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Hypocrisy
Let
us reason together for a moment.
One cannot advocate for morality and greed
at the same time without exhibiting blatant hypocrisy.
One cannot condemn materialism while also enshrining
commercialism as a source of moral value.
One cannot claim to be patriotic while spreading
fear, panic and misinformation among the populace.
One cannot claim to support the Constitution
of the United States, when all you care about are two or three amendments,
and even those are taken out of context. Guns are okay and deserving of
angry demonstrations, but seeing to the welfare of the people is not?
How is it that guns out value people?
How can one say that one believe in equality,
and then impose completely biased restrictions on particular minorities?
What thoughtful person is going to believe that a political
party seeks to protect Social Security after just trying to privatize
it out of existence?
When deregulation of the markets produces the
catastrophic recession we are dealing with now, how does one dare to advocate
for more deregulation as a solution?
When President Obama lowers taxes, how is it
that the opposition claims he raised them? The same logic would apply
to saying that up is really down.
When the president works hard to defeat a recession
that was created under someone else’s watch, how is it that people
blame him for causing it?
Can we trust a party that claims to want smaller
government, and then grows it bigger than the opposing party?
Or a party that wages war on the cheap in order to give tax
breaks to the wealthy, who need them least? How about a party that
talks about bringing honor and dignity to the office, only to bring
us the worst examples of endemic corruption that we have seen in
our lifetimes?
Can a government support religious freedom,
while promoting a particular sect?
Does it make sense to compare President Obama with
Hitler and Nazism, when American Nazis have never
supported liberalism? Like the KKK and other deluded White Supremacists,
they support conservatism, and always have.
How does one fight to protect the right to life
of fetuses, and then neglect the well-being of the poor, ignore the slaughter
of innocents by calling them collateral damage, and support
capital punishment? The hypocrisy could not be more blatant.
The trouble with hypocrisy is managing both sides of
what you claim. You can really be only one or the other. Usually what
sounds good is meant to hide what is bad, in the hope that people are
fooled by it. The hypocrite who significantly profits from hypocrisy will
go to almost any extreme to conceal the truth. Rhetorical tricks are used,
as are tactics based on fear and distractions.
Rousing a mob mentality is another way to sustain hypocrisy,
as is slandering the truth. Another method is to attract
supporters who are out of the mainstream, and will support just about
anything related to their cause. Hence the strange bedfellows that support
hypocritical positions.
Does any of this sound familiar on the political
scene?
How does we contend with such entrenched hypocrisy?
Despite the wonderful ideals of our nation derived
from liberal democracy, the defense of liberalism has been
sheepishly mild, almost apologetic. For decades we have let the opposition
define liberalism as something it is not, and have barely responded. I’m
not sure what shames liberals more, allowing conservatives to distort
their message unabated, or not loudly proclaiming the patriotic fervor
of Enlightenment principles from the rooftops.
If people only hear conservative tirades, and liberals
quietly show no resolve or inspiration, the uninformed public will naturally
be swayed in the wrong direction. And if liberalism dies,
if it succumbs to conservative barbarism, which is possible if it loses
its energy, all that is best about America dies with it.
Liberals need to be vigilant. It is time for them to
speak out about values and the ideals of real Americanism. If they do
so intelligently, the rhetoric of conservatism will pale in comparison.
Conservatives, after all, have nothing to offer but nihilism.
They subsist on generating fear, misinformation and regional bias that
is being artificially stoked for profit. These are the people who talk
about seceding from the union, who call our government of the people evil.
Who would tear down Jefferson’s separation of church and state.
Who believe that the way to cripple government is by increasing deficits
and bankrupting the economy with deregulation.
Where are the true patriots who will defend free
thought, and not allow the radical right to desecrate our Constitution?
