The Hypocrisy Two-Step
As you may know, there's some kind of wind farm proposal that Ted Kennedy is opposed to apparently because it would mess up the view from his summer house. Conservatives find this endlessly amusing but I can never quite figure out what they're trying to say about it. If you think Kennedy is wrong, then that's a black eye for him, but surely a bigger black eye to the vast majority of Republicans who are hostile to wind power generally. Alternatively, if you think Kennedy's correct, then there's really no point in mocking a Senator for taking a correct position on the issue. The central conceit of the right's fascination with this issue seems to be that hypocrisy is the most important thing in the world, certainly far more significant than something as petty as national energy policy.
The elevation of hypocrisy to paramount importance certainly serves the personal interests of pundits well. We are, as a group, professional writers and debates and not, say, people with specialized expertise in economics or environmental science or international relations or whatever else might be relevant to the issues of the day. Allegations of hypocrisy play to our strengths -- analyzing text and generating new text of our own -- while eliminating the need to bore into questions like "is this wind farm a good idea?" or "should we increase subsidies to wind power?" or what have you.
As an approach to moral or political philosophy, however, anti-hypocrisy has very serious flaws. Jeremy Lott did a good article in a recent issue of Reason making many of the relevant points. Notably, to me, the aggregate level of hypocrisy in a person's life is going to wind up depending more on the scale of his aspirations than anything else. I imagine the Christian injunction to "love your enemy" would be extremely hard to live by. No doubt most committed Christians frequently find it hard not to have feelings of hate or spite toward their enemies or toward those who have wronged them. That's human nature. You could, in fact, be quite successful as loving your enemy while still living a life that contained many moments in which you failed to meet this aspiration. I, by contrast, don't aspire to the love your enemy doctrine as an aspiration. Consequently, my life is going to be much less hypocritical on this score.
But this is obviously neither here nor there as far as whether or not you should love your enemy. That even a person who sincerely tries to love his enemies and often succeeds in doing so also sometimes falls short of this ideal merely shows that it's a hard ideal to live up to.
Or, to take it back to Kennedy, environmentalism is all about collective action issues. That any given person is going to prefer to just do what he wants rather than abide by rules aimed at limiting environmental damage is the point of pushing for enforcement of regulations on the subject.
Well said. In college, my friend took a class from Hadley Arkes, who accused liberals of being hypocrites. His evidence: liberals want to legalize prostitution, but don't want prostitutes doing business near where liberals live.
This sounds great if all you're going for is a "gotcha!" moment. After a moment's reflection, though, it becomes clear that liberals aren't hypocrites at all (on this issue). Legalizing prostitution means being able to regulate it and zone it far away from residential areas. Arkes didn't make sense unless policy positions are merely visceral reactions to the activity in question.
April 27, 2006 3:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Claiming sympathy with hard-pressed constuituents but voting against programs which would alleviate their difficulties is hypocritical.
Authoring an amendment to a funding bill to preserve the value of your property at the expense of your constituents -- as well as the citizens of your country -- might be more properly called a violation of trust.
April 27, 2006 6:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
My grandparents lived about a mile from the Kennedy compound until my grandmother passed away in November, so I might be a bit biased on this issue (though my grandparents hate the Kennedys). Environmentalists do generally support alternative energy sources, but they also support preserving natural beauty. The view of Nantucket sound from Hyannisport is stunning; any visitor to or resident of Hyannis knows this. Wanting to prevent this view from being destroyed is consistent with Senator Kennedy's long-held views on natural preservation.
Kennedy doesn't oppose drilling for oil on principle. So if this is NIMBYism, I'm guessing the Kennedys secretly own ANWR.
April 27, 2006 8:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
. . . Senator Kennedy's long-held views on natural preservation.
Would I be right in thinking that these views only apply to Nantucket Sound or perhaps, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts?
I ask because I may have been wrong but I thought that his amendment would deny federal jurisdiction over wind farms sited off the coast of Massachusetts, only.
April 27, 2006 9:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, let's see.
#1. Certainly there is no shortage of Democrats referring to various Republican strategies or tactics as 'hypocritical'. I don't think there's any basis to claim this is a 'Republican' tendency, as opposed to a 'people who disagree with me are hypocrits, see!'
#2. The overwhelming mantra of left against Republicans, Libertarians or anyone else who strongly advocates free-market economies is that the capitalists are "selfish." And, by induction, therefore Democracts are not "selfish" - they are acting selflessly, for the good of all. But it is easy to be "selfless" when you aren't being affected. Kennedy is acting in a selfish way, which isn't by itself that bad, but given how he attacks everyone else for being selfish, it is pretty galling, don't you think?
#3. Kennedy is supposed to be a leader, someone whose example one should follow in a variety of ways. Obviously, he is demonstrating the importance of "a nice view from my window" over "weaning ourselves from foreign oil". I must have missed that in the Democratic talking points.
#4. If Kennedy was a Republican, with the exact same views, you (the media) would rake him over the coals for preferring policies that "waste oil" and therefore indirectly fund terrorists. You would claim that his "love of natural beauty" was a sham, a thin excuse that proves that Kennedy (R) was a "whiny ass titty baby". Brad DeLong would raise a hue and cry "Where are the grownups in the Republican party?" and Democrats worldwide would nod knowingly and think 'yup... we're wiser and more insightful than that fucking scab Repuglican Ted Kennedy'
#5. Bottom line - apparently if a liberal acts in a hypocritical way, you make excuses for him and attack the people who call him hypocritical. But if a conservative acts in a hypocritical way, it's a serious moral defect, and evidence that conservativism has no place living in a "civilized" country.
Having said all of that, the Bush administration is a fucking disaster, and I'm looking forward to a divided government in 06.
April 28, 2006 3:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
There are factual disputes in the environmental debate: are human activities causing global climate change? what are the consequences of it? how do the costs of reducing greenhouse gases compare with the costs of global climate change?
One of the ways to advocate for one's side in a factual dispute is to impeach the credibility of the other side. Certainly when one peruses right-wing blogs, one sees a lot of presumption that their opponents in the global climate change are acting in bad faith -- they don't take the position on global climate change they do because of the merits of the issue, it's because they have an irrational animus against American prosperity and consumption.
Now, this avoids the merits of the matter just as readily as accusations of hypocrisy. But this debate is playing out in a political atmosphere. And a political reality is that people comprehend attacks on personal character a lot more than climatology. So when Ted Kennedy opposes a wind farm off the coast of Nantucket, he communicates that he doesn't take global climate change that seriously and reinforces the conservatives' anti-environmentalist narrative. Irrelevant as hypocrisy accusations may be, giving conservatives this issue has political consequences, and as someone who's pretty alarmed by global climate change, I'm pretty furious at anything discrediting the case for doing something about it -- not to mention anything that tends to discredit wind power.
April 28, 2006 5:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
My feelings on hypocrisy were set by a passage in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, set in a hypothetical future "New Victorian Age." In that passage, one of the Victorians says that, in their philosophy, hypocrisy is almost a virtue, because it simply means that you have set yourself ethical goals that are higher than you are capable of attaining. As somebody that was raised Catholic, that really resonated with me. We are incapable of perfection, but surely that does not mean that we should never strive for perfection, lest we be portrayed as "hypocritical."
April 28, 2006 7:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
The problem with hypocrisy as a political weapon is that conservatives don't seem to understand it. Or at least, their misrepresentations of what liberals actually believe have become so ingrained in their minds that they're incapable of spotting genuine hypocrisy. No liberal I know thinks it's inherently wrong to be rich, even though they favor progressive taxation and aid to the poor. No one I know thinks you shouldn't look out for yourself in your personal life, yet at the same time advocate public policies that benefit the common good. And of course, there's no inherent contradiction between favoring wind farms in general but disfavoring a specific wind project that might cause harm. Kennedy's reasons for opposing the project may be wrong, they may be selfish, but they are not inherently hypocritical. If he had previously been dismissive of those negatively affected by wind farms, then it would be a different story. Otherwise, it's no different than the fact that George W. Bush chooses not to live next to an oil refinery, and would presumably oppose any efforts to build one within smelling distance of his Crawford ranch.
And the whole "gotcha" politics surrounding this issue are rather amusing given the conservatives' apparent inability to recognize their own hypocrisy. How many staunch anti-gay Republicans have been outted in the last 5 years?
April 28, 2006 11:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
That is all fine and well Matt. However, while you can be for conservation and also for Wind Power in appropriate places, you also need to be consistent here. If Kennedy is going to support wind farms in other areas where the residents object based on visual elements, instead of just sounding hypocritical, he's actually going to be hypocritical. Wind Power takes sacrifices in that respect. Viewing this issue in a broader sense might sound good on paper, but practically speaking, this is the not the way people perceive it when they read it in this mornings paper. Sounds like a political problem that can easily impact and taint policy.
April 28, 2006 11:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think the fundamental point is that yes Kennedy is being somewhat hypocritical here, but that doesn't mean wind power is a bad idea, it means Kennedy is being hypocritical. Are the Republicans trying to argue that wind power is a bad idea? If they are they haven't made that case at all, they have simply shown that Kennedy is being a hypocrite in this instance.
April 28, 2006 1:15 PM | Reply | Permalink