That Hypocrite Smokes Two Packs a Day

It has ever been my view that hypocrisy is, along with inauthenticity, a trivial sin that young people tend to fixate on because the stakes are so low. David Polansky extends this argument to the international sphere:

Something similar goes for sanctioning behavior on the part of our allies that we would be loath to countenance among enemies or rivals. This sort of unequal treatment under the law is at best corrupt and nepotistic and at worst a miscarriage of justice when practiced at home — for it flouts the rule of law that we mutually rely upon. But in the world of international politics, states do have larger interests and goals that they can pursue in concert with allied countries, and it hardly serves them to spite those interests for the sake of some abstract notion of equality among states — particularly when it is doubtful that rival states enjoy any commitment to that principle in the first place. (This of course says nothing about the wisdom of any particular policy, or even the wisdom of maintaining an allied or client relationship with a given country at all, but that has no bearing on the underlying logic here.)

Another problem with attributing such significance to hypocrisy is that it posits a kind of imaginary audience for one’s actions comprised of members who are not themselves also actors on the international stage. If there is such an audience, who might it be? Many argue that the answer is the countries that comprise the so-called “Global South.” Trita Parsi and Branko Marcetic provide an exhaustive rundown of instances in which the perceived hypocrisy of the United States is mooted as a reason to abstain from joining its support of Ukraine’s defense against Russia. But beyond highly public rhetoric, there is little evidence that anger over U.S. hypocrisy was a decisive factor in their calculations, or why it would override any consideration of material interests at stake.

One is left pondering the rather implausible counterfactual of a perfectly sincere great power whose commitment to principle commands loyalty among distant states irrespective of their own several interests. Indeed, there is a kind of condescension at work in these discussions, as though the countries of the Global South were not capable of operating from the logic of interests in their own right. And at a minimum, it seems to presuppose that such countries are not themselves capable of displaying hypocrisy. After all, the “non-aligned nations” during the Cold War (many of which now comprise the Global South) were particular offenders — for example, decrying the invasion of Egypt by the British-French-Israeli coalition but remaining virtually silent about the Soviet Union’s concurrent invasion of Hungary.

I think that as we age we become more aware of all the convenient fictions that enable basic social life to function, and we tend to become more tolerant of simply letting those lies lie, as it were. Yes, we live in a world built on lies, but in a great many cases these lies serve the productive function of making the world a tolerable place to live. The Beastie Boys are perfectly illustrative; the best world in one in which father and son both refrain from smoking; the world in which father smokes but chastises son for doing the same is worse, but it is surely a better world than the one where father accedes to son’s smoking (to be sure I think that the Beastie Boys were fully aware of this irony). It would surely have been better if Gavin Newsom had abided by the restrictions that he imposed upon California during Covid, but his hypocrisy is far better in terms of public health outcomes than what Ron Desantis did with Florida. Unforced errors are to be regretted, but the divergence between rhetoric and policy in practicing politics as the art of the possible is inevitable. The juvenile obsession with hypocrisy leads to the juvenile politics of a Glenn Greenwald, where hypocrisy undoes good works, and eventually to the politics of Donald Trump, where saying bad things while doing bad things becomes lionized as “brave honesty.”

As Polansky notes, in the international sphere obsession with the impact of hypocrisy on third party observers tends to overlook the hypocrisy of those observers; states in the Global South have strong material interests to refrain from criticizing Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, while most of them have no material interests at all at stake in the Israel-Gaza war, making it terribly easy for them to denounce colonialism in the one instance and ignore it in the other. More importantly, it’s not at all obvious that the display of coherence between rhetoric and policy (avoiding hypocrisy by condemning Israel as forcefully as we condemn Russia) would actually generate any change in the behavior of the observer; no one is going to stop trading with Russia as consequence of the US forcefully condemning Israel.