Double standards seem like the only standards most politicians know

By David McElroy · January 20, 2012

In 1998, Newt Gingrich was the Republican Speaker of the House who guided the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about an affair. He talked piously at the time about family values and how Clinton wasn’t fit to be president because of his transgressions. At the same time, Gingrich was cheating on his own wife. Even now, the man doesn’t see anything hypocritical about this.

U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the chair of the Democratic National Committee. In 2009, she criticized GOP presidential candidates who had opposed Barack Obama’s bailout of General Motors and Chrysler by saying, “If it were up to the candidates for president on the Republican side, we would be driving foreign cars; they would have let the auto industry in America go down the tubes.”

There’s only one problem. Schultz drives a foreign car — a 2010 Infiniti FX35 with a personalized license plate bearing her initials. A spokesperson for the DNC didn’t see any hypocrisy in this, of course, but saw it as merely a Republican diversion from the issues.

We could easily cover dozens of incidents of hypocrisy — by supporters of both sides of the mainstream — but you get the point. If you do a web search for political hypocrisy or political double standards, what you’ll find is hundreds and hundreds of articles by people blasting the serious hypocrisy of the other side, but I haven’t been able to find a single word about the fact that hypocrisy is the biggest bi-partisan aspect of politics.

All day Thursday, I saw conservative Republicans blasting Marianne Gingrich and ABC News because of the charges she made in an interview with the network. To me, the woman comes across as a credible witness who testifies about her ex-husband’s deep dishonesty and lack of ability to be trusted. But I saw and heard Newt Gingrich’s supporters call her all sorts of names, most of which use language I wouldn’t repeat here. Why are they attacking her when all she is doing is pointing out the hypocrisy of her ex-husband?

I’d like to suggest that what’s going on in each of these cases is cognitive dissonance. When people are presented with two contradictory pieces of information, it creates feelings of discomfort in their brains. In order to get rid of that discomfort, they’re forced to unconsciously (or sometimes even consciously) discard one piece of information — so they won’t be faced with such an open contradiction.

In the minds of Newt Gingrich supporters, they already have firmly established in their minds the fact that he is a conservative champion who stands for their kind of values. For many of those people, the values he stands for are social conservative positions. This is the evaluation they’ve given him over the years. So when they’re faced with new information that’s in conflict with that — such as finding out that he’s a serial cheater and long-term liar who changes his positions when it’s politically convenient — they have to either reject the new information or decide they’ve been wrong about him in the past.

The cognitive dissonance of facing both of those positions forces them to choose one or the other, so the vast majority choose to disbelieve the new information. They can combine that with the long-established assumption that “the media” are out to get conservatives, and they have a nice story line that suggests that a lying and bitter ex-wife is teaming up with the “liberal media” to bring down a conservative. They might even end up more devoted to Gingrich than they were to start. And, oh yeah, if it does does turn out to be true, well, everybody does it, so it’s not a big deal if one of our guys does it, too.

The same sort of thing would be going on in the minds of unthinking Democrats who might defend Schultz. If the reverse case were true, they would be yelling about a double standard, but it’s different when it’s one of their own. After all, Schultz voted the right way on the issue, so her personal preference of her own vehicle didn’t matter. Right? In the same way that Gingrich voted the way conservatives wanted him to vote, so they were willing to excuse his personal behavior.

If you’d really like to know more about the cognitive dissonance that causes these double standards, I highly recommend a book called “Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts.”

In this book, a pair of social psychologists explain why the human brain is wired for self-justification. They show examples of how we fool ourselves in various areas of life, ranging from politics to police work to romantic relationships. When I read this book about four years ago, it helped me to make sense of a lot of things that didn’t make sense about the world around me. You probably look at other people and wonder why they could be so contradictory and confusing. What you’ll learn is that they’re wondering the same thing about you.

If you already opposed Newt Gingrich before this latest evidence came out, you might be looking at the Gingrich supporters and thinking that they must be idiots to still support him after this. (That’s my emotional response, too.) But you need to understand that you’ve almost certainly made similar errors. I’m sure I have, although I’d much rather assume that I’m the only truly consistent and rational person on the planet.

When you get right down to it, it’s this sort of insane self-justification that will always doom democracies. The theory is that educated and informed people will listen to the facts and come to rational decisions in the best interests of everybody. Even if every single person in the system were to honestly try that — and it can’t ever be that good anyway — it’s not possible for us to come to mutually beneficial solutions. You’re always going to believe your solution is better than mine. I’m always going to assume that my solution is better than yours. We’re both going to justify ourselves as being right.

Whichever political group you’re a part of, you almost certain see yourself as being part of the group that makes sense. The other groups are unreasonable and irrational and a dozen other things. Even though you’re sure you’re right, they’re just as sure that they’re the only reasonable and rational group. That’s just the way human nature works.

We’re not going to be able to rationally convince each other to change our minds — because we make decisions for unconscious emotional reasons and then we dress them up with logical-sounding words that justify what we’ve already decided.

We’re all deceiving ourselves. Some of us are a bit more aware of the self-deception than others are, but it doesn’t mean it’s a pleasant reality to understand.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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