Today’s political landscape is characterized first and foremost by an omnipresent cynicism. This cynical environment has established hypocrisy, the stated belief in a value, principle, or practice only when it benefits oneself, as the expectation rather than the rule. The Other Side is broadly considered to be motivated by selfish, identity-derived interests rather than lofty principles or ethical ideals. One need only purport to show the ways in which Other Siders have contradicted themselves in order to win the day.
When The Other Side appears to toss out consistency, objectivity, and integrity in favor of base coalitional interests, the social pressure to embody these values in one’s own politics often melts away. This dynamic plunges the politically active into the depths of what has been often described as identity politics. Contrary to some (often suspiciously self-serving) definitions, identity politics is not a type of political belief or a set of specific political positions, but a process of deriving political views in reference to identity characteristics instead of universal principles/values.
Cynicism and its friend identity politics encourage the (self)righteous calling out of alleged hypocrisy rather than the intellectual confrontation of ideas. I argue this tendency is itself a form of unproductive identity politics. To get there, however, a few more words must be said about identity politics.
As I see it, the identity politics game has two key components which are both grounded in the same basic assumption. First, to engage in identity politics is to arrive at a viewpoint because of who you are. Importantly, the “who” in the phrase refers not to your complete person, but to a single, abstracted aspect of yourself. Who you are as a lesbian, as a Christian, as an immigrant, and so on. The political positions which derive from considerations of a reduced, unidimensional version of yourself usually benefit the collectivity of people who share the same identity: “I support this because it benefits immigrants like me.”
The problem with this is its myopic conception of identity. Only in the abstract can people be reduced to a single, unidimensional identity. In the concrete world, identity is multifaceted and intersectional. In reality, there are Christian immigrant lesbians and what benefits the identity collectivity of one category can (and likely does) hurt the others. What one considers good for Christians may not align with what is good for lesbians.
The second component entails arriving at a political position because of who you are not. This is exemplified by acting against the interests of identity collectivities out of opposition to the identity category involved. Certain identities are blacklisted by identity theorists such that their owners are considered to be unworthy of intellectual engagement or recognition. These opposed identities are typically combatted or ignored due to their crazy, prejudiced, or otherwise base connotations in the individual mind of the identity theorist. It’s important to note which identities make the list depends on the subjective assessments of the identity theorist. (Identity theorists are a diverse bunch, they exist all over the political spectrum.)
While there is some overlap in outcome between the two components, they are conceptually independent. Overlap occurs because some identities exist in perpetual contradistinction with counter identities as part of a pre-constructed social binary. Gay and straight, citizens and non-citizens, men and women, etc. Advocating for one side of these binary identities may necessitate advocating against its negative mirror.
In other situations, this issue does arise at all. For instance, what is the inverted image of the white supremacist identity? Someone who espouses racial equality? a black supremacist? an “anti-racist”? It’s unclear. One need only lack the opposed white supremacist identity rather than hold any other particular identity in order to wage an offensive variation of the identity politics game against white supremacists.
These components are unified by the shared assumption that identities ought to and, in fact, do shape everyone’s political opinions all the time. All of your views can be traced back to identity-derived interests. While there is no doubt a kernel of truth here, practically applying this idea requires accepting the most cynical proposition of all, namely that everyone is constantly acting out of a conscious or unconscious desire to further their own interests. Under this assumption, no one sacrifices for their ethical values, no one is willing to suffer politically for their principles, no one holds themself responsible for acting selfishly. In fact, there aren’t really any “universal” or “objective” values or principles to speak of, only coalitional interests. It is difficult to imagine a bleaker take on the political realm.
If people don’t really value values and identities are the only consequential determinants of perspective, there’s no purpose to debate. Those on The Other Side simply believe what they do because of who they are or who they oppose (or “hate”). A pernicious incentive structure is born of this approach. If an identity theorist encounters a person with whom she disagrees about a political matter, she is motivated to either restrict the dissenter’s ability to have an opinion on the topic at all because he lacks the relevant identity and/or to pigeonhole the dissenter into an identity she opposes in order to delegitimize all his opinions.
Notice how these antagonistic strategies for addressing those with the “wrong view” are inverse correlates of the components which guide the identity theorist to the “right view” outlined above. Other Siders’ disagreement about a matter thought to negatively impact X Identity Collectivity must be produced either by their inability to sympathize with X Identity Collectivity due to their personal lack of X identity (the correlate of the first component) or by their possession of an opposed, blacklisted identity (the correlate of the second component).
For example, identity theorists on the evangelical right speculated that the journalists who grilled President Trump over his statements that churches should not be locked down during the pandemic either weren’t religious or were anti-religion. On the other side of the spectrum, some left-wing identity theorists have taken to labeling anyone who opposes completely defunding the police as either not black (or, disturbingly, not adequately black) or anti-black.
Perhaps one of the most prevalent variations of oppositional identity pigeonholing today involves the hypocrite identity. This should come as no surprise given that that cynicism and identity politics both love to emphasize how self-interested everyone is.
As with other terms like “racist,” “transphobe,” “postmodernist,” and “neo-Marxist,” the hypocrite label has been subject to overuse and concept creep as of late. People often forget that to be a hypocrite is to contradict oneself, not to embody a contradiction created by views one does not actually hold. Just because you read the same claim into two events does not imply someone else views the events as conceptually unified.
A recent illustration of this disconnect can be found in some of the left-wing responses to conservatives over the riots which occurred during the George Floyd protests. Conservatives condemning violent forms of protest in favor of peaceful forms who had previously opposed Collin Kaepernick’s kneeling were called out for hypocrisy. “These conservatives say they prefer peaceful protest to violence, but look how they reacted to Kaepernick’s peaceful protest,” went the memes. The problem with this is that most conservatives who criticized both events did so on distinctly different grounds. While they attacked Kaepernick’s demonstration because they viewed it as disrespectful to the flag and, by extension, the country and (of course) every veteran who has ever lived, they lambasted the riots due to their disdain for the destruction of property. For the left winger to think these conservatives are hypocritically contradicting themselves here, she must substitute the conservatives’ reason for objecting to Kaepernick’s kneeling with an inverted version of her own justification for supporting it. Since she supported Kaepernick’s kneeling as a peaceful protest, and since conservatives opposed the kneeling, conservatives must be anti-peaceful protest. Only after conservatives’ response to Kaepernick’s kneeling has been reclassified from a concern about disrespecting the flag to a general anti-peaceful protest position can they be (unjustifiably) seen as hypocrites for opposing violent and destructive forms of protest.
This illustration reveals people’s tendency to automatically frame others’ reactions in their own value-laden terms. It also shows how this unfortunate but understandable proclivity can result in erroneous allegations of hypocrisy. Again, hypocrisy necessarily entails self-contradiction. In order to ascertain whether someone is being hypocritical in their responses to separate events, one must take the time to properly identify why they responded the way they did to each particular event. Of course, the fact people, and especially politicians, lie about their motivations and reasoning renders this an incredibly difficult task.
But I do not currently oppose calling out hypocrisy just because of the complexities associated with trying to get inside someone’s head, I resist it because it has become a form of identity politics. Indeed, one need only spend a an hour reading political discourse on Twitter or scrolling through Facebook to discover a new magnificent identity politics shortcut to easily winning political debates about the issues. Instead of intellectually engaging and addressing the ideas an Other Sider espouses, one need only find some creative way to portray her personally as a hypocrite. Usually this process is completed without any attempt to actually understand the Other Sider’s philosophy or even her specific views. Once the hypocrite identity label has been issued, one need no longer address or even recognize this pesky Other Sider or her ideas for she has been cast into the Pit of the Blacklisted with all the others who have been deemed, accurately or not, racists, transphobes, and xenophobes (or postmodernists, neo-marxists, and social justice warriors).
Calling someone a hypocrite has become like calling someone a “racist” or a “social justice warrior,” it no longer means much because the term has been so overused and abused. It only serves as an attempt to silence others and justify one’s own intellectual laziness. It’s so much easier to attack people personally as hypocrites instead of logically contending with their ideas, but it’s also much less rewarding. Sure, you can reap the cheap social capital gained from name calling people those in your tribe also dislike, but you lose the opportunities to convert someone to your positions, learn more about the issues, and further refine your arguments. For what it’s worth, you also run the risk of wrongfully accusing someone of hypocrisy. If you haven’t truly intellectually engaged someone and confronted their beliefs, you likely don’t know enough about them to credibly accuse them of the crime of hypocrisy.
This argument is directed first at myself. I decided to write this post once I spotted the tendency to call out hypocrisy and move on in my personal interactions and observations. Since then, I’ve noticed centrists and independents like myself, who pride themselves in eschewing the comfortable embrace of partisanship, appear to be some of the worst culprits of this kind of pigeonholing. Ironically, the very people who decry identity politics the loudest and perpetually admonish others for conflating people with ideas relish it the most when mainstream partisans act - or appear to act - hypocritically. It reaffirms our belief we are more enlightened than those who simply ride the tides of party opinion even when the currents clash. As backwards as it sounds, I found myself craving to identify instances of partisan hypocrisy to verify my status as a “free thinker.” My political independence became its own kind of identity to which I was leashed.
In the current climate, it’s not easy to avoid the trap of identity politics and overcome the seductive cynicism which lures us into the intellectual fog of selfish tribalism. However, if we wish to embody our values and live out our principles, we must fight against these temptations. This can start with giving up pigeonholing those with whom we disagree as hypocrites for the sake of superficially minimizing and dismissing their ideas. If those of us who oppose the identify politics game fail to identify the ways in which we deploy identity theorist arguments ourselves, history will reveal as the true hypocrites.