The story I have tried to tell in this book is of an ongoing struggle within the English-speaking tradition of liberal political thought to escape some of the traps that the problem of hypocrisy poses for anyone who takes it seriously. All of the writers I have discussed did take the problem of hypocrisy seriously, and they all wanted to find some way round or out of it. In their attempts to do so, they encountered certain persistent difficulties but also pointed the way towards some important general lessons about how to deal with hypocrisy in politics—including the crucial question of when it’s worth worrying about, and when it isn’t. A number of these lessons, I believe, still hold for the politics of today. In this final chapter, I want to try to make this connection explicit, and to see what contemporary politics might learn from a history of this kind. Above all, I want to explore whether we might get a sense of perspective on our own problems by looking to the past.
If nothing else, I hope that this book has made clear some of the ways in which our current anxieties about sincerity, hypocrisy, and lies in politics have deep roots in the liberal tradition, and why therefore we do not necessarily have to step outside that tradition to gain some insight into them. We don’t have to go all the way back to Machiavelli and a pre-liberal perspective, nor do we have to go all the way with Nietzsche towards an anti-liberal one. However, I would not wish to claim that the tradition of thought described in this book can be automatically assumed to run on from the book’s endpoint with Orwell through to the present. It may be that we are further away from the 1940s than the 1940s were from the 1640s in relation to some of the central concerns of the authors under review. To take just one example: does anyone still really care about Oliver Cromwell’s hypocrisy, apart from historians? Perhaps the last place where Cromwell’s perceived defects of character might still have had the capacity to shape political argument and fashion political enmities is Northern Ireland, but even in Northern Ireland this issue is not what it was. A political climate that permits Ian Paisley and Martin McGuin-ness to sit down together in the same government is not one in which the question of Cromwell’s hypocrisy is going to retain much heat, for a whole range of fairly obvious reasons. In this respect, as in many others, the world has moved on. Oliver Cromwell’s statue outside the British Parliament is just another statue—as indeed the Parliament is now just another parliament—and its modest pose seems well suited to its status as one more piece of ceremonial stonework for people to ignore.
But it is important to resist the temptation to seek to bypass history altogether by reverting back to the genre that I warned against at the start of this book—that of maxims, with their seductive little truths about politics and character, that can be turned to any situation and made to fit any problem. One of the distinctive features of the tradition I have been discussing is that it suggests there are no easy, catch-all solutions to the difficulties we still face in deciding how to handle deceitful or dissembling politicians. At best, there are some patterns that repeat themselves in the complex weave of the past and the present, ones that we might miss if we just focussed on the small patch of political detail in front of our eyes. In what follows I will try to highlight these patterns as I see them, and to ask what they tell us about our own predicament. What is certain, though, is that it does not pay to be too dogmatic about any lessons that can be drawn here. Indeed, that is the lesson that underlies any others to follow—that there are no simple solutions to the problem of hypocrisy in politics, that it is pervasive and complex, and that the same difficulties recur in different settings.
THE TEMPTATIONS OF ANTI-HYPOCRISY
The pervasiveness of the problem of political hypocrisy, and its ability to ensnare almost any political argument, means that people will always be looking for some way to break free from it. The thinkers that I have discussed here are, in their different ways, no exception. There comes a point when almost any political thinker is liable to succumb to the temptation to seek an escape from the hypocrisy of political life by demanding a clean-up, or a clean-out, or at the very least some sort of permanent insulation from its more corrosive effects, rather than simply carrying on going round in circles. The desire to wriggle free from the hold hypocrisy has on us all is a recurring feature of even the most sophisticated discussions of its role in liberal politics. And this longing for some sort of escape is something that unquestionably still exerts its pull today. Commentators on contemporary politics can often be heard demanding that we confront the problem of political hypocrisy once and for all. However, the fact remains that this demand is incoherent, because it is self-defeating. This is the first lesson of the story I have been trying to tell: there is no way of breaking out from the hypocrisy of political life, and all attempts to find such an escape route are a delusion.
Many contemporary expressions of disgust at the slipperiness of politicians could come directly out of the pages of the past, and recognising their essential familiarity is one way of appreciating just how futile such protests really are. There is always a temptation to believe that the problem of politicians who neither say what they mean nor mean what they say keeps getting worse, and that it does so because no one has been willing to take a firm enough stand against it. But plenty of people have tried to take a firm stand against it, which is a large part of the reason why it seems to keep getting worse. Here, for example, is the political commentator Peter Oborne writing in his book The Rise of Political Lying (2005) about what he sees as the degradation of British public life under the government of Tony Blair, with its obsession with news management and spin:
What Britain really needs is not just a change in the law but a change of heart. We face a choice. We can do nothing, and carry on cheating, and deceiving each other, and wait for the public anger, alienation and disgust that will follow. We can watch the gradual debasement of decent democratic politics, and the rapid rise of the shysters and the frauds and—before very long perhaps—something more sinister by far. Or we can try and act once more as moral human beings. It’s a common effort. It affects us all, politicians, journalists, citizens. But there is hope. Britain has a magnificent tradition of public integrity and civic engagement, which can be reclaimed. It could even be better than before.1
This could come, practically word for word, from Trollope’s social criticism of the 1850s. And as in Trollope’s case, it is little more than a reflex cry of pain; as a line of argument about how to deal with duplicity in politics, it is going nowhere. There are two basic problems with the case Oborne makes. First, we never do face a fundamental choice of this kind. Hypocrisy and anti-hypocrisy are joined together, as Shklar said, to form a discrete system, so that it is never a question of truth versus lies; it is, at best, a choice between different kinds of truth and different kinds of lies. All-or-nothing choices are in this context always an illusion. Second, Oborne himself exemplifies the impossibility of drawing a line anywhere in this shifting heap of sand. Oborne is, among other things, a well-rewarded journalist for Associated Newspapers, in which capacity he hounds the political class from morning to night about their perceived moral turpitude, thereby making the problem he describes worse, by inflating the cycle of recrimination and counter-recrimination that produces it.
In this role, Oborne has occasionally made the news as well as simply reporting it. For instance, during the cash-for-honours affair that dogged the last days of Tony Blair’s premiership, Oborne accused the prime minister’s official spokesman (Tom Kelly) of lying to the press. (The point at issue was whether the police had required one of Blair’s police interviews to be kept secret, and for how long—as is the way with these sorts of arguments, it is hard with the benefit of even a little bit of hindsight to see why anyone should have cared.) Oborne made his accusation against Kelly at a lobby briefing, ensuring that it was given a wide public airing. The transcript of the exchange between them shows it descending into a miserable round of hectoring, denial, accusation, counter-denial, and counteraccusation, as Oborne accuses Kelly of being a serial liar, and Kelly accuses Oborne of trading in innuendo. The exchange ends with Kelly telling Oborne that if he carries on calling him a liar, he will see him in court.2 And as Trollope said in 1855, “the world looks on, believing none of them.”
The absurdity of scavenging journalists like Oborne demanding moral renewal in public life tends to produce another, countervailing rallying cry, which is to take the side of the political classes against the journalists, and to say that the collapse of standards is the latter’s fault, for making impossible demands. Trollope himself underwent a shift of this kind—from blaming the Disraelis to blaming the Quintus Slides—over the course of his own political career. The same move is visible today. It is the line taken, for instance, by John Lloyd in his self-explanatorily titled book What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics (2004). Lloyd’s account, unlike Oborne’s, is not absurd, and his argument has a good deal to be said for it—in an age of an almost limitless capacity for scrutiny of the political class, beyond anything Bentham could have dreamed of and beyond what even he might have wished for, it is reasonable to hope for some restraint from the scrutineers, in their own interests as well as ours, to prevent the cycle of masking and unmasking from collapsing into farce. But the problem with a book like Lloyd’s is that it does nonetheless constitute a taking of sides, which is another of the perennial temptations when confronted by political hypocrisy.
Lloyd is not demanding a fresh start. He is acknowledging that things are never going to be perfect, and that to expect complete sincerity and honesty of politicians or journalists is a pipedream. But for that very reason he believes that it remains possible to identify some people—journalists—as clearly worse than others—politicians—because of their inability to recognise this limitation on what they do. Yet what Lloyd cannot escape from is the fact that the politicians and the journalists are locked in this together. Each side believes that they are more sinned against than sinning. So seeking to separate them out by apportioning the blame, however well intentioned the endeavour, will inevitably stoke the problem that it is designed to resolve, because the journalists will ask: why should the politicians be the ones who are allowed to get away with it?
This is a theme that has recurred throughout this book: the futility of trying to resolve the problem of political hypocrisy by taking sides, in order to say that though we may all be hypocrites, at least our hypocrisy isn’t as bad as theirs (or in Lloyd’s case, because he is himself a journalist, at least their hypocrisy isn’t as bad as ours). Taking sides in this way requires the deployment of a kind of knowingness about politics to draw the line between the people who are in control of what they are doing and those who are not. It is a line of thought that we have seen in Mandeville, who used it to defend his own particular brand of Whiggism—Mandevillian Whigs truly understand the problem of hypocrisy, which is what makes theirs less culpable than that of their opponents. It’s there, too, in Morley, who used it to defend his brand of liberalism—Morley’s liberals understand the nature of political compromise, which is what makes their compromises more tolerable than those of the Tories. And it’s there in a politician like Tony Blair, who has used it to defend his brand of progressivism against all those cynics and sneerers who have failed to understand just how hard it is to do good in the morally compromised world of politics. In each case, the attempt to hold this line is underpinned by a distinction between first- and second-order hypocrisy, between those whose hypocrisy is bounded by an understanding that hypocrisy is unavoidable and those whose hypocrisy has tipped over into self-deception. But the recurring problem is that to profess that one is oneself merely a first-order hypocrite is in the context of political disagreement a form of second-order hypocrisy, because it is self-exculpatory, and threatens to tip over into its own kind of self-deception. Laying out the inner dynamics of this argument can be complicated, as we have seen in Mandeville’s case. So let me try to summarise the difficulty as simply as possible. In politics, saying “Well, at least I’m not as hypocritical as you” always leaves one open to the riposte “Well, you are if you really believe that” (and, of course, if you don’t really believe it, then you’re a hypocrite too).
In this context, it is hardly surprising that there is another perennial temptation, which is to seek to escape from the endless cycle of accusation and counter-accusation that is democratic politics by transplanting the problem of political hypocrisy into some higher realm, where it becomes manageable again. We saw something like this with Orwell, who sought an escape in his own brand of common-sense socialism, through which the basic decency of working people would be allowed to come through; with Sidgwick, who sought it in what I called “the cleaner and crisper compromises of liberal imperialism,” where a philosophical approach to politics might be protected from the vagaries of politicians endlessly pandering to public opinion; and with Bentham, who sought it in his own closed world of neologism and jargon, in a final attempt to keep the fictions of political life at bay. But again, as I have sought to indicate throughout this book, in the end there is no escape. These are themselves forms of second-order hypocrisy, because they seek to overlay democratic hypocrisy with something that conceals its essential qualities. And like all forms of second-order hypocrisy, either they are evidence of the thing they are designed to counter, which makes them self-defeating, or they are evidence of self-deception, which is often worse.
All of these avenues of escape still exert their pull today, though perhaps Orwell’s common-sense socialism only does so very faintly (it is striking that the current generation of neoOrwellians have ditched the socialism in favour of a form of liberal imperialism, dressed up as democratic international-ism). Contemporary politicians have shown themselves much more prone to the last two of these temptations: seeking an escape from the messiness of democratic hypocrisy in the warm embrace of liberal imperialism, and an escape from the constant name-calling of democratic argument in the calmer waters of technocratic jargon. The attraction lies in the illusion of control—freed from the imperatives of democratic hypocrisy, politicians ought to be in a position to set their own terms for any necessary compromises with the truth. But this remains an illusion. Liberal imperialists are no more in control of what they are doing than any other kinds of democratic politicians, and the need to retain the appearance of control is liable to leave them looking more hypocritical than ever. Likewise, politicians who construe politics in terms of agendas, roll-outs, initiatives, consultations, partnerships, mechanisms, targets, performance indicators, and so on, are not insulating themselves from the name-calling of party politics; they are simply inviting more of it, because politicians who use jargon always look like they have something to hide. Politicians who try to find a way out from the horrible compromises and contortions that democratic politics demands of its practitioners simply end up looking like hypocrites to everyone that they have tried to leave behind.
THE REAL CHOICES
So in the tradition I have been discussing, there is one set of lessons, deriving from the persistence of the desire to cut oneself off from political hypocrisy—by denouncing it, or taking sides, or seeking some sort of personal insulation from it—and from the certainty with which democratic politics will suck anyone who attempts this way out back into its sticky embrace. These are essentially negative lessons, and they remind us not to approach the problem of hypocrisy with false expectations about what can be achieved. But there is another set of lessons, too, and these are the ones that offer something more positive. All the authors I have been talking about in this book, as well as sometimes succumbing to the temptations of an illusory escape from political hypocrisy, have also attempted to make sense of the discrete system of hypocrisy and anti-hypocrisy in its own terms, and rather than taking sides, to understand when and why it might become self-defeating. In this way, they have sought to distinguish between different kinds of hypocrisy, rather than simply between hypocrisy and sincerity, or between your hypocrisy and my hypocrisy. In making these distinctions, they offer some insight into many of the real choices we do in fact face. In what follows, I will attempt to highlight these choices as I see them, and to identify what they might have to do with politics as it is currently practiced. I will do so by working backwards, from Orwell to Hobbes.
Orwell
What Orwell shows us is that democratic hypocrisy and imperial hypocrisy do not mix. The reason is that they are not simply different, but opposed sorts of hypocrisy. Democratic hypocrisy involves a kind of benign self-deception—its stability depends upon people growing comfortable with the mask that conceals some of the brute facts about power, and thereby moderating the ways that those facts play themselves out. But this benign hypocrisy becomes malign in the context of imperialism, because empires cannot in the end conceal the brute coercion on which they depend. Imperial hypocrisy is the attempt to dress up coercion as something it is not, but if they are to be sustained, empires have in the end to drop their pretences about the nature of their power. In this respect, imperial power politics tends towards sincerity. But democratic politics tends towards the continuance of hypocrisy as the basis of its own sustainability. Therefore, democracy tends to make a mockery of empire, and empires tend to make a mockery of democracies.
In so far as this dilemma presents us with a choice, it ought to be no choice—we must plump for democracy over empire. But what is most striking about this way of putting the matter is that in doing so, we choose hypocrisy over sincerity. This suggests, if nothing else, that pleas of democratic sincerity in the context of early-twenty-first century liberal imperialism should set us on our guard. Democracies cannot be honest with themselves about imperial projects—about what is needed to sustain them, about what they cost in financial and moral terms—so democratic leaders who plead a sincere faith in democracy to justify their imperial adventures have justified nothing. At the same time, the more pragmatic political thinkers who have argued that democracies will only be equipped to sustain the politics of liberal empire if they accustom themselves to “double standards” need to recognised that even double standards have their own double standards. The double standards of empire are very different from the double standards of democracy.3 If we accustom ourselves to the former, we will find it very hard to continue with the latter, and vice versa.
Of course, this is not the only way to think about the dilemmas of liberal power at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Other, practical considerations may trump the question of sincerity and hypocrisy, and there may well be better arguments both for and against liberal empire.4 Nor would I wish to claim that this clash of democratic and imperial hypocrisy explains the immediate difficulties encountered by the neo-conservative project to export democracy to Iraq by force of arms. Some may say it is too soon to judge whether that project will end in ultimate failure, and anyway, earlier empires took a long time to get going, and a long time to fall apart. Even the British Empire, whose internal contradictions Orwell dissected, did not implode, but only gradually faded away. Perhaps the clash between democratic hypocrisy and imperial hypocrisy does not necessarily spell disaster in the short-to-medium term. But Orwell at least gives us reasons to see why it might, and given that Orwell himself is so often cited in anger on the other side of these arguments, that is something worth bearing in mind.
The Victorians
Of the three writers I lo oked at, Trollope, the least philosophical and in his way the least consistent, understood political hypocrisy best. In Phineas Redux he offers us two types of political deceivers, drawn on the classic templates of Disraeli (Daubeny) and Gladstone (Gresham). One is the incautious conjurer, who is always trying to make things happen, even if that means turning reality on its head; the other is the more cautious hypocrite, who sticks to limits of the possible but in so doing sublimates many of his own personal principles. The conjurer is often sincere, but is liable to stretch the truth (as Disraeli did); the hypocrite may be honest, but is prone to dissemble about his own character (as Gladstone did). These types are still visible in politics today. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, perhaps, are both examples of sincere conjurers who have had difficulty with the truth; Al Gore and Gordon Brown are upright hypocrites, who prefer the facts but can have difficulty persuading the public that they are what they seem. The Conservative leader David Cameron is clearly, and self-consciously, in the Blair/Clinton/Disraeli mould; Hillary Clinton, perhaps surprisingly, may be more of a Brown/Gore/ Gladstone.5 I will go further into the case of Hillary Clinton in the next section, when I consider some possible futures for American politics. The point I want to make here is that democratic politics appears to have a tendency to produce complicated, and compromised, choices of this kind—not between truth and lies, or sincerity and hypocrisy, but between politicians who are sincere but untruthful and those who are honest but hypocritical.6
Inevitably, some people will prefer one type and some the other—we have varying levels of tolerance for these different kinds of political deception. For some of us sincerity trumps honesty and for others honesty trumps sincerity. Equally, fashions change, and the preference for sincere liars (which has been the dominant trend in the politics of the last decade or more) may eventually produce its own reaction in favour of the upright hypocrites. But if we resist the temptation to take sides, as Trollope did, what we can learn is how much these different political types depend on each other (and it is fun to imagine what Trollope might have done with a relationship like that between the Clintons, which literally marries the two together). These types are a permanent part of the discrete system of hypocrisy and anti-hypocrisy that allows democratic politics to function. It is a false choice if we think that we need ultimately to decide between them. The real choice is between a system that can accommodate both, and one that allows either the sincere liars or the honest hypocrites to have it all their own way. So what we should be on the lookout for is not dishonesty or insincerity as such, but instead any signs that our politics have become excessively intolerant of one or the other. The real danger arises if sincerity never has to answer for itself in the face of a crabbed and hypocritical insistence on the evidence, just as it would be dangerous if reticent and secretive politicians never had to confront publicly the question of what they really believe. A politics consisting just of Daubenys would be intolerable, as would a politics consisting just of Greshams. On their own they are insufferable. We need them both as much as they each need the other.
Bentham
The political theorist John Dunn once described democracy as “the cant of the modern world.”7 What Bentham shows is that there is more than one way to cant about democracy. On the one hand, the high-flown language of democratic principle can be a mask for the power relations that lie behind it, and Bentham was always on the lookout for words that masked the workings of power. But attempts to pin democracy down, and to capture its workings in fine detail, can also constitute a kind of masking, because they conceal the extent to which democracy relies on a set of fictions about its own essential character. The way we talk about democracy can be too elevated—as when we used the word as a term of approval regardless of the desirability of the practices to which it is attached—but it can also be too fine-grained in its attempts to capture the essence of those practices, and thereby miss the bigger picture. Highfaluting cant tends to be the province of politicians; technical cant tends to the province of political scientists. In the hands of the former, democracy becomes just another “colour” term to gloss over the details of political power struggles. In the hands of the latter, it becomes distinctly colourless, but that too is a kind of gloss that serves to cover up the impossibility of denuding democracy of all ambiguity.
If the language of democracy can be either too colourful, or too colourless, is there any way of getting it just right? My reading of Bentham suggests that there is not. Attempts to retain the fictional character of democracy are always vulnerable to detailed exposure of what is really going on behind the scenes, but equally, such detailed accounts are always vulnerable to the charge that they miss what is distinctive about democracy, which is its ability to confront power in its own terms, with words that capture the sweeping claims of popular rule. Another way to put this is to say that the pursuit of the true essence of democracy is always liable to result in a form of insincerity. But it does not follow that therefore all talk about democracy is cant. Instead, we need to distinguish the purposes to which this talk is put, and it is here that Bentham provides an excellent guide. Technical language and fictional language are each capable of masking the truth about democracy, but each is also capable of exposing the other as simply a gloss on that truth. The question is not whether politicians or political thinkers are sincere in their accounts of democracy, but rather what their purpose is in using the language of democracy—are they trying to hide something, or are they trying to expose something about the inadequacies of a competing set of terms?
This connects to one of the central themes of this book: the fact that something is a mask does not mean it cannot be used to unmask something else. To talk of democracy in very general and elevated terms—to seek to confront dry and empty jargon with the unarguable claims of the people to assert themselves against their rulers—can be a means of exposing one of the masks of power. But the same language, deployed to cover up the detailed difficulties of enabling democracies to function as structures of power in a given situation, can itself be one of the masks of power that needs to be exposed. Grandiose claims for democracy have been a consistent feature of political life for much of modern history. That they are grandiose does not make them illegitimate. Sometimes—and the later years of the Cold War might have been one such time—such language is needed to remind us of the possibilities of popular rule, which the dusty terminology of political science has tended to obscure. But at other times—and the aftermath of the Cold War might be another such time—grandiose claims need to be punctured with a more considered treatment of what democracy actually means on the ground.8 These considerations might seem to take us a long way from Bentham. Nonetheless, they relate to Bentham’s insights into the choices we face, given that democratic language can be both a mask for power, and a means of removing the mask. There is no point in looking to get rid of the mask altogether. What we need to decide is what we can best use it for.
The American founders
Between them, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson give us a wide panorama of the interacting dynamics of political hypocrisy and political sincerity. Of course, this is not the whole story of the American founding period, and there are other players—Washington, Hamilton, Madison—who could be added to this picture, and who would thereby introduce themes—military, economic, constitutional—that it ignores. Nevertheless, I hope that the account I have given is sufficient to indicate a few things: first, how important luck is in determining whether the appearance of sincerity can be maintained; second, how quickly contingent political arguments can spill over into more general or abstract arguments about the nature of political hypocrisy, and vice versa; and third, just how difficult it can be, for even the most seasoned political practitioners, to know where the limits of political hypocrisy should lie. The ongoing politics of hypocrisy, with all its own uncertainties and unpredictable shifts in fortune, makes it very hard to fix any durable bounds for hypocrisy in politics.
Underlying this, however, is a further consideration that I tried to bring out at the end of the chapter. The moments when politicians gain clearest insight into the limits of political hypocrisy tend to coincide with their own moments of political weakness. Adams often, Jefferson rarely, and Franklin perhaps never, came to see how important it is to separate out the kind of unavoidable hypocrisy that exists within any political system from the holding of hypocritical views about that system (and all its hypocrisies), which is much more damaging. There is a line to be drawn between first-order and second-order hypocrisy in this respect. But drawing that line can be politically incapacitating, whereas Jefferson in particular, whenever he blithely ignored it or trampled over it, found himself politically freer. This freedom connects to a certain lack of self-consciousness, and does not simply hold for politics: the best way to keep a mask in place can be to forget that one is wearing a mask. What politics brings out is the difference between living by this principle, and coming to understand it intellectually. An intellectual perspective on the problem of political hypocrisy allows the politician to see many things, but not to dispense with that degree of self-consciousness that can render the deepest insights self-defeating. Genuine freedom from the problem of hypocrisy is perhaps only to be achieved with the aid of self-deception. So there may be a hard lesson here: when it comes to sincerity and hypocrisy in politics, one can have intellectual insight, or one can have practical flexibility, but one cannot have both.
Mandeville
There is a lot to learn from Mandeville, not least how to write about political hypocrisy with humour, which is a great counsel against despair. Mandeville is one of the funniest of all serious writers about politics, and it is impossible to read him without gaining a sense of perspective on our endless anxieties about political insincerity. Laughter may really be one of the best medicines here. But Mandeville’s purpose remains a serious one, and though he does not resolve the problem of political hypocrisy, he does provide us with some important considerations when trying to achieve our own accommodation with it. The first is the importance of understanding how contingent the standards of hypocrisy and sincerity are. Dealing with political hypocrisy is a question not just of recognising that politicians wear masks, but of recognising that the masks they wear must suit the age in which they find themselves. Politicians can find themselves in an age in which it is best to put on the mask of sincerity, in order to appear as though they are not wearing a mask at all; for Mandeville it was part of Cromwell’s genius to understand this so clearly. It may be that we too have been living through such an age—not a Cromwellian age of enthusiasm, but rather a period of what might be called semi-confessional or faux-confessional politics (the confessional here being the daytime-TV studio). This is a world in which personal revelation is valued, reticence is derided, and openness, ease, comfort in one’s own skin is what gives politicians a hold over their audiences. Any successful politician will need to adapt to this. But no politician should assume that there is anything immutable about the claims of political sincerity. There is a big difference between adapting to the demands of a faux-confessional age, and coming to believe in them—that is, believing that sincerity and openness have an independent value in justifying political action. That would be second-order hypocrisy.
In this respect, the double standards of modern politics are better understood in Mandevillian than Machiavellian terms. Mandeville highlights the contingency of all standards of political morality, and the extent to which even the most skilful politicians must be slaves to the fashions of the times. There is no scope in the Mandevillian worldview for the prince whose mastery of the secret arts of government allows him to transcend the morality of the age. Instead, even princes and prime ministers must recognise the extent to which they are not in full control of the part they are playing, and it is that recognition that can provide security against misrule. But it is not easy to achieve this sort of self-knowledge, and almost impossible to retain it—politicians who come to believe that they are self-aware about the hold that hypocrisy exercises in politics are liable to use that knowledge to make an exception for themselves. Given this inherent tendency for self-knowledge to translate into self-justification, Mandeville offers two pieces of advice that remain pertinent. The first is not to rely too much on the self-knowledge of politicians. We are used to the idea that individual politicians cannot be trusted to set the limits to their own power, and must be subject to institutional constraints. The same ought to be true of their sincerity. Even the ablest politicians—even the Cromwells, even the Jeffer-sons—are not in complete control of the part they have to play. So no politician’s pleas of sincerity, no matter how seemingly self-aware, should be taken at face value. Much better, as Mandeville says, to assume that fifty different people could play the part of prime minister, than to assume that some are uniquely qualified for that role by dint of their self-awareness. In Mandeville’s words, “a prime minister has a vast, an unspeakable advantage, barely by being so [i.e., by simply happening to be prime minister].” That ought to be enough to set us on our guard against incumbents who wish to add to their advantages by insisting on their own good faith.
Mandeville’s second lesson is the closest thing there is in this tradition to a workable maxim. The worst hypocrisy arises when politicians pretend that easy things are difficult, and difficult things are easy. However, this is second-order, not first-order, advice. It is not hard to imagine circumstances in which it makes sense for politicians to misrepresent the ease or the difficulty of what they are up to: a leader whose party is cruising to election victory might do well to insist to his or her followers that every vote still remains to be fought for, in order to guard against complacency; likewise, a leader heading for crushing defeat might wish to pretend victory is still there for the taking, in order to guard against despair. But what no politicians should do is misrepresent to themselves or anyone else the ease or difficulty of taking decisions like these. It is easy to lie when you have to; much harder to judge when the lying should stop. It is hypocrisy for politicians to pretend that decisions taken out of political necessity are difficult for them personally, just as it is hypocrisy for them to pretend that knowing what counts as political necessity is ever easy for anyone.
In a faux-confessional age, politicians who go to war like to remind us that they too are human, and any decision that results in loss of life is taken with deep reluctance. That is what they mean when they talk about these as “difficult decisions.” At the same time, they prefer to explain the rationale behind such decisions in terms that leave no room for doubt. That is what they mean when they talk about these as “decisions that had to be taken.” But this is the wrong way around. Pangs of conscience are easy for politicians to handle; finding room for rational doubt is much harder. By putting the premium on personal sincerity, political leaders make it too easy for themselves to ignore the difficult facts.
Hobbes
Finally, underlying all of this is Hobbes’s view, as I reconstructed it, that most forms of what is conventionally understood as hypocrisy don’t matter, but hypocrisy about power does. One possible form of hypocrisy about power is to overstate the significance of personal sincerity—to seek to ground one’s politics on the fact that one happens genuinely to believe what one says one believes. For Hobbes, modern politics is grounded on the set of institutional arrangements that can generate security in a situation in which one can never be certain what anyone really believes, though one can be certain some people will place undue weight on their personal beliefs. To over-personalise politics, to collapse the distinction between the mask and the person behind the mask, is either culpable hypocrisy, or self-delusion. And, as Hobbes suggests, one of the marks of the culpable forms of hypocrisy is how closely related they are to self-delusion, which is one of the reasons why hypocrisy and self-delusion can feed off each other.
In these circumstances, we need politicians who are sincere, but that does not mean we should wish them to be sincere believers in everything they do. Instead, we need them to be sincere about the system of power in which they find themselves, and sincere in their desire to maintain the stability and durability of that system, even if it comes at the cost of their own ability to say what they mean and mean what they say. This is as true of democratic politics as of any other kind. Democratic politicians should be sincere about maintaining the conditions under which democracy is possible, and should place a higher premium on that than on any other sort of sincerity. The system of democratic politics will require them to play a part, but they should play their part in a way that is truthful to the demands of the system itself. Their individual hypocrisy—that is, their hypocrisy judged as individuals—does not matter. Indeed, some personal hypocrisy will be inevitable for any democratic politician. What matters is whether they can be truthful, with themselves and with others, about that.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT HYPOCRITE
Thus far, I have addressed the various questions relating to sincerity, hypocrisy, and lies in modern politics by looking back, to the somewhat distant past and also, in this chapter, to the more immediate past. But I want to finish by attempting to illustrate some of these themes by looking at an event that is unfolding as I write—the 2008 U.S. presidential election. This election, like any election, raises the question of whether political hypocrisy matters, and if so, of what kind. At the time of writing, it is far from clear who will be the candidates, never mind who will be the next president. Nonetheless, the perceived hypocrisy of all the possible candidates, and how they handle it, is likely to play some role in determining the outcome (it would hardly be a democratic election if this were not the case). And in that context, I want to contrast four different kinds of hypocrisy that have the potential to figure in the politics of the election, and to connect them to wider issues that I have discussed so far in this book. This is not by way of predicting the outcome of the election, nor of saying which kinds of hypocrisy are going to prove decisive with the American electorate. Rather, it is an attempt to identify, as the authors I have been discussing in this book were attempting to identify, which kinds of hypocrisy are worth worrying about.
Hypocrisy and religion
First, there is the question of religion and personal sincerity: how much does it matter if those running for president actually believe in the “faith-based” positions any plausible candidate is required to adopt in order to win over crucial segments of the electorate? The condition of American politics means that it is difficult for candidates to be entirely sincere on questions of religion, particularly as they tack back and forth between the stance they need to adopt to secure their party’s nomination, and the stance they need to adopt to win a general election. But for some, the issue of religious hypocrisy is more acute than for others, because it connects to the wider question of whether anything about their public persona is what it seems. This, for example, is Gerard Baker, the U.S. editor of the London Times, writing about Hillary Clinton early in 2007:
Here is finally someone who has taken the black arts of the politician’s trade, the dissembling, the trimming, the pandering, all the way to their logical conclusion. [Baker bases this claim on a contrast between the Hillary Clinton of 15 years ago—whom he calls “a principled, if somewhat rebarbative and unelectable politician”—and the Clinton of today.—D.R.] Now, you might say, hold on. Aren’t all politicians veined with an opportunistic streak? Why is she any different? The difference is that Mrs. Clinton has raised that opportunism to an animating philosophy, a P.T. Barnum approach to the political marketplace. All politicians, sadly, lie. We can often forgive the lies as the necessary price paid to win popularity for a noble cause. But the Clinton candidacy is a Grand Deceit, an entirely artificial construct built around a person who, stripped bare of the cynicism, calculation and manipulation, is nothing more than an enormous, overpowering and rather terrifying ego.9
Or, as media mogul and one-time Clinton fundraiser David Geffen said to explain his defection to the Barack Obama camp at around the same time: “Everybody in politics lies, but they [the Clintons] do it with such ease it is troubling.”
There are two things to be said about this: first, what Baker says shows why it is probably wrong to run the two Clintons together as Geffen does. All politicians lie, but some, like Bill Clinton, are able to lie easily because they are able to persuade others, and themselves, of their underlying sincerity. Bill Clinton was a faith-based politician, his faith being limitless faith in his own goodness of heart. Hillary Clinton is nothing like this; her public persona is too obviously an artificial construct, designed to protect her from her own weaknesses as a politician and a human being (notably a lack of warmth), of which she is clearly all too aware. This is why, in a semi-confessional age, it will be considerably harder for her than for her husband to get elected. But it also means that there is less danger in her case than there was in her husband’s of becoming self-deceived. With Hillary Clinton there seems little possibility that she, any more than anyone else, will lose sight of the fact that she is a hypocrite. Hillary Clinton appears to be a mixture of what Mandeville calls “malicious” and “fashionable” hypocrisy, of personal ambition and a desire to pander to the electorate. Baker, like all of her opponents, would have us take it for granted that these are inherently bad things. But are they? Mandeville certainly wouldn’t think so. And following Mandeville, we might say that politicians who are forced to combine these different forms of hypocrisy are less likely to be deceived about their own characters, or at least about the character of political hypocrisy, than politicians who believe themselves to be sincere.
This leads to the second point: what is Hillary’s insincerity being contrasted with? The underlying contrast in Baker’s attack is not with her husband, but with George W. Bush, a man who may have had his own problems with the truth, but whose underlying personality, and indeed underlying faith, is at least consistent and sincere in Baker’s terms. However, as I have tried to argue throughout this book, sincerity of personal faith or belief is an overrated virtue in politics, for the reasons Hobbes makes clear. The Bush doctrine in international politics has sometimes crudely and inaccurately been characterised as a Hobbesian one.10 Regardless of the ways in which this misapprehends Hobbes’s own view of international relations, it also seems highly unlikely that Hobbes would approve of the way that Bush has allowed questions of sincerity of faith to become entangled with power politics. Religion, for Hobbes, should be at the service of politics; politics should never be subservient to religious or even semi-religious instincts. Hobbes did not want his rulers to be true believers in anything, except in the idea that politics could be organised on a rational basis. So at the risk of stretching the evidence beyond anything a historian would be remotely comfortable with, I would say that Hillary is much more obviously the model of a Hobbesian politician than George W. Bush. She is both skeptical and somewhat cynical, and therefore is bound to wear a mask; she has constructed a persona for herself in order to negotiate the world of power politics as she understands it. If that mask requires her to hide the true state of her religious beliefs, so be it. If she is sincere about anything, she is sincere about power. That at least means she is less likely than more sincere politicians to be hypocritical about the things that really matter. None of this means Hillary Clinton is certain to be elected; nor, if elected, that she is sure to be a success. But then again, that was what Hobbes most mistrusted about democracy—that it had a tendency to reward those who made a show of their personal sincerity over those who were sincere about power itself.
Hypocrisy and war
The second area in which the question of hypocrisy has been unavoidable for candidates for president in 2008 concerns their attitude to the Iraq War, and their willingness or otherwise to defend their own voting record (if they have one). Again, plausible candidates are vulnerable in one way or another here, either for having adopted positions in favour of the war on which they have subsequently felt obliged to backtrack, or for having adopted positions against the war that they have nevertheless been forced to hedge, for fear of appearing unpatriotic. Looming over them all is the baleful example of John Kerry, who was deeply compromised by his circumlocutory explanations of his complicated voting position on this question in 2004. Flexibility seems to be called for, but sincerity and integrity also appear to be required. It is nightmarishly difficult to see how to get this balance right.
As a result, there will always be the temptation to take sides on a question like this, and to say that some hypocrisies here are clearly worse than others. But which? John Edwards apologised for his vote in the Senate in 2002 authorizing war, whereas Hillary Clinton refused to apologise for hers. Barack Obama sought to emphasise that he had nothing to apologise for, glossing over the fact that he was not in the Senate in 2002, and so got off lightly. John McCain sought to emphasise his own distance from these Democratic contortions, by dint of both his loyalty to the president and his constructive criticism of the president’s policy. Rudolph Giuliani emphasised the importance of personal heroism in determining integrity, glossing over his personal good fortune (from this perspective) in finding himself in charge of New York on the day the Twin Towers fell. Many people will seek to present these competing positions as fundamental moral differences, revealing of underlying differences of character: apologising for mistakes is better than not apologising; having made mistakes is better than pretending one is incapable of them; loyalty to country is better than loyalty to party; having been tested in the line of fire is the only true test of character there is; and so on. Of course, character matters, and the voters will need to decide which sort of character they prefer. But it is equally true that the attempt to portray failings of character as the worst sort of hypocrisy is simply an extension of politics, part of the endless round of constructing and deconstructing political personae that is the price that liberal democratic politics demands of its practitioners. I would hope that if the history I have been trying to tell suggests anything, it is that accusations and counter-accusations of hypocrisy are not going to settle questions of character.
But there is an extension of this question of hypocrisy when it comes to the Iraq War that poses a particular problem for Democratic candidates. This is the question of whether they really want America to win in Iraq. For example, did any of the Democratic candidates really want George Bush’s 2007 troop surge in Baghdad to succeed, given that were it to do so, it would inevitably damage their own chances of winning the White House (though given the difficulty of reaching definitive agreement about such things, perhaps not irreparably)? This is a theme that has come up again and again in recent iterations of American and British politics: can opponents of the Iraq War defend themselves against the charge that deep down they want the other side to win, in order to be proved right; or, in the most toxic form of this charge, that they take pleasure in the disaster? And it goes beyond the Iraq War—it is in some ways a perennial theme of democratic politics: how can you want things to go wrong for your political opponents without appearing to want things to go wrong for the sake of it? And the answer is that you must simply dissemble. No Democratic candidate for president can ever afford to be tarred with the brush that he or she wished to offer succour to America’s enemies, so all of them must deny this charge at all costs. But with some part of themselves, they are bound not to want Bush’s Iraq strategy to succeed. You do not have to be a Hobbesian to recognise that this is both human nature, and in the nature of politics.
Politicians can try to justify these evasions to themselves in broadly consequential terms, arguing that a temporary success here will blind the United States to deeper, underlying problems that will bring greater difficulties down the line. But in so doing, they will be concealing the part of themselves, perhaps even from themselves, that simply wants to win power, which means the other side must lose it. Moreover, because our politics is not Hobbesian all the way through, but values contestation and dissent over straightforward obedience, this sort of concealment is the price we pay for that contestation and dissent. Here, again, is a place in our politics where sincerity would be worse than hypocrisy, because sincerity, in ruling out ill-motivated opposition, would rule out various forms of opposition altogether. There are, as Judith Shklar says, and as any careful reading of George Orwell will confirm, various forms of democratic hypocrisy that we must be sanguine about, for fear of finding something worse.
Hypocrisy and compromise
The poisonous nature of much partisan political argument about the Iraq War, and the need for all parties to stake their claim to one of the most enduringly potent colour terms of modern politics—“patriot”—inevitably provokes its own kind of backlash. There is always room in a rancorous political landscape for a candidate who states what he or she believes in, but nevertheless embodies the principles of compromise and pragmatism, in some sense above or beyond party. Sometimes these candidates literally stand outside the party system, as with privately funded, independent campaigns of the kind Michael Bloomberg would attempt were he to run in 2008 (and again, at the time of writing, it is far from clear whether he will). But such independent candidates do not have a good record of effecting a permanent shift in political values in a world that remains as dominated by party as it was in Trol-lope’s time. Much trickier than an independent run, but also much more effective if it can succeed, is an appeal beyond the narrow limitations of partisan politics launched from within the party system itself. In their different ways, many candidates in 2008, including the Republicans McCain and Giu-liani, have gestured towards such an appeal, with mixed success. But the one candidate who has made it central to his entire political persona is Barack Obama.
There is, of course, a tradition for the sort of candidature that Obama has tried to embody: the principled, free-thinking politician who nevertheless recognises that on any important question there will be an equivalent strength of feeling on the other side, and whose compromises are therefore not hypocrisy but instead a form of principled pragmatism. ANew Yorker profile of Obama from May 2007 made the connection explicit, quoting Obama’s former University of Chicago colleague Cass Sunstein:
“Lincoln is a hero of his,” Sunstein says—Obama announced his candidacy in front of the Old State Capitol in Springfield in order to draw a connection between himself and that other skinny politician from Illinois—“and in the legal culture Lincoln is famous for believing that there are some principles that you can’t compromise in terms of speaking, but, in terms of what you do, there are pragmatic reasons and sometimes reasons of principle not to act on them. Alexander Bickel, in ‘The Least Dangerous Branch,’ made this aspect of Lincoln famous, and I don’t know if Obama has this directly from Bickel, but if he doesn’t he has it from law school.” Lincoln, Bickel wrote, “held ‘that free government was, in principle, incompatible with chattel slavery.’ . . . Yet he was no abolitionist.” Should freed slaves become the equals of white men? “The feelings of ‘the great mass of white people’ would not admit of this,” Bickel described Lincoln as thinking, “and hence here also principle would have to yield to necessity.” Lincoln wrote, “Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded.”11
But, though Lincoln’s is the most ringing example of this form of politics, the underlying idea that politicians can distinguish between compromising on their principles and compromising in their actions is one we have encountered before, in other contexts. Lincoln’s own version of it, as well as having its roots in his legal experiences, was a deliberate refashioning of what he understood as the Jeffersonian legacy for American politics. This legacy has its own roots in a set of rationalist arguments about sincerity and compromise that reaches back into eighteenth- and seventeenth-century English political thought, all the way to Francis Bacon. As such, it is a tradition that has another, quite separate branch, running forward into the English liberal tradition, and given most prominent expression in the high Victorian period, by writers like John Morley.
Obama, as Sunstein says, has his understanding of this tradition from law school, and from the trials and tribulations of American history, not from Victorian liberal philosophy. The idiom of Obama’s rhetoric is very different from anything that might come from the likes of Morley, but some of the core concerns are not. Obama has a thorough distaste for inauthentic expressions of religious faith—“the politician who shows up at a black church around election time and claps (off rhythm) to the gospel choir or sprinkles in a few biblical citations to spice up a thoroughly dry policy speech”—and a matching belief that it is only the politician who is able to speak his mind freely who knows when to compromise.12 This is, as we have seen, a deeply attractive message for a certain type of liberal politician, allowing him to retain a partisan sense of purpose while reaching out beyond the hypocrisy of mere partisanship to embrace a spirit of principled compromise as well. But it is worth mentioning John Morley in this context, and the generation of deeply compromised liberal imperialists who fell under his spell, simply to remind us that this line of thought does not only produce Lincolns. It can also generate a form of self-deception that derives from the desire of the democratic politician to seek a form of insulation from hypocrisy in some realm that transcends it. Of course, it does not have to produce self-deception: in rare hands, like those of Lincoln, principled compromise can emerge as a form of self-knowledge. But because the problem of hypocrisy produces a series of enduring temptations that entice politicians away from a sense of their own limitations and towards a sense of their own sufficiency, such self-knowledge remains rare.
Hypocrisy and the environment
Finally, let me move away from questions of personality politics to a more global theme. An issue that is certain to dog all present and future presidential candidates in the United States and elsewhere is their approach to the problem of global warming. In the immediate context of the 2008 U.S. election, the potential candidate who had been both best placed to exploit the issue and also most vulnerable to the charge of personal hypocrisy was Al Gore. Early in 2007 newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic were full of either deeply critical or sympathetically agonised articles about whether Gore’s personal hypocrisy mattered, once it was discovered that the energy needs of his private home produced a carbon footprint many times the size of others in his neighborhood. Clearly, for any possible Gore candidature this was bad politics—blatant hypocrisy of this sort always gives your enemies a stick to beat you with. On the other hand, it is not clear that this kind of hypocrisy is the obstacle it sometimes appears, because there seems to be quite wide acceptance that some personal hypocrisy of this kind (not always practicing in the private sphere what you preach in public) is unavoidable in those who seek political power: they are like us, but they are not like us, and in some aspect of their lives the gap will show.
This kind of mismatch between public pronouncements and private practice is the hypocrisy we tend to hear most about, because it is the easiest to find, and the easiest to exploit to provoke a reaction. In many settings, and above all in the more censorious branches of the media (particularly online), not practicing what you preach is what hypocrisy has come to mean, though as we have seen throughout this book, it is far from being the only way of understanding the term. But the reaction to this sort of hypocrisy is often short-lived, and frequently surprisingly tolerant. Just as the explosion of information technology has made it easier to expose any slip in a public individual’s private standards, so it has also reinforced the extent to which private citizens also lead lives that require them to enact many different roles, in many different settings. Politicians are not the only ones who possess what social psychologists call “multiple selves.” Perhaps for this reason, voters seem far more censorious about public inconsistencies—“flip-flopping” in the jargon—than they do about private lapses from the highest public standards. So perhaps the more serious charge of hypocrisy to which a politician like Gore is vulnerable is that he didn’t do much about global warming when he was in office. But again, this hardly seems enough to preclude him from running for president (had he wanted to), since he was only vice president at the time, and he might legitimately say that someone needs to elect him president before being able to judge what he is and isn’t capable of doing.
However, the real point I want to make is that the question of hypocrisy and global warming cannot, and should not, simply be about the personal hypocrisy of politicians like Al Gore. Electoral politics can almost certainly cope with the hypocrisy of environmentalists who are not quite as good as they would like the rest of us to be. And in this area, the distinction between first- and second-order hypocrisy is both clear and workable. There is a big difference between those who do not live up to the standards they ask of others, and those who make a parade of their own ability to set an example. An environmental campaigner who travels the world by jet to spread the message that air travel is a significant cause of global warming is compromised, but such compromises may constitute the only efficient way to spread the message. Such a case is far removed from that of a politician like the British Conservative leader David Cameron, who has gone to great lengths to “green” his own personal lifestyle, and to make political capital out of that fact. When it emerged that Cameron’s much publicised bicycle rides to the House of Commons involved the use of a car to ferry his personal belongings behind him, he revealed himself to be a second-order hypocrite. Second-order hypocrisy, because it makes a mockery of the whole business of public enactment, is corrosive in ways that first-order hypocrisy is not.
But even this is in a sense trivial. Far more significant than the question of whether individual politicians are hypocrites on environmental issues is the question of whether the most advanced democracies can cope with the charge of hypocrisy that is likely to be leveled against them by the rest of the world, regardless of the immediate twists and turns of their electoral politics. If global warming is as bad as most scientists fear, it will require sacrifices of everyone. But it will be easy to portray the demand by developed nations like the United States or Britain for equivalent sacrifices by developing nations that have yet to enjoy the full benefits of economic growth as a kind of hypocrisy. How then will democratic politicians in the most advanced countries be able to persuade their own electorates of the sacrifices needed if the burdens of those sacrifices are not more widely shared? It will be relatively easy for democratic politicians in the West to portray politicians elsewhere in the world (particularly in China) as hypocrites if they expect the West to take a lead in adopting growth-restricting measures while the Chinese economy continues to grow apace. But it will be relatively easy for Chinese politicians to portray democratic politicians as hypocrites if they expect the rest of the world to follow their lead without taking account of the unequal states of development of the various economies. Equal sacrifices are hard to justify in an unequal world. But unequal sacrifices will be hard to justify in the democratic world. And there lies the problem.
Of course global warming is about much more than this. Aspects of the predicament we face, particularly the problem of the commons—“that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed on it”—are as old as politics itself. 13 Resolving these difficulties in the future may demand substantial technological innovations, and draw on the intellectual resources of disciplines that did not exist for much of the period covered by this book, including game theory and risk assessment. Nevertheless, at the heart of this issue lies a dilemma that the prevalence of hypocrisy poses for all forms of modern politics. Some hypocrisy seems unavoidable when it comes to environmental politics—in relation both to personal conduct, and to the behaviour of different regimes that will seek to hold each other to standards that they cannot readily meet themselves—and it would be a mistake to imagine that hypocrisy must cease before any real progress can be made. Equally, however, it would be a mistake to be too sanguine about hypocrisy in this context, given its capacity to generate political conflict, and to spill over into the most destructive forms of self-deception. So we must try to distinguish between different kinds of hypocrisy, and to decide which ones are worth worrying about.
It will not be easy—nothing about political hypocrisy ever is. But a sense of historical perspective can help. Liberal societies have always attracted accusations of hypocrisy from the outside, because of their failure to live up to their own standards. But seen from the inside, it is clear that the problem of hypocrisy in liberal politics is a good deal more complicated than this. What matters is not whether liberals are worse than they would like to appear, but whether they can be honest with themselves about the gaps that are bound to exist between the masks of politics and what lies behind those masks. This honesty cannot be taken as a given—liberal societies, particularly once they have become bound up with the requirements of democratic politics, are as capable as any others of self-deception. But liberal politics, and liberal political theory, have the advantage that they are able to probe the gaps between political appearance and political reality without either overstating them, or seeking to deny them altogether. This then is one of the resources that a history of liberal political thought has to offer. Armed with a sense of historical perspective, we can see that many forms of political hypocrisy are unavoidable, and therefore not worth worrying about, and that some others are even desirable in a democratic setting, and therefore worth encouraging. But, as Hobbes says, when hypocrisy deprives us of our ability to see what is at stake in our political life, then it still has the capacity to ruin everything for everyone.