While fully justified, it's really not worth decrying Republican “hypocrisy.” On the level of the underlying political project, conservatives are remarkably consistent: The GOP is the party of maintaining traditional hierarchies, of upholding white Christian patriarchal order.
https://twitter.com/Leahgreenb/status/1577394728953294848
“Pro-life” is one example of how the stark surface-level hypocrisy is disregarded as long as the actions in question are fully consistent with the underlying political project – a similar dynamic is at work every time conservatives talk about “law and order” or “states’ rights.”
I find political conservatives to be mostly very principled – it’s just that the principles are not what they are claiming they are. In this case, the principle is: We *want* a society in which a man has unquestioned authority over the lives (and bodies) of those around him.
Btw, the “But Herschel Walker is Black!” response isn’t any better than the “But Clarence Thomas…” or “But (insert name of prominent conservative woman)…” responses: Yes, they too can be proponents of a political project defined by traditional racial and gender hierarchies.
Under “normal” circumstances, these revelations about Walker would probably still sink his candidacy: If there is such a stark discrepancy between a politician’s stated (surface-level) principles and their actions, it’s usually easier to just offload the candidate.
That’s because going so clearly against your stated principles comes at a cost: For everyone else, these supposed principles are thereby revealed as shallow, something that’s just obscuring the actual political project (to which you might not want to draw too much attention…).
And there is a cost even for Republicans themselves: They need to invest more time and energy into convincing themselves that what they’re doing is still justified – because no one likes to look in the mirror and see a purely power-driven cynic. That disconnect needs work.
In that sense, Republicans sticking with Walker is indicative of how they view the current political conflict: as *not* normal, but existential – a situation in which upholding surface-level consistency, even if preferable under most circumstances, does not matter at all.
The ultimate example of this was, of course, conservatives uniting behind Trump and sticking with him during the 2016 election campaign. It made a complete mockery of most of their *stated* principles – but in many ways, Trump embodied the underlying project.
Trump being caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women certainly made a lot of conservatives uncomfortable, simply because it was so crass – but then again, it was not at all a betrayal of what he promised: an unabashed defense of white patriarchal order.
Much of Donald Trump’s attractiveness to conservatives (predominantly, but not exclusively white men) stemmed from the fact that he promised to elevate a kind of toxic patriarchal “alphaness” and made its defense against “woke” assaults a centerpiece of his agenda.
Just like with Trump’s overt racism, it was precisely the fact that he was so unabashedly “alpha” (in this particularly ridiculous, toxic way), so openly sexist, so unabashedly misogynistic that endeared him to these kinds of people/men: Finally someone who would fight back!
Trump’s promise, in this perspective, was the restoration of white Christian patriarchal glory - his rise to the presidency an unmistakable signal that there would be no more holding back, that “real men” could finally reassert their dominance, restore order.
The fact that Trump himself was unhealthy, unfit, immoral didn’t matter; what mattered was the political promise, the promise to lash out against the enemies of patriarchal rule - the Libs, those annoying feminists, the “beta males.” They voted for the Trump of MAGA iconography.
In any case, emphasizing surface-level hypocrisies is usually not very helpful, certainly not when dealing with the American Right. The danger to democracy is not the hypocrisy – it’s the underlying political project to which conservatives are fully and consistently committed.
Addendum: Quite a few people have told me I am overcomplicating things – “This is about power, end of story.” But power for whom, to what end? There is more to be learned here about the political conflict and what animates the Right than just “They want power.”
Look at the stark contrast between conservatives’ stated “law and order” preferences and the way they remain united behind one of the most unlawful politicians in recent memory. It’s a useful reminder what “law and order” has always meant on the Right.
How can the self-proclaimed “party of law and order” support someone who so clearly does not care about the law – even explicitly demand he be exempted from the law, as conservatives did in their hyperbolic, hysterical reactions to the FBI searching Trump’s Mar-a-Lago?
Describing this as “hypocrisy” is entirely correct while at the same time missing the larger point: Calling for the law to treat different groups differently is hypocritical only if you believe in equality before the law. But conservatives explicitly don’t.
Demanding Trump must be above the law is an exacerbation, but not an aberration from Republican politics. Entrenching a system that is predicated on the *inequality* before the law has always been the core of the conservative “law and order” doctrine.
A stark differentiation between those who are supposed to be bound by the rules (“Them”) and those who are not (“Us”) has always been very much at the heart of the conservative political project.
Conservatives start from the premise that some groups are worthy of protection and deserve privilege - while others are deviant, dangerous, and need to be kept in check. Once we acknowledge this as the highest principle, the conservative position is entirely consistent.
In all these cases, the brutal hypocrisy is disregarded because the actions are fully consistent with conservatism’s “Higher Truth”: If it helps to entrench white Christian patriarchal dominance, it can’t be wrong; if it undermines traditional elite rule, it must be illegitimate.
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