Surely there’s a lot of it. Our usual impulse is to dismiss most of it with a plaintive “What can you do?” John Hinderaker reminds us that it’s electorally relevant:
The Democrats are the party of the nomenklatura, including the most petty of the nomenklatura–Americans who have managed to graduate from college. Beyond that, they are the party of those who cash the trillions of dollars in checks that government at all levels writes, every year, and who benefit from the ever-widening web of government regulations.
Government checks go mostly to the upper middle class, which is why the counties around Washington are the richest counties in the country. Even the many billions of dollars designated for poverty programs don’t mostly go to the poor, but rather to those who *serve* the poor. And it is almost exclusively the well-off who benefit from each round of government regulation. So the Democrats are the party of the wealthy, with their best voting group those who earn over $200,000 a year.
We have a category for hypocrisy, here at Liberty’s Torch. It remains an important subject in human relations, both for when it’s relatively innocent and for when it deserves to be condemned. Political hypocrisy of the Democrats’ variety is of the latter sort. It’s not the “spirit is willing, flesh is weak” variety Neal Stephenson pinned in his novel The Diamond Age. It does actual harm to large numbers of human beings.
But it’s married to the self-interest of those in government, of those who sell goods and services to governments, and those who manage to “rake off” a little of the money that flows through governments: Robert Michels’ classic Iron Triangle. And that makes it near to impossible to combat.
Among the effects that most terrify the Democrats’ strategists today, the steady defection of minority voters from the Democrat plantation is foremost. Democrat politics is coalition politics. Coalition politics is all about buying blocs of votes with promised subventions and giveaways. But when a coalition reaches majority status it becomes fragile: all those boughten supporters line up at the trough for their feed… and there’s considerable acrimony among them about who gets fed first, and at whose expense.
Hypocrisy of various degrees is critical to “keeping ‘em on the plantation.” But feeding time arrived some time ago, and those who were told they’d be fed have become impatient. So Democrats who are part of that iron triangle, whose personal well-being depends upon keeping the coalition together and the government money pipe bulging, are in a lot of trouble this year. Their clients are deserting them.
This will affect more than just the elections in November. Stay tuned.
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It is possible to aspire to, and advocate for, a belief while failing to live up to the standards set by that belief. Possible? Necessary, inevitable, impossible to avoid, as Jesus pointed out in Matthew 5:28. But that isn’t hypocrisy as much as it is the Human Condition.
The issue normal people have with the hypocrisy shown by the current crop of Democrats is that they advocate for that alleged ideal while utterly ignoring the rules they set for everyone else to achieve it. Close down businesses? No, only the barbershops and churches, leave the sex parlors and bars open. Want to protest against shutdowns? Not allowed. Want to protest pretend racism? Sure, no issues whatsoever. Restaurants are not allowed to have more than one customer per 10 sq meters, unless it’s a Democrat fundraiser. Beaches shut down, but not abortion clinics.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to Man, and from Man to Pig, and from Pig to Man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.”