It is long past time for leaders of the conservative movement, the conservative commentariat, and the Republican Party to begin insisting again on standards of decency, rather than embracing double standards or the morally fraught resort to “whataboutism.”
Almost daily, leaders or pundits or activists, who formerly seemed to know better, now deflect criticism of misbehavior by Trump or his supporters by irrelevant comparisons – as if some earlier offenses by liberals excuse today’s transgressions by conservatives’ own side.
For example, it doesn’t matter if “our side” does bad stuff, because we can ask “what about” what the Left did at another point.
So, for example, without saying a word against the vile behavior by Trump fans against press covering a rally in Tampa, one conservative activist belittled the complaints of one of the abused reporters by tweeting that “it would have been really traumatizing” to have been shot at like Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., was last year. (The activist is a friend, so I won’t name him, especially because I could use dozens or hundreds of examples interchangeably and it’s not fair to single him out.)
The most common whataboutism, still, is the mindless retort, against any criticism of Trump, to the effect of “what about how much worse Hillary would have been.”
Memo to those who didn’t learn it in kindergarten: Two wrongs don’t make a right. Further memo: This isn’t about who should have been elected president in 2016 (certainly not Hillary, from where I sit!); it’s about what is or isn’t acceptable behavior from any president or his staff, today or at any time.
“What about Hillary” doesn’t excuse Trump’s habitual lying. It doesn’t excuse Trump using a favorite Kremlin epithet, “enemy of the people,” to describe the media in general, and then to tweet approval of his mob’s profane attempts to use a heckler’s veto to interfere with reporting.
WhataboutHillary, or “what about Obama,” doesn’t excuse kowtowing to the thuggish Russian leader who is America’s single most dangerous adversary. It doesn’t excuse peddling conspiracy theories about a “deep state” in our own government supposedly undermining democracy itself – especially when simultaneously slandering the special counsel who is actually trying to crack down on the Russian dictator’s deliberate attempts to undermine our democracy.
When an independent counsel was investigating Bill Clinton, conservatives rejected attacks on the counsel – even though he was going far farther afield from his original jurisdiction than Robert Mueller has even hinted at. What double standard now allows for Mueller – who hasn’t leaked, who has played everything close to the vest, and who is being overseen by the current president’s own appointee – to be calumniated not just with impunity, but with those same conservatives’ approval?
The double standards, here and in so many other instances in the Age of Trump, are breathtaking and deeply disturbing.
Whataboutism doesn’t excuse payoffs to nude models and porn performers. It doesn’t excuse assertions that a white supremacist mob contains “some very fine people.” It doesn’t excuse repeated attacks on his own appointee as Attorney General for abiding by the strong advice of the Justice Department’s ethics lawyers. And it certainly doesn’t excuse the president’s repeated incitements (as a candidate) to violence.
Despite what some cultural Armageddonists on the right say, our society hasn’t deteriorated to such a state of Manichean struggle that the only way to defeat radical leftists is to adopt their bullying, truth-destroying, Alinskyite tactics. Facts matter. Civility matters. Character still counts. And mutual respect and common decency are crucial bulwarks against barbarism.
No, it is not okay for the Conservative Political Action Conference to offer major platforms to Milo Yiannopoulos or Marion Le Pen. No, Steve Bannon is not an acceptable conservative spokesman. No, it’s not okay for a president to egg on a mob to boo a cancer-stricken war hero. It’s also wrong for news show hosts to condone the president’s painting a moral equivalence between the United States and Russia (and to say those who criticize the president for it “are working overtime to destroy” our democracy).
The converse is true, too. None of these transgressions by the Right come close to excusing the Antifa-related or other mob violence, or even the shouting down of campus speakers, so often perpetrated by the Left. The Left’s abuses are inexcusable and often despicable. But conservatives have no standing to criticize or combat those abuses if we so regularly excuse, or commit, those of our own.
Quin Hillyer (@QuinHillyer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former associate editorial page editor for the Washington Examiner, and is the author of “The Accidental Prophet” trilogy of recently published satirical, literary novels.
