Such distinctions are everywhere once you think about it for a minute.
I don’t know many people who oppose parental rights. But I also don’t know many people who believe that parental rights are absolute. You can’t kill or physically abuse your kids. The vast majority of arguments about parental rights are about edge cases where other principles take over.
Most businesspeople care a great deal about making a profit. But there are some things they won’t do—even if legal—to maximize their profits. That doesn’t make them socialists, it makes them morally mature people who value other considerations beyond the bottom line.
To put it most broadly, nearly everyone believes in freedom as an abstract good, but we spend most of our time arguing about where to draw the lines around freedom. The law in general, and criminal law in particular, amounts to a giant, ongoing, exercise in delineating what we are not free to do. Believing in the necessity of law doesn’t make one anti-freedom, it marks you as someone who thinks seriously about freedom.
Order is a principle, too. And it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in logic or political philosophy to understand that freedom and order can be in tension. Freedom without order is anarchy. Order without freedom is oppression. Finding the middle path is arguably the central project of the Western tradition.
Last point on this: Not everything is a contest between competing abstract principles. Sometimes mere reality is a limiting principle unto itself. Burke would call this “prudence.” The principled socialist may think everyone deserves free health care, housing, and employment. But, as Margaret Thatcher put it, “The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” So, the sober-minded socialist (rare, but they do exist) prioritizes what they believe the country can afford. The principled free marketer disdains taxation, but understands whatever amount of government we’re going to have will have to be paid for, so we have to have some amount of taxation. Government is about trade-offs and choices forced on us by reality.
The Kimmel interlude.
In the aftermath of Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, many Trump defenders insisted that they weren’t being inconsistent. When it appeared that Kimmel had been fired, they insisted that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr’s threats—“we can do this the easy way or the hard way”—were immaterial. Kimmel’s stupid comments were simply a last straw for his employers to make an overdue business decision.
Then his employers decided to lift his suspension and put Kimmel back on air. Trump was not happy. He declared, in part, that Kimmel “is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution. I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do.”
In the words of former Rep. Justin Amash, “Trump torpedoed every White House surrogate who claimed the administration wasn’t attempting to coerce Disney/ABC.”
This whole thing was a small—but important—example of how Trump’s personal agendas create problems for people who simultaneously want to claim they are deeply principled and want to defend Donald Trump. The opponents of lawfare who defend Trump’s weaponization of the government; the opponents of foreign entanglements who contort to defend the plan to turn Gaza into a seaside resort; the devotees of depoliticized science who have to white-knuckle it through every utterance by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; the defenders of free market capitalism left to explain how the government taking a stake in Intel and U.S. Steel is consistent with their principles: the list goes on.
I am perfectly comfortable saying that most of the defenders of all these things have principles, what they lack is consistency rightly understood. Principled consistency involves taking principled positions even when they yield results you do not like. If you revere the Constitution when the Constitution ratifies your desires but reject the Constitution when it doesn’t, you don’t actually revere the Constitution. Of course, you may think you revere it. But the proper reply to this stated conviction—absent some compelling argument based on another principle or reality-based prudence—is “you’re wrong.”
You can replace “the Constitution” with all sorts of other commitments—from Christianity to capitalism—and it works the same way.
And you know what? To some extent, that’s fine. We’re all wrong about some things. We all make self-interested compromises with reality. We all have blind spots that make perfect consistency an impossible standard.
The founders anticipated this. They understood that the wrongness, the self-interest, and the blind spots were inextricable from politics. They called this faction. Some factions might be committed to free commerce, but not for their industry or region. Some factions might claim to be for religious freedom—but not for those people.
That’s why they created a system based on disagreement, on argument, on elections, and checks and balances. The idea being that the worst aspects of faction would be canceled out by the need to contend with other factions. Too much self-dealing and special treatment would create a coalition of other factions to countermand it. And if—or when—that didn’t always work out, the courts and the Bill of Rights would serve as a backstop.
In this sense, I am glad for the hypocrisy of the fair-weather friends of constitutional principles. Better to have people claiming to be principled than to have the power-hungry give up the pretense and claim the principles have no purchase on them at all. Hypocrisy pays tribute to principle by clarifying the standard being betrayed. I have a much bigger problem with those on the new right and old left who reject the principles entirely. There is way, way too much of that out there.
(Think of it this way: I think Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election was criminally sinister and his schemes on January 6 were outright villainous. But the dupes on January 6 largely believed that the election was stolen and they were fighting to preserve democracy. They were wrong and their leaders lied to them. But it would be worse if the goons storming the Capitol knew the truth and did it anyway. If they said, “Democracy is for suckers” and “the Constitution is garbage,” their honesty would not detract from their villainy, it would enhance and compound it. I’d rather live in a country where the bad actors are at least lying to themselves about their noble purposes.)
Regardless, our system has an answer to those who will only use principles when convenient. In my latest Times column I wrote about those conservatives who laudably criticized Trump’s hostility to free speech on the grounds that the precedent could be used against them when Democrats are back in power. My problem with this argument isn’t that it is wrong—it’s obviously correct—but that it violates the two-wrongs-don’t-make-a-right rule. If you believe that state coercion against free speech is wrong, you should reject coercion even when you dislike the speech in question, in much the same way you should denounce political violence against your enemies just as much as you should denounce it against your allies (Greg Lukianoff wrote an excellent column on the same point).
Since my column, many right-wingers have been crowing about Google’s admission that it was pressured by the Biden administration to censor critics of COVID policy on the internet. See! They did it first! They’re all hypocrites about free speech! That’s perfectly fair criticism. But if you think that coercion by government was wrong, that doesn’t make Trump’s coercion right.
James Harrington was a once-prominent but now mostly forgotten political thinker. His primary influence was on people who would later influence other people you might have heard of. But he was one of the founders of the republican tradition that formed the foundation of the Constitution.
He had a great illustration about how a proper republican system—an “empire of laws and not of men”—is based on the self-interest of different factions. In The Commonwealth of Oceana he describes two little girls deciding how to divide a cake. They decide that one girl will get to cut the cake, but the other girl gets to pick her slice first. If the first girl tries to cut herself the larger slice, the other girl will pick that slice. The cutter’s self-interest, or gluttony, is circumscribed by the other girl’s self-interest or gluttony. It would be better if the girls were imbued with a principled devotion to fairness and sharing, but that is not always the way with children—or voters.
I’ve been saying for years that perhaps the greatest driver of our political dysfunction is that we elect people and parties who act as if they will never be out of power and so they do not care about the moral hazard of their decisions. Trump is a continuation and intensification of this trend, not a break with it. He wants to wield the knife and have the first piece of cake. Indeed, he thinks that’s the point of having the knife.
You can defend giving him the knife. You can even defend his desire to have his cake and eat it too. But such defenses have little to do with prudence or principle.
