Standards, hypocrisy and the coalitions’ way
own team while exaggerating the violations of rival coalitions. As George W. Bush once put it, “Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions.”
Over the weekend, Trump held a rally at the same time as the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. CNN ran a graphic from the latter event’s red carpet: “Trump Skips Event Honoring First Amendment to Rally His Base.”
Now, it’s true that the annual dinner is supposed to honor the First Amendment. But come on. The event has long been a riot of narcissistic self-adulation and Hollywood envy, which explains the red carpet in the first place.
Days later, the air is still thick with conservative denunciations of Michelle Wolf ’s caustic routine — and with liberal defenses of it.
Conservatives insist, rightly, that Wolf was crude and nasty toward White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Wolf ’s liberal defenders, who’d never accept the comedian’s vitriol if it were aimed at one of their own, ludicrously celebrate her courage for speaking truth to power.
Liberals have a better argument when they note that Sanders and her conservative defenders have been, at best, blind to Trump’s even cruder personal attacks on women and others. When Trump says indefensible things, those in his coalition leap to his immediate defense and say, in effect, “Lighten up, don’t be so sensitive.”
More and more, one hears people jettisoning universal norms — free speech, constitutional fidelity, rhetorical decency — in favor of relativistic ones that simply suit the needs of one coalitional identity group or another. Some on the left now denounce free speech solely because it is a threat to their power. Many Trump supporters wave off his rhetorical grotesqueries because “he fights!”
Rather than simple blindness to our hypocritical violations of standards, we’re declaring war on the standards themselves. If this trend continues, we may get less hypocrisy and more open war between coalitions.