In Praise of Hypocrisy
The president makes a bittersweet
concession to an American norm.Over the last four weeks, Mr. Trump has lashed out against any criticism of his behavior, because, as he never tires of pointing out, “We won.” In requesting the resignation of his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, however, Mr. Trump made his first public concession to political expectations. Hypocrisy has scored a minor victory in America. This is a good thing.
.. Mr. Trump wasn’t just breaking the rules of political conduct: He was destroying them. He was openly claiming that he abused the system to benefit himself. If he didn’t pay his taxes and got away with it, this made him a good businessman. If he could force himself on women, that made him more of a man.
.. In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt described how fascism invites people to “throw off the mask of hypocrisy” and adopt the worldview that there is no right and wrong, only winners and losers.
Hypocrisy can be aspirational: Political actors claim that they are motivated by ideals perhaps to a greater extent than they really are; shedding the mask of hypocrisy asserts that greed, vengeance and gratuitous cruelty aren’t wrong, but are legitimate motivations for political behavior.
In the last decade and a half, post-Communist autocrats like Vladimir V. Putin and Viktor Orban have adopted this cynical posture. They seem convinced that the entire world is driven solely by greed and hunger for power, and only the Western democracies continue to insist, hypocritically, that their politics are based on values and principles.
Mr. Trump employed the technique of whataboutism when he was asked about his admiration for Mr. Putin, whom the host Bill O’Reilly called “a killer.” “You got a lot of killers,” responded Mr. Trump. “What, you think our country’s so innocent?” To an American ear, Mr. Trump’s statement was jarring — not because Americans believe their country to be “innocent” but because they have always relied on a sort of aspirational hypocrisy to understand the country. No American politician in living memory has advanced the idea that the entire world, including the United States, was rotten to the core.
.. Ms. Conway was “counseled” after her impromptu commercial for the Trump brand, said the president’s press secretary, Sean Spicer. This was certainly a hypocritical move, considering that Ms. Conway had been following the president’s lead, but a hypocritical nod to decency is preferable to the blatant trampling of decency that preceded it.
.. this explanation represented a step back from the we-won-and-therefore-we-can-do-anything stance. If Mr. Trump had stuck to the throwing-off-the-masks manner of addressing controversy, he could have argued that at the time of Mr. Flynn’s conversation with the Russian ambassador, Barack Obama was a lame-duck president and everyone knew that Mr. Trump, once inaugurated, could revisit the issue of sanctions.