as it turns out there are worse options than hypocrisy, politically speaking
Reposted from
We can discuss how self-serving it was, but I do think it was valuable that Americans *used* to think that we *should* be a force for good and be willing to reach out and help. Beyond soft power, it was a good thing folks would expect us to send aid, to organize around it and to offer support.

Comments

The same goes for corporate Pride and rainbow washing, I fear…
reply
I think people get a sense of power in making someone feel ashamed for being charitable... I’ve heard People*(probably family) say things ranging from “well it’s performative to throw money at a problem” to “you don’t know who is taking it all” and suddenly being charitable means being “a fool”.
reply
The fact that bad people felt the need to be hypocritical is a testament to the power of "the will to be good". Now, unfortunately, shame is out of fashion, and people feel empowered to be just openly ugly (in every sense). We all lose as a consequence!
reply
This has been one of my refrains for a long time: http://itself.blog/2012/06/02/is-hypocrisy-to-be-preferred/
reply
alternatively, https://bsky.app/profile/tressiemcphd.bsky.social/post/3llorlzy3ik2t
reply
Maybe she's just making a different point about a related topic instead of offering an alternative in the same terms
reply
Even here, one might argue that charges of hypocrisy are actually kind of meaningless and ineffective in the grander scheme of things whether directed at the right or the left.
reply
on this team
reply
What if the mask on version of genocide is causally related to the mask off version, like Tom Homan working for Obama too? It's worth considering why the two would not look so different to an Indonesian socialist under the machete in 1966 or a teen burned alive in Gaza under Biden.
reply
whether the "mask on" people are better or worse than the "mask off" people is a different question than the question of which of the two situations is preferable
reply
Totally fair though I think putting major historical phenomena in terms of multiple-choice questionnaires (pick A or B, now C or D) rather than their relationships isn't the way I like to roll!
reply
Thanks for that little dig at our lack of sophistication.
reply
when biden talked out of both sides of mouth about gaza that was a real "mask on" moment for me... and i preferred it to the alternative
reply
me with my big sign "say the quiet part quiet again"
reply
There's moral hazard in hegemony, hypocrisy-as long as it exists, is an acknowledgment of limits.
reply
Far better to have corporations support DEI instead of *waves hands*
reply
We have a moral obligation to help people around the world. I don't like that the help has usually been an effort to exert American power but that's not the same as saying we shouldn't help.
reply
the compliment that vice pays virtue!
reply
Right. Even with America's flaws, would the world be better off with Putin or Xi as the top dog?
reply
Don't know where it's from but, "hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue". I always liked that. A hypocrite knows at least how he should act and might be shamed into doing the right thing. Naked vice is much worse.
reply
Doing good things for mostly illogical or self serving reasons beats doing no good thing and/or all bad things

Who knew
reply
I think what’s missing is that you simply can’t sustain that type of hypocrisy on thin air. US saw itself as the good guys for like 50 years after WWII, but we were in the dregs of that by my childhood in the 90s. It’s been a while since we’ve had a plausible positive national narrative.
reply
Hypocrisy "is the tribute vice pays to virtue" - LaRouchfoucauld. In other words, hypocrisy requires some moral compass, some awareness of right and wrong. This regime is so beyond that.
reply
Very much like the Perfunctory Apology. Maybe not genuine, maybe forced upon the person by PR advisors, but it still reinforced the standard that a certain thing was wrong and people who do it must make amends.

That was replaced with “never admit wrongdoing,” which is a much worse state.
reply
Judith Shklar stays winning on why hypocrisy is both a vice, and why prioritisation of anti-hypocrisy is extremely dangerous (the most likely result is not true virtue but unapologetic sin)
reply
Yeah. There is value in most people believing that good things are possible and we can do good things, as opposed to the nihilist joy of thinking that all we can ever do is do bad things.
reply
Hypocrisy is the tax that vice pays to virtue.
reply
Some people want American isolationism. Everyone, the deserving and undeserving, will get it good and hard.
reply
Maybe not even hypocrisy, more a mixture of good and bad stuff. A state literally contains multitudes, it will contradict itself.

What we’re seeing now is to some extent a “mask off” moment — but it’s also a moment of degradation, loss of things that were genuinely good. A tragedy.
reply
Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.

We've obviously cancelled our subscription.
reply
I don't think it's hypocrisy so much as it's useful idiots. Some people really do want that stuff and so people with cynical motives employ them to carry out specific and targeted acts that are supposed to further the ends of the cynical. And the good people then brush off the harm others commit.
reply
This reminds me of Norm MacDonald's bit on hypocrisy https://youtu.be/_9wLAFuAi4U?si=n84pA_Jji3_yttsR
reply
Mainly on X, the consensus seemed to emerge that if a journalist attended and covered the Qatar World Cup or even if a fan watched it on tv, they shouldn’t be allowed to criticise anything about the host country (or indeed any Gulf investments in anything else)… bizarre
reply
It's a compliment to virtue! really underrated
reply
I had this exchange with a friend last week: there are worse things than American liberal empire! Namely American illiberal empire!!

I think the failure to imagine that things can get worse is a really significant problem across the political spectrum (Bevins’s If We Burn makes this point, as well)
reply
https://bsky.app/profile/jrowanbxl.bsky.social/post/3lhb4o5czos2v
reply
"a certain level of competence" biden ran for half the election while drooling and speaking gibberish. 2017 trump i dont even have to explain. obama had all the power in the world in 09 and all we got was lousy obamacare. bush i dont have to explain. like what planet are you on?
reply
One where countries other than the US exist
reply
(And, sure "a certain level of competence" here is a *very* low bar, under which many of today's populists are still managing to limbo rather effortlessly)
reply
When has the American empire ever been liberal though? It's been engaged in propping up fascists and genocidaires and suppressing democratic movements for its entire existence.
reply
20,000,000 people will die because Elon stole their AIDS medicine because he thinks doing so is funny
reply
Ok. What does that have to do with my question?
reply
I had so many conversations re: Palestine along these lines with people who (verbatim) insisted that things “literally couldn’t be worse” than what Biden was doing, to which I could only reply that not only could they get much worse, it wasn’t particularly hard to imagine how

And here we are
reply
Exactly
reply
the failure to imagine that (especially for everyone skating on the veeeeery upper crust of global society) is a huge factor tbh.

my go-to example is all the LA pool parties I’ve been to, with unlimited food + drink, where everyone’s unfathomably complaining “it can’t get any worse than this” (??)
reply
Yep. I guess those peace lovers showed us.
reply
You actually can't do "double genocide" so all those people were right. You should have just been honest and said the genocide doesn't bother you at all.
reply
It can in fact be faster or slower! Your argument is an argument than Israel might as well wipe out every last Palestinian because at least it's still only the one genocide.
And what we've got now of deporting Israel critics is... not helping, to say the least.
reply
For some of us "slower genocide" is unacceptable but you do you.
reply
Must be awesome being so morally superior bro, I’m sure the dudes in El Salvador who were sent there because of fucking tattoos think your “unacceptability” helps. You’re definitely gonna get head at the next anarchomaoism or whatever book club for this one.
reply
omg you are a perfect example of what i just said. Genocide is a spectrum of actions from kidnapping children, kicking people out of their homes, boming homes, to murdering all of them. The fact you refuse to see that betrays your own inhumanity and refusal to see them as people who need help
reply
"Genocide is a spectrum." I invite you to eat a bowl of shit, vomit it back up, and eat it again.
reply
The failure to understand that letting these fascists control the US government all but guarantees that multiple marginalized groups will be ethnically cleansed was, and remains, infuriating.

People don't listen to us 🙍🏿‍♂️
reply
I think that attitude also betrays a problem with strategic thinking, and that’s something we all need to wrestle with a lot more as well.
reply
No doubt
reply
yeah that's definitely the most difficult version of this conversation
reply
This is why I continue to believe that Americans are gamblers, not insurance purchasers. Always gotta chase the infinitesimal chance of a unicorn fairy rather than accept it was a giant troll with a meat cleaver coming at you
reply
Do you mean that most Americans supported or were indifferent to genocide so it was foolish utopianism to try to pressure the party to end it's continuing support and protection for it? I am struggling to understand why you talk as if America not enabling genocide is an unrealistic fantasy
reply
Because both parties are paid for by the military industrial complex and no politicians will vote to stop giving weapons to another country for any reason as it would mean loss of a large chunk of funds to the opposition.
reply
Looks like another brain dead moron that enjoys having trump as president and comes out of the woodwork like a fucking sea lion!

Muting you so you can scream into the void forever, dumbass.
reply
Purely anecdotal and we are talking about young ppl, but I taught in the NYC public schools for a long time, kids mostly from lower income homes, and I'd ask them if they'd prefer being promised a middle class life or the chance to be rich but that chance was very small. Most took the 2nd option.
reply
It would definitely explain the overproduction of younger people in the "influencer" space.
reply
*sigh* not wrong
reply
Same mentality that gives us the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” complex
reply
Humans in general are terrible at assessing future risk. American rugged individualism just makes that so much worse. And especially bizarre when people on the left are against harm reduction, or willing to let things get worse instead of doing what we can
reply
All that. Nailed it.

"American exceptionalism" supercharges that tendency and it's, uh, not great.
reply
Also, you know half of us constantly consuming right wing propaganda doesn't help.
reply
Surely the most difficult is getting people to understand how much worse climate change is likely to get

https://actuaries.org.uk/planetary-solvency
reply
There is a whole class of NP-hard conversations, I guess
reply
the same people who point to how genocide is a spectrum of actions, did not see how early in that spectrum Gaza was, and how it absolutely could get worse. I read someone say "you can't double genocide" and i just think "what is wrong with you?"
reply
When i wrote this i did not see someone had actually responded with that stupid "double genocide" statement, i guess there are more than one of these braindead people without compassion
reply
And now those people have to pretend that things would be the exact literal same if Harris had won. Ridiculous.
reply
@cursed.monster the trouble is not that things could not be worse, but using that to defend the indefensible—(saying 'yeah Biden is sending Israel bombs to facilitate genocide, but Trump will do worse') may be true, but it does not defend Biden.
Trump being evil does not make Biden and Harris good.
reply
Sure, yeah, but I am explicitly not defending Biden’s record, because I also agree it’s indefensible, but just categorically denying that it could be worse is foolish, and it was obvious which choice was worse

A lot of people seem very interested in reading this as a defense of Biden, and it is not
reply
if you really understanbd just how bad mnurduring and raping 200 000 innocent people are you wouldnt call it 'worse' when nazi countries get destroyed
reply
Yes, I agree that individually I can understand the defense of an individual voter, but I absolutely abhor anyone saying Arab-Americans deserve what they get because they should have voted for Harris, as she was "better on Palestine" because that is bullshiat in ten different ways.
reply
@cursed.monster for instance, I can take a liberal defending their own vote for Harris on a net-benefit basis, but when they blame Arab-Americans ('Dearborn'), it is immoral to blame those harmed by policy by saying that not voting for that policy makes it worse. Try empathy.

https://youtu.be/mJhW7UtwGW4
reply
Sure, I’m not blaming them (even if I were inclined to, which I’m not, I’m not sold on the numbers being enough to shift it)

Victims of trauma get a pass on this choice from me, but there were a lot of other people who damn well knew better acting like ipecac and bleach were the same drink
reply
Whites elected DJT, Brookings study (84% of DJT's 77 million voters) aDJT won all seven swing states by over the margin of third-party votes.

Democracy 101 is Democratic (notice) leaders responding to voters, 77% of Dems polled wanted an embargo.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/trump-gained-some-minority-voters-but-the-gop-is-hardly-a-multiracial-coalition/
Comment image
reply
Have you seen the posts where Dems blame Arab-Americans? Just look for "Dearborn" on Bsky, you will find hundreds.

I am losing my shiat over this because it is victim-blaming, not only because white Americans elected DJT, but asking those harmed to vote for "less harm" is vile.
Comment image
reply
So. Many. Times. "I agree, it's a genocide and it's obscene BUT ALSO if we elect Trump it will literally never improve"

And here we are 😔
reply
Right! It was categorically not a defense of Biden’s policy, though that’s generally how it was received, just a note that as bad as things were, it could get worse in fairly obvious ways
reply
how is it worse now?
reply
I would love an answer to this. If the situation is worse in Palestine under Trump then I am missing something
reply
It's worse. But plans for the new luxury resort and casino "Trump Gaza" are already finalized. Hope those who voted for Trump or stayed home are happy.
reply
Oh, you were serious
reply
yes
reply
Yes, but many falsely conclude this means doubling down on liberalism instead of socialism when only movement toward the left has preserved the liberal character of American empire. We risk downplaying the historical fact that liberal American empire intrinsically tends toward the illiberal version.
reply
Socialism without liberalism is, well, illiberal, and no better than illiberal capitalism (e.g., USSR, China, etc).

You need both liberalism (civil rights, self-governance, equality under law, etc.) and socialism (worker ownership of production, economic self-management, social safety net, etc.).
reply
Wait!? We can have both! A package deal you say?
reply
When empires fall, as they do, there are usually multiple factors at work: lost asset value via war, disease or catastrophe, lost territory, the rise, and encroachment of powerful adjacent enemies. None of these things is true for the US. And yet, there is one other thing that fells an empire. 1/3
reply
America, “richer than Croesus,” (holding 26% of world GDP!) vastly powerful, yet your nation seems beset by a paralysing cultural and political decadence, tied to widespread social disenchantment with perhaps your own individual and collective sense of purpose. 2/3
reply
In terms of liberal/illiberal, the US has always championed liberalism publicly, while practicing illiberalism covertly and privately. The rise of Trump/Musk et al. is simply that illiberalism — exclusion, segregation, social inequality, making itself known as a political and cultural force. 3/3
reply
Basically we're in a tedious Mirror Universe episode of Star Trek and I blame that vole that shorted out the LHC in 2016.
reply
It's very easy to imagine how things could get worse (e.g., we could all die in a thermonuclear strike at any minute), and that breeds complacency. What's genuinely difficult is imagining how things could realistically get better. You can't get there without appreciating how bad things actually are.
reply
Yes, Trump is doing bad stuff that can easily escalate to even worse stuff, but it's important to appreciate how much of what he's doing was to some extent just below the surface of his neoliberal predecessors. Hence, scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds.
reply
The mask off fascist is always way worse than any flavor of liberal. However, people need to see that fascism is the expected outcome of liberalism rather than the aberration. The prior system was always unsustainable and our current moment was all too predictable. We have to build better than that.
reply
The easy solution is to make America unable to be either of those (they're both cancer)
reply
If you don’t like democracy I have awesome news for you about where the country is heading
reply
I don't think making America not those things will be easy at all
reply
Sadly not
reply
yes: we need a strategy for a just transition away from American hegemony. simply blowing up the liberal international order is not enough.
reply
The inability to imagine things being worse speaks to ignorance of both history and current events happening elsewhere. The fact most of us can't is an indictment of our education, among other things.
reply
Not enough people listening to minorities in rural areas talking about what the bigot fascists say and do - there’s no imagination needed when your opponents monologue like bond villains the minute they think nobody important is listening (and are increasingly doing it anyway)
reply
not from rural area but from suburban Ohio but...can confirm
reply
Listen to them, then we all need to see them for who they are and not who we wish them to be

Fascist Trash Humans

No more excuses, no coddling or walking on eggshells around them. Confront them or excise them from your lives but stop making excuses for Fascist Trash
reply
(also not-politically speaking, now that I think about it)
reply
"The No-Asshole Rule", but for countries.
reply
If I'm not a hypocrite I need to raise my standards
reply
[drawing the runes of katherine hawley on the floor] i think one of the key dynamics of the neoliberal era is the blurring of hypocrisy and well-meaning failure, and how the former has been leveraged against the latter.
reply
hypocrisy is a part of life

misrepresentation is the problem in politics, it's just so ubiquitous amongst the current people dominating discourse that y'all don't care

there's nothing that compromises democracy faster than telling people what's allowed to be thought and said and what others mean~
reply
"Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue" - took me a while to understand this because it's only recently that we've seen people who aren't even bothering to be hypocrits.
reply
1000% yes
reply
A kinda banal but very useful insight IMO is that all ideological programs tend to display massive elements of hypocrisy when enacted in practice, so the existence of hypocrisy tells us very little about the actual value of the program.
reply
You could kind of see something similar with new left and Foucaldian criticism of the social democratic welfare state -- yeah there was always a bunch of hypocrisy in practice, but clearly it still turned out to be missed when gone!
reply
America helped other countries. People helped their neighbors. Now it’s dog eat dog, and what’s in it for me?
reply
Fortunately there’s a third option other than (1) naked fascism/imperial conquest and (2) hypocritical liberal imperialism that carries out sophisticated capital extraction and brute genocide. We should choose this option imo rather than lament the loss of (2) which has a very high body count indeed
reply
true. but option #3 (international solidarity I presume) would involve elements of what people associate with 2, however wrongly, and pointing out the hypocrisies of liberal imperialism does not communicate this by itself
reply
“Associate with” yes. Can, in any way be leverage or parlayed from 2 to 3? absolutely not. Which has been proven time and again despite plucky warriors like Ken Roth’s best efforts over 50 yrs. I suspect the reason the only options are 1 & 2 is because Raytheon’s stock price doesn’t budge either way
reply
yeah, "what if American exceptionalism but remixed?" would definitely not be my pitch for a politics of solidarity
reply
Yeah Matt Duss tried to sell “the left” on this in 2021 with Tony Blinken at the head (“anti corruption, like Bernie!”) and it didn’t turn out great. Though, to his credit, I don’t think he would try this a second time
reply
there are people on here insisting to me that eliminating USAID would be necessary after The Revolution because it would be imperialist

Do these people think the USSR didn't give foreign aid? Do they think America is so irredeemable that even after communism arrives it can't be allowed to exist?
reply
the weirdest thing about that is a contemporary revolutionary leftist imaging social transformation / revolution as resulting in socialism in one country. an organ of redistribution will be necessary ‘after the revolution’ but if ‘the revolution’ only happens in the US it won’t happen.
reply
and sympathetic as I am to what the USSR was trying to do it’s susceptibility to subversion by the international bourgeoisie, and its failures are the great lesson of the 20th C. An important part of that lesson is the rev won’t work if it’s on a national basis.
reply
Yes all major powers use aid for loyalty extraction and PR, gutting this (after making countries dependent on it) while maintaining imperial violence, as Trump does is the worst of all worlds. None of this has anything to do w/ the central issue of needing an actual democratic, redistributive system
reply
good things aren't possible and if they are, they can't be done by America, even a Marxist USSA would be irredeemable and need to be destroyed for the good of humanity, apparently
reply
Not sure who you’re arguing against but this isn’t my argument. Somewhere between Samantha Power bombing and “Read Settlers”’internet leftists there are actual people grappling with what ought to replace the ruinous so-called “liberal world order” which is routinely unjust and extremely violent
reply
That isn’t just mindless campism
reply
It was expedient claiming youre 're some complex, conflicted Jekyll and Hyde polity. Now you don't even have that
reply
I’ve always espoused this theory.
reply
The way I like to say this, with a play on the title of a book by Astra Taylor: The Liberal International Order Never Existed, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone
reply
Published in 2006:
"About other countries' approach to the American role as the world's government, however, whatever its life span, three things can be safely predicted: They will not pay for it; they will continue to criticize it; and they will miss it when it's gone."
reply
📌
reply
yes! lip service you can at least hold people to!
reply

Posting Rules

  • Be respectful to others
  • No spam or self-promotion
  • Stay on topic
  • Follow Bluesky's terms of service