play the game.”

When you have no principles, its easy to argue that principles should be invoked selectively, because they’re no longer important in their own right. They’re weapons to be employed in fallacious arguments to destroy the opposition. But the more they’re used in this way, the less credibility they have. People aren’t stupid. They see what these politicians are trying to do, and they don’t like it.

The unfortunate byproduct of this, however, is that the principles themselves become tarnished because of how they’re (mis)used. When principle no longer carries any weight in an argument, people turn to something that does: identity politics. The term is most often associated with the left and conversations about race, but it’s far bigger than that. The right does it just as much and, sometimes, even more blatantly, dismissing anything negative as a product of the opposition’s “fake news” machine.

The right demonizes the mainstream media, regardless of whether the reporting is principled and the content is accurate. The left, meanwhile, demonizes white males, regardless of whether they’re advocates for equal rights or anti-immigrant, chauvinist pigs. What we don’t want to look at here is the fact that both sides are engaged in the same behavior: They’re putting identity ahead of principle.

The Fallout

This is how we get things we say we hate: things like negative campaigning and officeholders who refuse to apologize for anything they’ve ever done, no matter how questionable or even heinous. This is why we have to have a #MeToo movement instead of a society that respects women from the get-go. It’s why neo-Nazis feel emboldened and some people feel like it’s OK to pop them one: because we’ve abandoned our principles.

We’d rather demonize than apologize, because “the other’s” identity as our enemy is more important than our own principles. This is how armies behave during wartime: They churn out biased propaganda and dehumanize the enemy, so a soldier’s conscience – the seat of those principles – doesn’t get in the way of killing. The fact that we’re doing this during peacetime, against our own fellow citizens, illustrates just what’s happening to us.

We’re not just hypocrites, we’re heartless ones.

This is what happens when we mortgage our principles on the altar of our bitterness for the sake of mere convenience. If this is the kind of identity we want as individuals, or as a nation, history will judge us a colossal failure.

* Note: I like to add “if you were in their shoes” to this principle.

Read more political essays by Stephen H. Provost in Media Meltdown, available on Amazon.