There is a certain species of moralist—common in politics, overpopulated in newsrooms—who believes that to disagree with him is not merely to be mistaken but to be wicked. His favorite epithet is “hypocrite.” With it, he can dismiss the very notion of moral reasoning and preen over his own supposed consistency, which is to say, his own intellectual poverty.
Thus the Left congratulates itself on having discovered that conservatives can be dismissed as walking contradictions simply by attributing to us false characteristics and then noting that we do not behave accordingly.
Republicans hate immigrants, we are told, and yet Donald Trump is married to an immigrant! And J.D. Vance’s wife comes from a family of immigrants! What fools we must be! How can the Republican base be so stupid? To the Left, love of immigrants and opposition to illegal immigration cannot coexist. To anyone capable of moral reasoning, they coexist necessarily.
I recall Chris Matthews accusing conservatives of supporting welfare reform because we are racists. But you see, the joke is on us, because most welfare recipients are white. Stupid Republicans: they can’t even racist right!
Even Pope Leo XIV, a man of good heart but dubious philosophy, has repeated this fallacy. He recently declared that one cannot be pro-life while supporting the death penalty, because death is the opposite of life. This Simplificatum Maximus, though cloaked in compassion, is moral confusion. It collapses the distinction between the innocent and the guilty, justice and vengeance. To execute a murderer is not to devalue life, it is to take life seriously enough to punish its deliberate destruction. Civilization depends on that distinction. There is room enough for serious people to disagree on whether Christianity condemns or demands capital punishment, but analogizing the killing of an innocent child to the execution of a murderer is the sort of moral flattening that Christianity, and civilization, exists to reject.
This is the essence of conservative thought: the making of distinctions. The Left sees the world through a single moral lens—oppressor and oppressed—and calls anyone who resists that lens, and the defamations that accompany it, a hypocrite. But to live in the real world is to hold competing truths in balance, to discriminate (in the older, nobler sense) between good and evil, justice and mercy, freedom and license.
Permit me, then, to spell out a few elementary propositions.
I can love immigrants while insisting that immigration be legal. Law and empathy are not enemies, they are twins.
I can be pro-life when it comes to innocent children and still believe that the murderer forfeits his right to life. The difference is called moral agency.
I can wish to help the poor and still reject the welfare state which turns poverty from a condition into a generational cage.
I can wish for the best healthcare in the world and still know that socialized medicine is the surest way to destroy it. Bureaucracy is efficient at only two things: spending other people’s money, and politicizing important decisions best left to the individual.
I can value mercy and still see that freeing violent offenders is not merciful, it’s treachery against the law-abiding.
I can support teachers and still support school choice, because protecting bad schools in the name of solidarity is neither moral nor sane.
I can support working Americans and still recognize that some labor laws, meant to “protect” them, have driven entire industries overseas, impoverishing the very people they were meant to save.
I can support inclusion and meritocracy at once. True inclusion means judging people by their talent and effort, not their demographic résumé. Equality of opportunity is justice; equality of outcome is prejudice in drag.
I can support science and still question it, for science is not a priesthood. To “trust the science” blindly is not enlightenment, it’s idolatry.
I can support a free press and still reject the indoctrination mills that masquerade as journalism. Freedom of speech is sacred; manipulation of thought is not.
I can desire peace and still understand that peace endures only under the protection of strength. Weakness is not virtue; it is bait.
I can support conserving the things that are good and making progress where they are not. All progress requires change, but not all change is progress.
And none of this—none of it—is hypocrisy. It is called thinking.
Now let us pause. Before we on the sensible right congratulate ourselves too heartily, we should be sure we do not commit the same fallacy in reverse.
We can support capitalism—the greatest engine of wealth and human advancement the world has ever known—and still admit that it leaves gaps which decency and compassion must fill. Markets produce prosperity, but sometimes they distort. Opportunities arise for those who can, but we must not forget those who cannot.
We can defend the Second Amendment and still recognize that guns in the hands of the deranged, the criminal, or the child are not the price of liberty but the abuse of it. Freedom presupposes responsibility, and responsibility requires sensibility.
We can champion industry and still believe in environmental stewardship. To conserve our land, air, and water is not left-wing sentimentality, it is conservatism at its most literal.
We can believe in putting America first and still recognize that American interests sometimes require engagement beyond our borders. Isolationism is not patriotism; it’s abdication, and self-neglect.
In short, the task of the adult mind, conservative or otherwise, is to distinguish, to discern, to refuse reductionism. To reject the comforting simplicity of slogans for the demanding discipline of thought.
What the Left calls hypocrisy is, in most cases, coherence misunderstood by people who demand that we not think. But what the Right must remember is that coherence is not infallibility. Principles must guide us, not calcify us.
Civilization itself rests on distinctions, between innocence and guilt, truth and error, liberty and license. When those distinctions collapse, reason collapses with them.
The Left calls that compassion. The Right calls it decay.
And if insisting on such distinctions makes me a fool in the eyes of the pious and the ridiculous alike, well, all the better.
