Right-wing hypocrisy is never hypocrisy. It's a coherent belief system

Pointing out Republican hypocrisy is always tempting. It’s so easy to come up with examples—but the sheer ease of finding those examples shows why we need a different way of understanding what might appear to be hypocrisy. Because something else entirely is going on.

• The same week right-wing Christian groups were at the Supreme Court arguing that businesses should be allowed to discriminate against LGBTQ people, the Family Foundation of Virginia was all over the right-wing media screaming about a restaurant having refused to serve them because of their bigotry.
• Months after Sen. Lindsey Graham said that abortion law should be left to the states, he introduced a federal abortion ban.
• Republicans obsess about Hunter Biden’s supposed corruption while embracing the rampant corruption of Donald Trump's adult offspring.
• One Republican politician after another turns out to have paid for their partners to get abortions while they oppose legal abortion.
• Republicans yell about voter fraud while committing voter fraud. They scream about “groomers” while their politicians and operatives keep getting busted for actual child sexual abuse. 

If you think that consistency within any specific issue is desirable, or that doing a turnabout on one thing represents hypocrisy, all of these things look ragingly hypocritical. But that’s misunderstanding how the right-wing thinks. 

It’s actually really simple: The right-wing belief system is that if it benefits them, it’s good. If they want it, it’s right. If it helps them gain power, it’s proper. 

The question is never whether businesses should have to serve people whose identities they disdain or whose ideologies they object to. It’s about whether Christians can claim victimhood more readily as business owners who don’t want to serve LGBTQ customers or as would-be diners who restaurant workers don’t want to serve. It’s never about whether states or the federal government should control abortion law. It’s about Republicans getting the electoral advantage.

So rather than talking about these turnabouts as hypocrisy, we should be talking about how they show that Republicans don’t believe the rules should ever apply to them. How they’re rejecting any accountability for the powerful even as they insist on the most brutal forms of punishment for people without power. How all they care about is themselves and what benefits them right now, without any thought to anyone else or a future past their own most immediate ambitions.

Whether the positions Republicans take at any two moments in time can be reconciled with each other doesn’t matter. What matters is that they think it’s helpful to them at that moment. In that sense, the entire right-wing worldview is like how Donald Trump lies. He doesn’t usually do it in big strategic ways. He doesn’t think ahead. He doesn’t care if he gets caught. He’s just looking to control a specific moment, gain dominance of an interaction, and then move on and dismiss as irrelevant whatever it was he said in pursuit of that.

Yes, it’s a completely bankrupt worldview. Of course it is. But to fight it, we need to be clear about what it is we’re watching in action.