Most of us have a sense that things are coming apart. The persistent appeals to emergency need not be cynical, or at least not always and only cynical. We recently published Russell Berman’s warnings about a rising “rhetoric of emergency” (“ State of Emergency,” June/July 2022). “Our” democracy is at risk! They excuse their illiberalism because they’re convinced that much is at stake.ĭire sentiments among establishment elites are not entirely mistaken. Our liberal establishment no longer feels it can afford the luxury of its liberal principles. To my mind, the true explanation for today’s blatant double standards rests in the weakness of Team A, not its superordinate strength. I’m confident that the editors at the Washington Post are quietly embarrassed about having flogged the Russian collusion hoax. I’m not so pessimistic about the value of pointing out gross double standards. “‘Hypocrisy,’” he concludes, “is simply a display of power, so the more blatant it is the better.” Like a dictator who gets a kick out of seeing his arbitrary will carried out, Team A “has decided the greatest happiness in life is to crush its class enemies, see them driven before it, and hear the lamentations of their pundits.”Ĭount me skeptical. Which raises a question: Why have the double standards become so obvious? Why can Chuck Schumer encourage violence against Supreme Court justices with impunity, whereas failure to denounce the January 6 “insurrection” amounts to complicity in it? In his account, Lyons presumes that Team A wants to humiliate Team B, inducing feelings of inferiority and training Team B to accept the ascendancy of Team A.

This lack of accountability did not prevail a generation ago.

Even if false in fact, the Russian collusion story was true in spirit. Today, we’re all required to pretend it wasn’t a big deal. Even as it became evident that this story was baseless, not a single member of Team A expressed contrition. Careers flourished Pulitzer Prizes were distributed. Yet, for more than two years, the same authorities promoted false claims about Trump’s collusion with Russia in order to affect the 2016 election. It is impossible to read a mainstream news story about the 2020 election without being subjected to public service announcements about Trump’s “false claims.” Moreover, in respectable company one is compelled to agree that these false claims represent a dire threat. Although Team A insists on the sanctity of the rule of law, there exists no neutral arbiter to hold it accountable, “because Team A has consolidated all the power to decide the rules, and to enforce or not enforce those rules as they see fit.” So don’t waste your breath appealing to neutral standards. One perquisite of dominance is the right to enforce the rules when they are convenient-and suspend them when they are inconvenient. By his account, every political system has a dominant party, Team A, and a subordinate party, Team B. Asked to denounce Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, we can cite Stacey Abrams, who never accepted her defeat in the 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia. In the aftermath of the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Florida home, we can point to Hillary Clinton’s private server. There are many occasions for exposing hypocrisy these days. When pressed by some of her View co-hosts as to why Smith was asked to leave rather than told to leave, she speculated about what that scenario would look like: “They come back from back from break, now if is in some sort of state and he’s struggling and you’re trying to get him out the door and it’s on camera.” She added that Oscar producers and organizers even considered the possibility that Smith was having “a manic moment, because that’s not what he’s known for, smacking people and stuff.Consistency is a basic principle of justice, and one important form of criticism is the exposure of hypocrisy. Goldberg, who was not present at the Oscar ceremony and cautioned that she was not speaking for the Board, said today “but there are things that I do know.” After media reports came out today suggesting Oscar producers did not formally request that Will Smith leave the ceremony after slapping Chris Rock, or at the least gave Smith mixed messages about the request, Academy’s Board of Governors member Whoopi Goldberg insisted on today’s The View, “He actually was.

Chivalry code hypocrisy