Limousine Liberals?

A new book claiming to “expose” liberal hypocrisy only shows how much the right relies on straw men.

By Bryan Collinsworth, Sarah Lawrence College
Tuesday November 8, 2005

If Peter Schweizer, a Research Fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, tried giving the presentation he made last Thursday at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC to his old philosophy professors from Oxford, they might cast themselves into the River Thames in despair. After all, his new book— Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy—is based almost entirely on one of philosophy’s most infamous logical fallacies: that if a certain person’s real-life actions don’t live up to his or her abstract ideals, then those ideals are automatically proved false.

In Schwiezer’s case, of course, the ideals he’s questioning are liberal ones, and he attacks them by offering detailed analysis of how eleven specific lefties—each one gets a chapter—don’t act so ‘liberal’ in their own personal lives.

Schweizer believes that his work “will strike many people as a revelation…” While right-wingers who fall short of their beliefs have been publicly slammed for years, he told his conservative audience at Heritage, “the simple fact is that hypocrisy on the left has never been explored, it’s never been systematically analyzed, and that’s what I try to do in this book.”

Indeed, I’m sure Rush Limbaugh, FOX News, and the whole right-wing blogosphere must be breathing a HUGE sigh of relief to know that someone on the right finally had the guts to go after the eleven figures Schweizer “exposes” in Do As I Say: Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Al Franken, Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Ralph Nader, Nancy Pelosi, George Soros, Barbara Streisand, Gloria Steinem, and Cornel West. [Editor’s Note: the Center for American Progress and Campus Progress are associated or have worked with a number of these individuals.]

If that predictable list of conservatives’ stock villains gives you the vague suspicion that Do As I Say might be more of a right-wing hit job than a fresh, challenging, or “systematic” analysis, you’re right. And you won’t be surprised to learn that when it comes to leveling his charges of hypocrisy, Schweizer’s philosophy is “anything goes.”

His accusations range from the legitimate—labor advocate Ralph Nader resisted an effort to organize the staff of his own non-profit—to the laughably petty and convoluted—Barbara Streisand claims to defend civil liberties, but one time she spotted a paparazzo taking pictures of her, and she told the police that she felt threatened by him, so they arrested him, but they held him for three days and on higher bail than usual, so when he was released he sued the sheriff’s department for civil liberties violations, and they concluded that he would probably win if the case went to trial, so they settled out of court. Got that?

Do As I Say also serves up the obligatory sneering references to the American Civil Liberties Union, dismissals of anything left of Alan Colmes as “radical,” “liberal,” and “Soros-funded” (without any explanation of what these terms mean), and of course, a passing mention of MoveOn’s ad contest in which two out of over 1,500 independent submissions compared Bush to Hitler. After even a few pages, it’s clear that there’s nothing systematic, analytical, or even very cutting-edge about Schweizer’s work. It is merely a recycled mess of valid points, silly gotchas, and blatant deceptions, a train wreck of conservative lore that it would take years to untangle.

It’s not worth the effort, though, because the entire jumble stands condemned on the same grounds that philosophers have always dismissed such ad hominem attacks: Do As I Say doesn’t advance any substantive, reasoned arguments for why the various liberal ideals in question are bad ones; at best, it only proves that the eleven profiled individuals are hypocrites when it comes to living out those ideals (and even here, it struggles).

Now, Schweizer tries a lot of elaborate rhetorical tricks to get around this fatal flaw. His favorite technique is to concede that really, no one can perfectly live up to his or her ideals, but there’s something special about liberal hypocrisy.

As he explained at his Heritage talk, “When conservatives abandon their principles and become hypocrites, … they end up hurting their families; they end up hurting themselves; it ends up being a loss-loss situation. It’s very hard to find a conservative who abandoned their [sic] conservative principles, to perhaps embrace liberal or other principles, who ended up being better because of it.… [T]hat’s because conservative principles—when it comes to issues like personal morality, for example—they’re like guardrails on a winding road. You can certainly cross through them, but … you do so at your own peril.”

On the other hand, Schweizer added, “When liberals are hypocrites, when they abandon their principles and go against the ideals they claim to profess, their lives are better. Their kids end up going to better schools, they end up with more money, they end up more happy [sic].” This, he claims, is proof that “those ideas generally don’t work for individuals, and therefore they won’t work for society at large.”

It’s a clever try, but it fails in myriad ways. For one, Schweizer doesn’t really substantiate his “conservative-hypocrites-get-burned” hypothesis. He gives a few examples of right-wingers who became drug addicts or had affairs, but only a dyed-in-the-wool partisan would see these cases as betrayals of conservative, rather than universal, principles.

Schweizer makes no mention, on the other hand, of the countless ‘principled’ and explicitly conservative stands—in favor of segregation and the seven-day workweek, say, or against women’s suffrage—which the American right seems to have happily abandoned over the years (with some notable exceptions) without any of the dire consequences they once predicted. Nor does he tackle the major conversions taking place even at this moment—say, the right’s sudden emergence as “defenders” of the future solvency of Social Security, a program they once openly opposed.

As for the flip-side of Schweizer’s thesis, that liberal hypocrisy actually leads to better outcomes than adherence to liberal ideals, there may be instances in which this is true. If Schweizer had had the intellectual integrity to focus only on these cases, he might have successfully made his point—but he would also have published a much thinner book. Instead, he goes hog-wild revealing any and every liberal contradiction he can find, and the result is a fatal contradiction of his own: Most of his examples only resonate if the reader values, on some level, the liberal ideals that are being betrayed.

Yes, it’s outrageously hypocritical that “pro-labor” politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Ralph Nader participate in private enterprises that brutally suppress unions and labor rights. It’s shocking that defender-of-the-working-class Barbara Streisand has a reputation for being a “full-fledged girl monster” toward her own assistants and servants. It’s disappointing that affirmative action advocates like Michael Moore and Al Franken don’t seek out more minorities to hire for their projects. And it’s frustrating that wealthy liberals sometimes obtain and preserve their millions by playing fast and loose with the rules.

But wait a minute: Does Schweizer really expect his readers to come out of all this pining for the utopian world in which working people are cheated and abused, minorities are largely absent in positions of power, and the surest path to success is ruthlessness and foul play?

On the contrary, much as he and his fellow conservatives would hate to admit it, this whole right-wing art of liberal hypocrite-hunting really only succeeds when it offends a fundamental American sense of fairness—the very sense embodied in those progressive ideals that lefty leaders sometimes betray.

Yet aside from using Americans’ sense of justice to attack those who try, however inconsistently, to stand up for it, the most such hypocrisy exposés can do is ease the conscience of right-wingers feeling guilty or defensive about their own similar shortcomings. The fact that the Kennedys own oil companies does nothing to solve our looming energy crisis or make it any less real. Michael Moore’s foundation’s investments in Halliburton don’t justify granting no-bid government contracts to favored businesses or letting those contractors get away with millions in unaccounted money when they do work in Iraq. And the Clintons’ decision to enroll Chelsea in a private high school doesn’t excuse us as Americans leaving some children behind.

The greatest and final disappointment of Schweizer’s book, though, is that there are real concerns about inconsistency in American politics that he might have raised. While his lockstep-conservative attacks on individual lefty hypocrites are all but useless, a truly ‘systematic analysis’ could have offered us important lessons about ourselves and the policies we advocate.

A broad examination of both conservatives’ and liberals’ reticence to practice environmental conservation when it runs counter to our short-term interests, for example, could get all of us thinking about how to rededicate ourselves to this essential task. And an in-depth, empirically supported argument that it’s impossible for just about anyone to completely avoid compromising personal principles in a confusing and complex modern world could convince Americans across the political spectrum to set aside holier-than-thou pretensions and seek ways to work together for the greater good.

But in the question and answer session following his presentation at the Heritage Foundation, Schweizer himself conceded that he is not mounting any such broad critique. When asked whether he had found in his research any left-wingers who don’t act hypocritically, he responded, “I have no doubt that there are liberals, and I would argue probably largely rank and file liberals, who try to live their philosophy. Now whether that’s a good idea or not I think we can have a very good debate about.”

Yes, we could. That’s exactly the debate we should be having. And it’s exactly the debate that ad hominem polemics like Do As I Say don’t contribute to at all.

 
Illustration: Matt Bors